I’m thinkin’ you’ll want to head out to your favorite local bookstore and buy Bill deBuys’ A Great Aridness. It’s full of stuff like this, on the dry winter of 2001-02, when a bear came out of hibernation early because it was so warm and ransacked deBuys’ yard in search of something to eat: That …
Because it’s hard to resist the word “megadrought” – or, frankly, the concept: Tree rings from the headwaters of the Rio Grande show a 50-year drought from 122 to 172 AD, suggesting that “megadroughts” may be a recurring feature of the region’s climate, according to new research by a University of Arizona team. Scientists have …
Thrown on driveways this morning, my effort to explain why I think the endangered species act process, as it relates to the silver minnow on the Rio Grande, is broken: If you believe those who argue we are overusing water in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and headed for a crash (and there’s good data …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the endangered species act process brokenness’ »
It’s not enough that Mesa Verde is on their side of the border. (We all know it really belongs, for all practical purposes, in New Mexico.) Now I discover, playing with Google Data Explorer, that Colorado just passed New Mexico in natural gas production. Man! I thought that was the one thing we were good …
Continue reading ‘Another reason for New Mexicans to resent Colorado’ »
We spent Saturday at the Bosque del Apache, a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque. It’s early in the season for the well-known sandhill crane wintering grounds, but in addition to cranes we saw mobs of pintails, a cormorant, a family of grebes (I’m reasonably certain they were westerns, though they’re tough to tell at a …
Lissa and I are in St. Louis, a wet place. I know it is a wet place because there is no dirt. Or, more specifically, there is no bare dirt. Something’s growing everywhere, the result of 38 inches (97 cm) precipitation per year. I’m always struck by that when I visit a wet place. While …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on our forests burning’ »
Irony defined: sitting in the shaded courtyard at work yesterday at lunch, next to a lovely fountain/pond flanked by lush lawn, reading the opening chapter of Cynthia Barnett’s Blue Revolution: Sacramento landscape architect Ronald Allison tells of a two-and-a-half-acre residential design in Granite Bay with a waterfall, a grotto, a cave, six fountains, a pool …
Continue reading ‘Irony defined: Barnett’s “Blue Revolution” at the office pond’ »
The use of automobile metaphors in descriptions of nuclear weapon technology is somewhere between comedy and cliche. Here’s my latest entry (sub/ad req): You could think of the B61 as the Volkswagen bug of the U.S. nuclear arsenal — reliable, adaptable and very, very old. I also said some other, more substantive things: The risk, …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: my latest nuclear weapon automotive metaphor’ »
A guest post from my child, N. Reed Heineman-Fleck, which grew out of our conversations about my work chronicling the southwest’s fires of 2011: When Dad told me about the Los Conchas fire, and how it was different than normal fires–in some places it turned everything to black dust; it rolled instead of catching, it …
Some fun with the newly released USGS historical map collection – here’s Albuquerque circa 1893: update: Ooh, I missed this. From the top left corner of the map – U.S. Geological Survey, J.W. Powell, Director: