Danger. Journalist doing math. There be dragons: Otowi is the Rio Grande’s gateway to central New Mexico. Located between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, it’s the point where the river has picked up pretty much all the snowmelt it’s going to get, absent some minor contributions from the Jemez Mountains. It’s also a key point …
From this morning’s newspaper, we appear to be headed toward Endangered Species Act litigation this year on the Rio Grande: Human water diversions have left the Rio Grande ecosystem with too little water to maintain the minnow and other species that depend on the river’s flow, including the valley’s iconic cottonwoods, said Jen Pelz, Wild …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: headed toward ESA litigation on the Rio Grande’ »
One more from yesterday’s road trip to the Bosque del Apache, the National Wildlife Refuge 90 minutes’ drive south of Albuquerque. As I’ve written before, snow goose overpopulation is an ecological disaster. But when they take flight? Yowza.
Lunch today sitting in the car at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, with a pond of snow geese, pintails and assorted other water fowl wintering here in one of the few broad wet spots in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico. A birder friend explained once that the car makes …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Bosque del Apache plumbing edition’ »
The question of how tumbleweeds got to America keeps coming up in conversation, but I can never quite remember the details, so I’m typing this up here so I can Google it later as needed. Here’s the version from Tim Egan’s terrific book The Worst Hard Time, a gripping narrative history of the Dust Bowl. …
From this morning’s newspaper: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday said Texas can go ahead with its lawsuit that claims groundwater pumping in southern New Mexico is draining the Rio Grande and depriving Texas users of water to which they are legally entitled. Texas cleared a major hurdle with the decision, which could set the …
My colleauge Lauren Villagran, our new Las Cruces bureau, wrote in this morning’s Journal about the struggle over the future of the Gila River in New Mexico: Should the river run wild, or be managed and controlled? Should New Mexico take the water or leave it?
When New Mexico was being entertained to newspaper and television coverage last year of water trucks rolling to the handful of communities that, in the midst of drought, had run out, I did a piece in the paper trying to get my arms around the folks he hadn’t run out of water. What were they …
Continue reading ‘In a drought, who runs out of water, and who pays?’ »
One of the significant areas of climate research right for us in the southwestern United States involves work on modeling the large (spatially and temporally) droughts that are so significant in long term human and ecosystem dynamics. These are the ones that are not just one-year whammies, but linger for decades, like the drought of …
The status of the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow raises some fascinating transboundary questions. As water moves across state boundaries, who bears responsibility when upstream actions affect an endangered species in a downstream state? The fish, once found from the mountains of northern New Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico, is gone from all but …