Accumlating odds and ends, cluttering my brain but lacking the oomph for a full blog post: Rio Bravo Bridge With work getting underway on the replacement of the Rio Bravo Bridge over the Rio Grande in greater Albuquerque’s South Valley, a bit of spelunking in one of the Internet’s unlit subterranean passages yielded this bit …
Tucker Davidson of Audubon wrote a lovely piece about slowing down and listening to, and looking for, the birds: Birding requires us to be present in the moment. It also allows us to shift our focus from our own worries and ruminations to another subject, breaking anxious thought patterns. Birds hold our attention without overwhelming it. For …
BERNARDO, NEW MEXICO – The juniper pollen has cranked up early this year, and the irrigators with groundwater pumps (legal or not, it’s hard to know) are firing them up, but the most telling sign of spring was the kettling sandhill cranes this morning. The term comes from the boiling water in a kettle, as …
Where no one asks any questions Or looks too long in your face In the darkness on the edge of town. – Bruce Springsteen Do you believe in ghosts? Or crows? Do you at least believe in crows? Three of them. Possibly four. Crows, or possibly ravens. But I’d rather they be crows, so let’s …
Sunup bike ride to consult with The Birds. They advised us, if we can, to stay indoors to beat the heat, said they’d keep an eye on things for us.
The first bird I formally identified, as in “sat down with the book and then wrote down the result” was a great blue heron. The entry in the old family Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, red ball point pen: 11/86 Sat on tiny island in Colorado River all morning, picking at its feathers The …
Reconciliation ecology, the field’s founders say, “says we still have time to save most of the world’s species. But to do it, we must stop trying to put an end to civilization and human enterprise. Instead, we need to work on the overwhelming bulk of the land — the places we humans use. We need …
Continue reading ‘“reconciliation ecology” in the rice fields of California’ »
PHOENIX – Drive south on Interstate 10 out of the Phoenix metro area, past Ikea, and the city ends abruptly, a sharp line between development and desert. Given its reputation for sprawl, Phoenix (when I say “Phoenix” here I’m talking about the whole metro area, not just the city itself) is remarkably compact. The realities …
I’m working this weekend on two talks, one a webinar Wednesday with Audubon and the other a lecture for UNM Water Resources grad students Thursday, that both touch on one of the fundamental challenges in getting water management right – the question of how we draw the boundaries, both geographically but also conceptually – around …
I’ve praised the successful shift from flood irrigation toward more efficient technology – meaning things like center-pivot and drip over flood irrigation – that has enabled a downward trend in the amount of water applied to a typical irrigated acre of farmland in the United States. According to the USGS, US farmers decreased their average …
Continue reading ‘A return to flood irrigation in search of environmental benefits’ »