“the valley breathing in”
The first water is heading down the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Main toward town. “I love this time of year,” an MRGCD guy told me years ago. “You can feel the valley breathing in.”
Archive of posts filed under the Ribbons of Green category.
On Gardens
Utopian text Every garden is a utopian text, expressing the desire for a more perfect world as well as an implicit critique of the less-lovely world in which it is located. – Naomi Jacobs, Consuming Beauty: The Urban Garden as Ambiguous Utopia Claude Monet, no doubt speaking in French and so shared here translated prosaically …
March 1 runoff forecasts are solid
With a solid snowpack in all of my rivers, we’ve got a pair of solid March 1 forecasts for 2023 runoff. Rio Grande 102 percent at Otowi, the main forecast point for water entering New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. Implications: While we don’t have a formal Annual Operating Plan for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County …
The peculiar economics of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District
I was talking to a friend last week about the work Bob Berrens and I are doing for our new book on the origin stories of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. I’m deep into a chapter on the failed 1920s efforts at tobacco farming (I’ve told that story before here), and we were talking …
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Ribbons of Green: The Hubbell Oxbow
The big farms we have left in Albuquerque’s South Valley are weird. I spent a good fraction of my weekend staring at maps of them, or riding my bike around them, or both. My co-author Bob Berrens and I have zeroed on in this area for a key part of the storytelling in our new …
The Ghost of the Herrera Ditch
It’s taking me a while to figure exactly what “the new book” is about. In an early manifestation (I recall such things based on the names of computer file folders of my scribblings) it was called “the ghost of water”. The idea was to find threads of the past in the stuff we built to …
Collective Action and the Ribbons of Green
A paragraph from the new book Bob Berrens and I are writing about the Rio Grande and the making of modern Albuquerque: To understand a community – any community – you can start with its water. Collective problem-solving, collective action, lies at the core of community, and our relationship with our water requires us to …
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Welcome new readers!
Welcome new readers! With the current attention on the Colorado River’s crisis, I’ve had a great many people sign up for my blog feed in recent weeks. I’m so happy to have you join our Inkstain community! But an up front apology may be in order, as this might not be what you expected. I’m …
“Drouth had no terrors here.”
I dropped off the Santa Fe Overland at Albuquerque about a year ago during the drouth that prevailed over the southwest at that time. The range was as dry and hard as a table. Rivers and streams had dried up. Cattle were dying and the country seemed utterly desolate. Imagine my astonishment and delight when …
“a veritable garden spot”
Barr Irrigation District The home of the ill-fated “Barr Irrigation District” is not one of Albuquerque’s scenic destinations. Perched on low sand hills between Albuquerque’s soft industrial underbelly and the city’s “Sunport” (our marketing appellation for what a lesser metropolis might call an “airport”), the old irrigation district land is today home to an interstate, …