From the morning paper, a quick look at the New Mexico Court of Appeals decision on the state’s domestic well statute (sub/ad req): New Mexico’s law giving homeowners the right to drill their own water well is legal and does not unfairly harm other water users in violation of the state constitution, according to the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The “Festering Issue” of NM Domestic Wells’ »
My education in economics included a lot of discussion of the importance of clarity in property rights regimes. You’ve got to know who owns what. New Mexico water law in this regard is a tangled mess. In large areas of the state, we lack formal adjudication of water rights. We do know some things about …
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There’s something endearingly goofy about hot air balloons. Which is what makes the Dark Lord, sort of puffed up and laying on his side in at dawn in an Albuquerque park, so charmingly counter-intuitive. It is the season of our city’s annual hot air ballon fiesta, nine days of a gobzillions (OK, hundreds, but literally …
The Rio Grande at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue bridge dropped to 200 cubic feet per second overnight, perfect timing for this morning’s newspaper piece about low flows on the river (sub/ad req). For those not versed in our obscure ways of water measurement, “200 cfs” translates roughly as “awful damn low”: Water agencies are scrambling to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Parched Rio Grande’ »
I used to write a lot about the Santa Fe Institute and the fascinating trans-disciplinary research that goes on there, but in recent years I sorta lost touch. I went up last week for a visit to reconnect, and, among other things, have tea (sub/ad req): SANTA FE — To understand the Santa Fe Institute, …
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Southwestern environmental journalist Laura Paskus has a new web site. Lots of great work linked there, check it out.
I am the type of journalist who loves a juicy, seemingly intractable political/policy problem. That’s why I love writing about water. But as a New Mexico water writer, I confess to a certain amount of envy at my colleagues to the west. Sure, we’ve got some tough water problems in our state. But they are …
From the newspaper this morning a column (sub/ad req) on my frustration with the disconnect between the Obama administration’s soaring rhetoric about public information and transparency and the gritty reality faced by those in the trenches trying to get public information: With the arrogance of a federal agency that has become accustomed to a lack …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The FOIA’s in the Mail’ »
Out here in the inland arid western United States, water management is complicated by the convoluted question of what happens to the water after we “use” it. Sometimes it’s used up. Sometimes we put it back, in a way that allows others to use it. Regular Inkstain readers, all three of you, will recognize this …
I’ve got the sad honor today of writing an obituary for Cliff Crawford, the retired University of New Mexico biologist for whom the word “beloved” carries only a fraction of the baggage that it should. Cliff’s the dean of the dean of the bosque biologists, a group who study and love the riparian strip along …