Archive of posts filed under the New Mexico category.
Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?
From the morning paper, the latest in the struggle to figure out how much water the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow needs: According to an analysis by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, the river has only once since the 1990s, in 2005, had enough water to meet the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “conservation objective” …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?’ »
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Real water, real people, Maxwell NM edition
oops, update, forgot link Journal photographer Robert Rosales and I recently visited Maxwell, NM, which I describe (I think safely, though how does one know for sure?) as having “arguably the most serious drought-driven municipal water supply problem in the state of New Mexico.” From the story: Asked about the burden she bears in trying …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Real water, real people, Maxwell NM edition’ »
Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere
A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene: Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek. But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast …
Continue reading ‘Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere’ »
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights
From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights’ »
Anthropocene diaries: fight the man
I’m going to make up a story. I’d like to think it might be true. There’s an impromptu path I like to walk along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque that follows a narrow high spot of riverbank for something between a quarter and a half a mile. As you head north, the river’s on your …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: where the water will run out
2013 has the potential here in New Mexico to be a great laboratory for exploring the question of specifically where and when water supply shortages actually play out during a drought year. I took a crack in this morning’s paper at setting up the problem, highlighting what I see as the four key New Meixco …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: where the water will run out’ »
Running the table: dry at all relevant time scales
I confronted a litany of drought when I was making the rounds on my newspaper beat this morning. No doubt this has happened before and I’ve just not noticed it, but the current forecasts are dry at all the basic time scales I watch closely. I lined ’em all up so you could share New …
Continue reading ‘Running the table: dry at all relevant time scales’ »
New West: the economics of immigration
At the peak of the housing bubble in January 2006, when the annual pace of new home construction hit a blistering 2.29 million units, an estimated 14 percent of laborers in the construction sector were undocumented immigrants, including 20 percent of carpet, floor and tile installers, 28 percent of drywallers, and 36 percent of insulation …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction
There’s a rich, historical elegance to the tradition of state-v-state lawsuits over interstate compacts. Because each of the US states is constitutionally sovereign, when they sue one another over water flowing down a river from one state to the next, the legal action begins and ends before the US Supreme Court – the court of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction’ »