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:
From yesterday’s newspaper, a reminder that not all the area within the boundaries of this year’s big New Mexico forest fires is burned to an ugly, indecipherable ecological cinder (sub/ad req): There is good reason to visit the moonscape, and to talk about what happens next to the ecosystem there — the subject of a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It didn’t all burn like that’ »
Once this resource was provided*, those who failed to pay for it (such as me, drifting through Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza at the end of a long Saturday bike ride) could not be excluded from enjoying its benefits. In addition, my consumption of the resource (sitting in the shade listening to the music) did not, …
Continue reading ‘My education in economics: Public Goods’ »
For the current water year, Oct. 1, 2010, through the end of August, I’ve had 4.39 inches (11.15 cm) of rain at my house in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights. That’s 51 percent of the mean going back to the 1999-2000 water year. Just one of the months, December, was above my long term mean, and …
ABQJournal video edition of the weekend post-fire flood flow explainer, with the remarkable Kerry Jones video of the torrent in Cochiti Canyon: (Thanks to Troy Simpson, Richard Pipes and Kerry Jones)
The results of a couple of trips north last week into the flood zone in the canyons below the watersheds burned by the Las Conchas fire (sub/ad req): In Cochiti Canyon, a New Mexico Environment Department team estimated the Aug. 21 flow that caused the first round of damage at Dixon’s at 12,000 cubic feet …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on the power of moving water’ »