With fall semester over yesterday, I called “faculty prerogative” and went out with Lissa for a weekday afternoon walk by the Rio Grande. I’m just an adjunct, but I’m trying to model the behaviors of my more distinguished university colleagues, and one of them is the rhythm of the academic calendar. Finals week is still …
Continue reading ‘The institutional hydrograph: New Mexico’s Rio Grande in December’ »
I tend to enthusiastically and often uncritically embrace every new water conservation number, as if using less water is an unqualified good. I generally believe that, and you’re going to have a hard time pushing me off that intellectual turf. But there’s a flip side I’m trying to think through. It’s what economists might call …
For the first time since Nov. 30, 2010, New Mexico has been categorized as entirely free of “drought” in this morning’s federal Drought Monitor. 26 percent of the state remains “abnormally dry”, but none of the state is in any of the monitor’s formally designated drought categories. This does not mean that we are free …
The Tamarisk Coalition’s latest survey maps for work done over the summer of 2015 show that the beetle has now spread along the entire Rio Grande in New Mexico. The light blue dots are areas where the beetle showed up this year: The beetle was originally introduced in Colorado and Utah as an experiment in …
Continue reading ‘Tamarisk beetle now entrenched on New Mexico Rio Grande’ »
New Mexico has always seemed the least borderlandish of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands states. Unlike Texas, Arizona, and California, we don’t really have a large twin city spanning the border (think Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, El Paso-Juárez, the Nogales’s, San Diego-Tijuana). My former Albuquerque Journal colleague Lauren Villagran in a poignant column this morning on the scars left …
A colleague notes an interesting bit of business in Dan Boyd’s story in this morning’s newspaper about the state of New Mexico’s “closing fund”, a state government goody bag to help fund economic development: The most recent project to be allocated closing fund dollars is the expansion of a Southwest Cheese Co. factory in Clovis. …
Continue reading ‘I should have written a book about pizza cheese’ »
Seen on my bike ride this morning, Albuquerque’s Tumbleweed Snowman in preparation in the back lot behind the flood control authority offices and workshop: Tumbleweed Snowman history Some years ago I got the help of retiring Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority engineer John Kelly to trace the history of the snowman, which by tradition …
Continue reading ‘A legend in the making: Albuquerque Tumbleweed Snowman 2015’ »
Brett Walton’s Circle of Blue update on the Interior Department’s upcoming Gila River diversion decision suggests we should expect a “yes” from Secretary Jewell tomorrow on a decision to proceed with a lot of inconclusive studies of the super-expensive project that will almost certainly never be built but that will be an intense environmental and …
Continue reading ‘Gila River diversion decision: “Reply hazy. Try again.”’ »
Amid the litany of the apocalypse, with the pictures of fallowed farm fields and dead fish and trees and cracked mud, here are five pieces of good news on western water, both on the supply side and on the demand side. 1. Colorado River Basin storage is up Total storage in the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Five pieces of good news for water in the western United States’ »