From the morning paper, a look at the effect of drought on farmers in southern New Mexico. It’s a more complex story than simply lack of water, and the impact depends a great deal on where you are: The Franzoys’ problem is not so much the dropping aquifer as the quality of the groundwater. It …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: drought hits New Mexico’s famed Hatch Valley’ »
Working with some colleagues, (including, no shit, the Emmy-award winning co-founder of Inkstain), an experiment in alternative story-telling forms to accompany a newspaper piece on the impact of drought on farmers in the southern Rio Grande valley of New Mexico:
From Tuesday’s newspaper, State water bills down to trickle: New Mexico’s water problem is simple. We’re using more than we’ve got. When it’s framed this way, the solutions are simple. Get more. Use less. Or, at the very least, stop using more every year. But watching the 2013 New Mexico Legislature wrestle with these questions suggests …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water problems are hard’ »
On a road trip to southern New Mexico to report on drought: “That’s a forlorn-looking river, isn’t it,” Phil King told me as we walked out on Mesilla Dam this afternoon, looking down at the bed of sand where the Rio Grande is supposed to be.
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” …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?’ »
oops, update, forgot link Journal photographer Robert Rosales and I recently visited Maxwell, NM, which I describe (I think safely, though how does one know for sure?) as having “arguably the most serious drought-driven municipal water supply problem in the state of New Mexico.” From the story: Asked about the burden she bears in trying …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Real water, real people, Maxwell NM edition’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights’ »
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 …