Sorry I didn’t have the presence of mind to give you something for scale. This little critter was a a bit smaller than my hand, crawling along the bottom of the drying Griegos Lateral, one of the 1700s-era irrigation ditches on the Albuquerque Rio Grande Valley floor. Drying kind early this year, because climate change. …
Continue reading ‘Ditch Lobster in a Drying Griegos Lateral’ »
A few notes on New Mexico’s Rio Grande in 2022, as I collect my thoughts for a TV interview later today: Snowpack and runoff Snowpack peaked at ~80 percent of the median Runoff into NM’s middle valley looks to be less than 50 percent (maybe quite a bit less?) Dry spell As I write this …
Albuquerque’s nod to its agricultural past, like much of the style we have adopted for ourselves, is in significant measure artifice. This is not to say that it is not in some vague sense rooted in a truth, an actual past. But we engage in the 21st century in significant embellishment, a story we spin …
Continue reading ‘Tobacco farming and swamps in early 20th century Albuquerque’ »
Sometime last weekend (June 4-5, 2022), the Rio Grande south of Socorro, New Mexico, began drying. By this morning (Monday June 6) river managers reported 20+ miles of drying. The gage north of the 380 bridge at San Antonio dropped to zero today. The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which normally gets the largest …
Continue reading ‘Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande is beginning to dry’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck With a single statement, the United States Supreme Court changed the direction and tone of the compact negotiations: [T]he waters of an innavigable stream rising in one state and flowing into a state adjoining may not be disposed of by the upper state as she may choose, regardless of …
The only thing better than a tailwind on the bike ride home up the hill from the Rio Grande is an air conditioned bus on a hot afternoon. Tailwinds are great, but stories happen on buses. Riding my bike to a meeting with folks trying to figure out how to cope with climate change seemed …
Continue reading ‘The Bird Watches Over a Drying Rio Grande’ »
Cities. Farms. The natural environment. All of it. We can do it in an orderly way, or devolve into chaos. That’s it. That’s the blog post.
It has become a Frequently Asked Question of late here at Inkstain World Headquarters: John, you’ve frequently been quoted in the past expressing optimism about the future of the Colorado River Basin. Dude, Lake Mead is so low they’re finding dead bodies. Are you still optimistic? My answer, of course, is “yes”. It’s in my …
Continue reading ‘Sure, dead bodies in Lake Mead, whatever. I remain optimistic.’ »
I’m feeling old and tired, so Squadrats, a new (to me) GPS mappy bike game, arrived at a good time. There’s a video game culture catch phrase, “numbers go up”, which describes the incentives designers have to give you ways to make some number go up, to lure/hook you into playing ever more. (Think “streaks” …
Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. Kilgore Trout, in Lingo-Three, as quoted in Vonnegut 1973