The Creative Class and the Golden West

Having recently read Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class“, and having heard a great deal of rhetoric locally about the importance of creative class economy issues to Albuquerque’s future, it occurs to me that it will be interesting to see how our community’s leadership responds to Thursday’s fire that destroyed the Golden West …

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Water in the Desert: Angostura Edition

Angostura Dam Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I stopped at Angostura Dam on a recent drive up to Santa Fe. It’s the diversion for water used in the Albuquerque reach of the middle Rio Grande. It’s a modest affair, built in the 1930s, just building up enough head to divert water into a concrete …

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Alfalfa

The inimitable Coco weighs in on the problem of agriculture in the desert: Just how ill-suited desert communities are to agriculture in general depends entirely on the location of the desert community. The short view prevails. It says agriculture isn’t profitable on a small scale. We don’t have enough of it to matter anymore. And …

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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Forecast Edition

On the current status of our snowpack: Much of New Mexico is just like the forecasters said we should expect it to be: dry. With La Niña’s cool Pacific waters pushing storms away from us this year, Albuquerque and most points to the south and east have been drier than average since Oct. 1. The …

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