I wrote a story in this morning’s newspaper about New Mexico’s efforts to revive its moribund state water planning process: Ten years after New Mexico officials last took a stab at developing a state water plan, they are reviving their effort to calculate the gaps between New Mexico’s finite water supplies and the needs of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water planning’ »
I did not realize the Ancestral Puebloans were known for their leather furniture. New Mexico is a wondrous place.
Reed Benson, a University of New Mexico law professor whose patient explanations and deep writing have been extraordinarily helpful to my understand of things like the doctrine of prior appropriation and the Endangered Species Act, has joined the blogoworld: It has come to my attention … that a lot of people do not read law …
Continue reading ‘Here’s a new western water blog worth adding to your RSS feed’ »
This open land on Albuquerque’s west side, a 20 mile drive from downtown but probably half of that as the crow flies, is getting a newly improved four-lane road and drainage. It’s currently home to a cluster of shooting ranges, the place where we turn our post-sewage plant poop into compost, and a small airport. …
I had a couple of pieces in the newspaper last week about New Mexico’s long term water usage trends. I wrote the stories because the data, a time series I assembled by reviewing state water use reports, surprised me: Water for household use peaked in 1995 and has been declining ever since, according to state …
Yesterday my sister and I busted Mom out of the nursing home for lunch and a drive down by the river to see the tail end of the fall colors. Down by Tingley Beach, an Albuquerque municipal park adjacent to the Rio Grande, the cottonwoods were still putting on a show, but they’re clearly tiring, …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: the winter palette’ »
A storm blew through Santa Fe last night. Lissa and I drove up into the Sangres to see the snow:
Trying some stuff that I don’t want to do on my employer’s production server. Nothing to see here. Move along. Img 924111903 0001 (PDF) Img 924111903 0001 (Text)
There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter: The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the flood that wasn’t’ »
A snowy egret showed up this afternoon amid the turtles sunning themselves on the Rio Grande Nature Center’s pond. We took some pictures. [slideshow_deploy id=’8238′]