As near as I can tell from a lazy visit to the Wayback Machine, it was sometime around 2014 that I added the old Metropolitan Water District Colorado River Aqueduct map to my blog header. It’s a lovely map that has served me well these many years, but it doesn’t match my brand any more.

I was playing today with this 1823 map by Jose Narvaes (Narvaez?), but it didn’t pop the way I need a blog header image to pop. So I went instead with the 1938 USGS topo map of Albuquerque, which is gorgeous. Look at the loving detail of the Rio Grande as it makes the bend past “Old Albuquerque,” the Atrisco and Armijo ditches meandering down the South Valley, the swamps flanking the river.

I’m in the middle of some final choices about the art to include with the revisions to the manuscript of the new book Bob Berrens and I are writing – Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City, and I’ve been staring at both the Narvaes/Narvaez and the 1938 topo, trying to decide whether to include either. Narvaes/Narvaez I probably won’t. It’s lovely, but doesn’t move our narrative. The 1938 topo is on the bubble. It’s so damn pretty!

Finishing the Manuscript

I’ve been holed up for the last six weeks in a third floor garret (metaphor alert) doing the final revisions on the book, which is a full brain activity. I haven’t been paying much attention to the world around me, and I came down to the corner bodega (metaphor) to get some bread and cheese and ask the newsboy what’s been happening. He pointed me to Tony Davis’s story from the Tucson Star last week.* What the actual fuck, y’all? Is this the best you can do? I am so profoundly disappointed in Colorado River Basin leadership right now. Will I lose blog readership if I say “fuck” again?

The network is failing. Yeah, I’m talking to you. You are failing us. There are 40 million of us, and we have to figure out how to share this river.

Do better.

Another semester done

Luckily I’m not going to CRWUA this year. It’s early, conflicts with the last week of the UNM Water Resources Program class I’m co-teaching with Bob Berrens. It has once again been a joy to get to know a new cohort of the water managers of the future – a dozen joys, the years Bob and I have spent teaching the class together.

Spending the last three months teaching the class while I’m simultaneously deep in book revisions has been fun because of the interplay. Central to both is the idea that we have a multiplicity of values around water. Good water management does not mean pursuing my values. It means recognizing that there are many communities, and a multiplicity of values, and the institutions we have created to manage our way through that diversity, and whose evolution we are entrusted to steward, matter. I guess this has become my “meta-value.” I have my own personal values about the where and when and how of the use of water. But what is more important to me is that we have institutions that reflect the breadth of communities and values and interests other than mine.

* Sorry, I know it’s behind a paywall, but a) I appreciate the Star’s efforts to figure out a way to pay Tony to continue to do the important work of journalism, and b) the people I’m talking to here all have the pdf.