A guest post by historian Sara Porterfield: “May 24, 1869—The good people of Green River City turn out to see us start. We raise our little flag, push the boats from shore, and the swift current carries us down.” Today marks the 150th anniversary of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado …
Continue reading ‘John Wesley Powell at 150: How Can We Tell Better Stories?’ »
Correction appended, I was off by 5kaf on the Nevada numbers, also fixed a badly garbled sentence, thanks to the alert reader who brought this to my attention With the backdrop of Hoover Dam, an assembly of Colorado River dignitaries signed the Drought Contingency plan yesterday afternoon. Done really is done. The Colorado River Drought …
Continue reading ‘What the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan means in practice’ »
On New Mexico Highway 36, beneath the sign announcing your entry into the community of Fence Lake, someone has appended a small hand-lettered sign announcing, “NO FISHING”. This is appropriate, as there is no lake. Fence Lake is remarkably self-aware. There’s an obelisk-ish monument in front of the former Fence Lake school (now a “community …
Continue reading ‘“Fence Lake, you will some day fade away.”’ »
If you’re following flows on the Rio Grande through New Mexico this spring, no doubt you noticed the big drop this morning in releases from El Vado Reservoir on the Rio Chama. (Of course you noticed, right?) Welcome to what we in the UNM Water Resources Program have come to call “the institutional hydrograph”. It …
Continue reading ‘The Institutional Hydrograh: Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact’ »
“My research integrates elements of biology, hydrology, and geomorphology,” said Hobbs, who is currently working on her Masters’ in Water Resources in UNM’s Water Resources Program. “In New Mexico, the water is more spoken for than it is present. The use of water must be allocated amongst multiple users while also trying to maintain a …
Continue reading ‘Mo Hobbs on the interdisciplinary nature of water’ »
When you cross a bridge, Craig Childs said at an American Rivers gathering in Santa Fe Friday evening, stop, and look down. A couple of llamas stared in what I imagine was puzzlement this morning as I dropped my bike and walked out onto the planks bridging one of the irrigation ditches in Albuquerque’s South …
I had a fascinating conversation this morning with the guy in the hat, who was out with his family fishing where the Middle Rio Grand Conservancy District’s Central Wasteway drops water out of the Albuquerque irrigation system, back into the Rio Grande. I’ve been bicycling to this bridge three or four times a week recently, …
The word value, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called value in use; the other, value in exchange. The things which have the greatest …
In the wake of Arizona’s difficulties in coming to terms with the future of central Arizona agriculture as it sorted out its approach to reducing Colorado River water use under the Drought Contingency Plan, the latest Census of Agriculture data is fascinating. The decline continues, but only just barely. The data within this data, broken …
Continue reading ‘Central Arizona ag’s decline continues, but Pinal County is up’ »
My co-author Eric Kuhn was in town over the weekend to finish up the copy edits for our upcoming book Science be Dammed, and happily we were not so busy that we didn’t have a chance to get in a couple of bike rides. (In our collaboration these last few years, “Are you going to …