Sunday’s bike ride book research took us up along the old Duranes ditch, through Albuquerque’s near north valley. The landscape is still wearing its winter coat, but it’s clearly dusting off its leaf-growing apparatus and getting ready for spring. We stopped to get a look at one of my favorite old farm fields, on Los …
Continue reading ‘“partición de bienes” – Albuquerque’s Long Lots’ »
The first water is heading down the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Main toward town. “I love this time of year,” an MRGCD guy told me years ago. “You can feel the valley breathing in.”
Today’s ENSO outlook (El Niño Southern Oscillation) suggests a consensus among “the models” that the odds are tipping toward an El Niño for the coming summer and fall. The humans in the loop are more bearish: The most recent IRI plume favors ENSO-neutral to continue through the spring, with El Niño forming during summer 2023 …
I was talking to a friend last week about the work Bob Berrens and I are doing for our new book on the origin stories of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. I’m deep into a chapter on the failed 1920s efforts at tobacco farming (I’ve told that story before here), and we were talking …
Continue reading ‘The peculiar economics of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’ »
As we try to adapt to climate change, understanding how our changing hydrology funnels through legal filters will be crucial. That’s why the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center funded this terrific piece of work by UNM Water Resources Program student Annalise Porter: New Mexico’s Greenbelt Law: Disincentivizing Water Conservation Through Agricultural Tax Breaks, just …
Continue reading ‘Tax Breaks and Water Conservation Disincentives in New Mexico’ »
The big farms we have left in Albuquerque’s South Valley are weird. I spent a good fraction of my weekend staring at maps of them, or riding my bike around them, or both. My co-author Bob Berrens and I have zeroed on in this area for a key part of the storytelling in our new …
Doing reading for the new book on early 1920s Albuquerque, as business leaders pursued what would become the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, I see the regular return of a phrase I’d come to see frequently my reading of Colorado River history in the same time period: the flood menace Here’s the Albuquerque Journal, reporting …
Continue reading ‘the rise and fall of “the flood menace”’ »
It’s taking me a while to figure exactly what “the new book” is about. In an early manifestation (I recall such things based on the names of computer file folders of my scribblings) it was called “the ghost of water”. The idea was to find threads of the past in the stuff we built to …
Being a professional writer carried with it, for me, a bundle of contradictions – the arrogance of the act (I have something to say that’s so worthwhile that you should spend your time and your money to read it!) crossed with the insecurity, the fear (Do I really have something to say that’s worth their …
A paragraph from the new book Bob Berrens and I are writing about the Rio Grande and the making of modern Albuquerque: To understand a community – any community – you can start with its water. Collective problem-solving, collective action, lies at the core of community, and our relationship with our water requires us to …
Continue reading ‘Collective Action and the Ribbons of Green’ »