Tucker Davidson of Audubon wrote a lovely piece about slowing down and listening to, and looking for, the birds: Birding requires us to be present in the moment. It also allows us to shift our focus from our own worries and ruminations to another subject, breaking anxious thought patterns. Birds hold our attention without overwhelming it. For …
Wednesday family lunch included tacos at El Paisa on Bridge just west of the river, and then a drive to the Los Padillas Cemetery in the far south valley. I love cemeteries because they speak to some deep values, and I’ve taken to using them as a teaching tool for our UNM Water Resources Program …
Continue reading ‘The Value of Water in Alternative Uses, Cemetery Edition’ »
A bunch of odds and ends cluttering my brain, blog posts that are half written in my mind that are in the way: Quoting Luis Villa on accessing the open data commons We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has …
Continue reading ‘“the nearest thing I have seen to being true”’ »
The cycling trick in our linear north-south Rio Grande Valley is to match the Rail Runner with the wind. The best rides (where by “best” I mean “my favorite”) are in the valley, along the river and the ditchbanks that make up our ribbons of green. A wind out of the north calls for a …
I’m back after a couple of months’ hiatus to working on Ribbons of Green, the new book Bob Berrens and I are finishing up for publication next year by UNM Press. The current task, putting together the final package of art, is a blast. There’s more than a little tedious technical work (sorting out copyright …
Public opinion has always favored the free use of water. Brackett, Dexter. “Consumption and Waste of Water.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 34, no. 2 (1895): 185-203. In 1848, the designers of Boston’s water works assumed a need of 28 gallons per capita per day (GPCD). By 1872, while searching for and …
Continue reading ‘Consumption and Waste of Water, circa 1895’ »