On Joshua Cooper Ramo’s Age of the Unthinkable: Instead of tanks and planes and armed battalions, we face “adaptive microthreats and ideas,” like improvised explosive devices made of cheap cell-phone components. Because of such thinking, Ramo writes, “no major power has been able to defeat an insurgency anywhere in the world” since World War II. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Sandpile Edition’ »
One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist (at least the way I do it) is an embarassing lack of original ideas. My job is to entertain, understand, sort and pass judgment on the ideas of others, then explain the ones that meet some sort of preliminary test of usefulness and/or relevance. Ideas of …
This paper, a study of the effect of the closure of the Cincinnati Post on elections, got a good ride in the metamedia blogosphere a few weeks back when it came out, but I just got around to reading it. Interesting stuff, and you can see why it was popular with we inkstained scribes: The …
Daniel Hernandez, on Mexico City: Reserves of the city’s largely imported water supplies from the Cutzamala plant are at their lowest in years. Hoping to prevent a larger disaster, for three days a month, the municipal water utility has decided to run the city’s supply at 50% its normal flow. March 14 was the first …
Continue reading ‘Imagine One of the World’s Largest Cities, Without Running Water’ »
Everybody’s calling the big omnibus public lands bill that passed the House yesterday a wilderness bill, but we water wonks know better, right: Legislation to settle a long-standing dispute over the Navajo Nation’s rights to water from the San Juan River won final congressional approval Wednesday. The legislation acknowledges the Navajo Nation’s right to 600,000 …
Last Sunday night, I read an excellent New York Times story via the Web about Steven Chu’s introduction to the ways of Washington. I cover the Department of Energy at my day job, and the DOE is a major employer in New Mexico, so I made a note of the story to include a link …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: How Important is Andy Revkin’s Blog?’ »
Apparently Wigan Athletic have signed John Fleck for £2,000,000. What’s a “£”?
Gayle Leonard has made a word cloud of all the various transboundary waterblogger talk. Cool stuff.
Wendy Barnaby has an excellent piece in last week’s Nature (free for now, behind the paywall soon) challenging the conventional wisdom that wars of scarce water supplies are a likely result of the collision between population growth, aridity and climate change. Barnaby had set out to write a book about water wars. But the more …
Continue reading ‘Transboundary Issues: Where Are All the Water Wars?’ »
New Mexico’s cap and trade bill failed. What happens next?