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, …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Tea at the Santa Fe Institute’ »
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 …
In search of the juniper titmouse and random desert wrens, I headed up the Domingo Baca trail in the foothills above Albuquerque this morning. As is the case with most of the little canyons on the west face of the Sandias, there’s a spring near the bottom of Domingo Baca Canyon. The tilt of the …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Domingo Baca Canyon’ »
Lissa and I were walking in the Rio Grande bosque, the riparian cottonwood forest, last night when the sun dropped below the clouds just before sunset and lit the trees across the pond with the most exquisite light. All we had was a cell phone camera, so I went back this evening at the same …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: not exactly nature, but close’ »
This week’s bit of western water history comes from the archives of the Library of Congress. Elephant Butte Dam (originally Engle Dam) is on the Rio Grande upstream from El Paso. Completed in 1915, it is currently the subject of a fascinating New Mexico water rights adjudication battle, nicely detailed by Sig Silber.