I confronted a litany of drought when I was making the rounds on my newspaper beat this morning. No doubt this has happened before and I’ve just not noticed it, but the current forecasts are dry at all the basic time scales I watch closely. I lined ’em all up so you could share New …
Continue reading ‘Running the table: dry at all relevant time scales’ »
At the peak of the housing bubble in January 2006, when the annual pace of new home construction hit a blistering 2.29 million units, an estimated 14 percent of laborers in the construction sector were undocumented immigrants, including 20 percent of carpet, floor and tile installers, 28 percent of drywallers, and 36 percent of insulation …
There’s a rich, historical elegance to the tradition of state-v-state lawsuits over interstate compacts. Because each of the US states is constitutionally sovereign, when they sue one another over water flowing down a river from one state to the next, the legal action begins and ends before the US Supreme Court – the court of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction’ »
In the summer of 1869, while John Wesley Powell was making his first journey down the Colorado River, Ferdinand V. Hayden, he of the famous Hayden surveys, was making a less notable journey down the eastern flank of the Rockies, from Colorado into New Mexico. Hayden’s primary purpose was geology, with an eye toward the region’s …
I went for a walk this morning at the old Two-Mile Dam site on the Santa Fe River east of Santa Fe, NM. It’s two miles from downtown (hence the name), in the Sangre de Cristo foothills near the end of a road lined with wealth. Santa Fe is unusual in New Mexico as a …
I’ve been keeping rainfall records as a volunteer National Weather Service observer since 1999. 2012 is the 13th calendar year for which I have complete records for my house, in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights, about a mile northeast of the University of New Mexico. It was my driest on record, at 5.08 inches (12.9 cm). …
Albuquerque is not a city, even as its metropolitan-area population approaches one million. That is, it cannot imagine itself a city because to do so would negate its reason for being, its biggest draw for tourists and refugees from Los Angeles and other large cities. Despite the sprawl, it thinks of itself as a town, …
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the coming trouble among farming, fish, cities and water in the Rio Grande: [W]ith farms and cities diverting water from the river to meet their needs, leaving enough for the fish and the ecosystem on which it depends while at the same time meeting human needs has become …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: trouble on the Rio Grande’ »
If one allows mining of a nonrenewable source, it is disingenuous to argue that the source should never be polluted if the economic activity causing the pollution is necessary to sustain employment. Suppose that two individuals proposed to extract water from a nonrenewable aquifer. The first agreed he would farm and by doing so dry up the aquifer. …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, my distillation of the Colorado River Basin Study’s key message: Towing icebergs from Alaska or building a giant pipeline from the Missouri River won’t bail out the western United States from its growing water supply crisis, federal officials said Wednesday. Instead, conservation by the region’s farms and cities offers the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Basin Study – it’s conservation for now’ »