I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western …
From today’s newspaper, the story of a private property owner and a loose-knit coalition of folks around her working to preserve and restore one of the most remarkable stretches of Rio Grande riparian wildlands in the middle Rio Grande (sub. or ad req): A gate that used to keep cattle in now keeps them out …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Pecos Sunflower Edition’ »
My head’s been spinning trying to follow discussions over California’s pending water legislation. Emily Green has helpfully rounded it all up in one spot: “Potential cost? $12bn. Who will it affect? Every Californian who needs water.” George Johnson on Santa Fe’s water budget: “For all its aspirations to be different, Santa Fe is still guided …
Somewhat surprisingly to me, Albuquerque’s water future has become an issue in our upcoming mayoral election. My Journal colleague Sean Olson, who used to cover the Water Utility Authority and now covers politics, interviewed the candidates for a piece in this morning’s paper: You can’t talk about Albuquerque’s future without talking about water, and the …
There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law. First Price: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that …
Continue reading ‘Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?’ »
Westward Ho! Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. From today’s bike ride, the Westward Ho motel along old Route 66 on Albuquerque’s west side. I love the saguaro and battered neon. I’m guessing the pun in the motel’s name is not intentional.
In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation’ »
New Mexico’s June 2009 gasoline sales were the lowest for the month since 1994:
Oil industry behind “energy citizens rallies” The U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying organization is behind a series of “energy citizens rallies” against pending climate change legislation, including two in New Mexico later this month, according to a memo obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan,” American Petroleum …
From this morning’s newspaper, UNM ecologist Jim Brown sketches out dire scenarios: On one hand, Brown wrote in his 1995 book “Macroecology,” humans are just one of the millions of species that inhabit Earth, “formed by the same processes that produced all other species, and our abundance and distribution are governed by the same natural …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Ecologists and Peak Oil’ »