Stuff I helped produce elsewhere: tumbleweed snowman
In New Mexico, we make our snowmen out of the materials at hand: (updated with a link to the video because I can’t figure out how to embed it right)
Archive of entries posted on November 2011
Does access to water make you more vulnerable to drought?
It might seem obvious that the more water you have available, the less vulnerable you are to drought. Or not so obvious? Comparing counties over the Ogallala with nearby similar counties, groundwater access increased irrigation intensity and initially reduced the impact of droughts. Over time, land-use adjusted toward water-intensive crops and drought-sensitivity increased; conversely, farmers …
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The changing duty to bear witness
I don’t know who “qbertplaya” is, but I am eternally thankful to him or her for this: It’s Patti Smith closing CBGB, the last song played there, a moment in history captured by someone wise and generous enough to hold up some sort of mobile recording device. I was struck by that act when I …
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This isn’t the blog post you’ve been looking for.
“focused, not fighting”
The Arizona Republic had a very smart editorial today about the Colorado River. The premise: what happens in California matters a great deal to Arizona. The back story is a struggle in California about how to meet the terms of a deal in the early ’00s to cut back to its 4.4 million acre foot …
Dipping more drinking straws into the Colorado River
When it comes to water, we westerners seem to be a distrustful lot: Water politics in Colorado and in western Wyoming have long been driven by this one, nagging fear: that California was getting something to which it was not entitled – and might get accustomed to it. Squatter rights, if you will, bolstered by …
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What will it take to end New Mexico drought?
Corey Pieper, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Texas, linked this evening to some excellent (if grim) maps showing what it would take to bring Texas, New Mexico and the rest of the southern tier of states out of drought. The first is the percent of normal precipitation required over the winter to end drought: …
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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Getting to know our river
From the morning paper, a riff on getting acquainted with our river: The question of what we know about our river, and how we care for it, has been on my mind since I finished reading Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Blue Revolution.” Barnett, a Florida journalist, writes about the need for a water ethic. She …
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Can we blame Westlands shortages on Colorado River management?
Via Doug Obegi at NRDC’s San Francisco office, more evidence today of the interconnection of water management across the western United States. Obegi, in a post outlining the history of diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, pointed out the way water allotments to the Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley decreased as the …
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Among the sentences I wish I’d written
is this, from Robert Hass: Life, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies.