Nature or not?
Mule deer, in the grass outside the Far View cafeteria at Mesa Verde National Park. Is this nature? Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
Archive of posts filed under the anthropocene category.
“City Water, City Life”
I live in a suburban neighborhood that dates to the early 1950s, when this swath of mesa east of the Rio Grande was cleared for homes. It’s almost certainly at that point that the city of Albuquerque, which then managed the water utility, laid a grid of pipes to bring water to the area. Carl …
Getting nature right is hard, Episode XVII: restoring the Elwha
PORT ANGELES – The Elwha River is, as U.S. rivers go, a dinky thing. It rises in the Olympic Mountains, draining a basin of a bit more than 300 square miles and flowing north some 45 miles before dumping its cargo into Strait of Juan de Fuca just west of Port Angeles, Wash. By my …
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Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?
From the morning paper, the latest in the struggle to figure out how much water the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow needs: According to an analysis by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, the river has only once since the 1990s, in 2005, had enough water to meet the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “conservation objective” …
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Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere
A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene: Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek. But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast …
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Anthropocene diaries: fight the man
I’m going to make up a story. I’d like to think it might be true. There’s an impromptu path I like to walk along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque that follows a narrow high spot of riverbank for something between a quarter and a half a mile. As you head north, the river’s on your …
Anthropocene Diaries: Searsville Dam
Keith Kloor had a nice riff the other day on the question of how we should decide what “nature” is supposed to look like, now that we’re kinda in charge: It’s not my job to say what nature should mean in a world shaped primarily by humans–I’m still working it out, myself–but I know others …