Rio Grande flow dropped this week through Albuquerque, at a time when we should expect it to be rising with the accelerating melt of an unusually large snowmelt. What’s up with that? The answer (see below, I’m can’t figure out how to tl;dr this) is a case study in the stuff we’re trying to explain …
Continue reading ‘On Cochiti dam and the notion of “flooding”’ »
We have a chance this year to watch a fascinating intersection of climate-change driven changes in the Rio Grande through Albuquerque as filtered through both physical infrastructure and what we call the “institutional hydrograph”. The tl;dr Dust on snow is likely to accelerate Rio Grande headwaters snowmelt, meaning all that stored water comes off earlier. …
There’s a weird bench at the edge of a lovely little ten acre patch of desert sand hill scrub a ten minute walk from my office at the UNM School of Law. The path circles the edge of the university’s north golf course, which is green and lovely in its pumped-groundwater way. The path (It’s …
Continue reading ‘Ribbons of green and the sand hills beyond’ »
But when worlds collideSaid George Pal to his brideI’m gonna give you some terrible thrills – Richard O’Brien, Science Fiction Double Feature
In the early 1990s, a group of New Mexico scientists set up experimental plots at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque for in an effort to determine what might happen when water was reintroduced to the flood-starved woods flanking the river. Their description of what happened is …
Continue reading ‘Bosque overbanking as the Rio Grande rises’ »
My friend Scot and I rode north on yesterday’s bike ride to see the Corrales Siphon pumps. Built in the 1930s, the siphon for nearly a century carried water beneath the Rio Grande to irrigate a thousand acres of land on the west side of the river at the northern end of the Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘Thick places, infrastructural inversions, and the gift of ideas’ »
I’ve been obsessed with John van Dyke’s “ribbons of green” image for a long time. Rummaging through some old computer files last night, I found the following, circa 2009, in a folder of notes and sketches for what would become my book “Water is for Fighting Over.” Notes from Moab There’s a moment when you’re …
Sunday’s bike ride book research took us up along the old Duranes ditch, through Albuquerque’s near north valley. The landscape is still wearing its winter coat, but it’s clearly dusting off its leaf-growing apparatus and getting ready for spring. We stopped to get a look at one of my favorite old farm fields, on Los …
Continue reading ‘“partición de bienes” – Albuquerque’s Long Lots’ »
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.”
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 …