Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Record low March 1 snowpack in some New Mexico watersheds

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The preliminary March 1 runoff forecast from Karl Wetlaufer, the federal government employee at the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service who provides vital information to help us make informed water management decisions, is yikes: February brought another month of well below median precipitation across the entire Rio Grande basin. As one would anticipate this generally …

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“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”

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“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.” – Hanif Abdurraqib I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words. Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, …

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Wrecking Ball Report: At Reclamation, a view from the inside

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Elevated from the comments, observations from former Reclamation manager Doug Blatchford: WHEN I joined the Reclamation team in 2005 as the River Operation Manager on the Colorado River, part of my duties was to prepare a business plan to direct future business decisions based on the operations budget and services required (like delivering water to …

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Wrecking ball report, California water edition

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We’re starting to see dimly the outlines of what it means for the federal government to no longer be a reliable partner in western water management. Here’s Annie Snider and Camille Von Kaenel on what’s happening in California’s Reclamation operations: DOGE’s cuts are already hurting Reclamation’s ability to move water through a sprawling system of …

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What does it mean for western water management when the federal government becomes an unreliable partner?

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I got a text message yesterday afternoon about this, which is nuts: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Albuquerque District announced today that an unintended water release from Cochiti Dam may increase flood risk on the Rio Grande in the river channel, riverbanks, and floodway. The cause of the unintended water release was a procedural error …

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“the most badass thing we do”

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Pooling our resources to discover new truths about the universe so that we can all have better lives, to strike back against disease, suffering, poverty, and violence, to reduce ignorance for the benefit of all—that’s literally the most badass thing we do. – Adam Mastroianni

A legal guide for climate scientists to safeguard their on line communications

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With the new administration’s shithousery team now pounding on NOAA’s door, a useful resource from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund: Emails sent to and from scientists are increasingly subject to scrutiny through a variety of means, including aggressive open records requests, subpoenas, and even hacking. The prevalence of social media, blogs, and other digital …

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Shithousery and California’s Success Reservoir

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There’s a tactic in football (what we Americans refer to as “soccer”) called “shithousery.” It’s a style of norm-breaking behavior – constant stoppages, niggling fouls, feigning injury – that completely disrupts the flow of the game. It can involve bending or breaking rules, and one of its main goals is to disorient the opponent, piss …

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