Albuquerque’s nod to its agricultural past, like much of the style we have adopted for ourselves, is in significant measure artifice. This is not to say that it is not in some vague sense rooted in a truth, an actual past. But we engage in the 21st century in significant embellishment, a story we spin …
Continue reading ‘Tobacco farming and swamps in early 20th century Albuquerque’ »
Sometime last weekend (June 4-5, 2022), the Rio Grande south of Socorro, New Mexico, began drying. By this morning (Monday June 6) river managers reported 20+ miles of drying. The gage north of the 380 bridge at San Antonio dropped to zero today. The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which normally gets the largest …
Continue reading ‘Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande is beginning to dry’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck With a single statement, the United States Supreme Court changed the direction and tone of the compact negotiations: [T]he waters of an innavigable stream rising in one state and flowing into a state adjoining may not be disposed of by the upper state as she may choose, regardless of …
The only thing better than a tailwind on the bike ride home up the hill from the Rio Grande is an air conditioned bus on a hot afternoon. Tailwinds are great, but stories happen on buses. Riding my bike to a meeting with folks trying to figure out how to cope with climate change seemed …
Continue reading ‘The Bird Watches Over a Drying Rio Grande’ »
Cities. Farms. The natural environment. All of it. We can do it in an orderly way, or devolve into chaos. That’s it. That’s the blog post.
It has become a Frequently Asked Question of late here at Inkstain World Headquarters: John, you’ve frequently been quoted in the past expressing optimism about the future of the Colorado River Basin. Dude, Lake Mead is so low they’re finding dead bodies. Are you still optimistic? My answer, of course, is “yes”. It’s in my …
Continue reading ‘Sure, dead bodies in Lake Mead, whatever. I remain optimistic.’ »
I love living in a town with a ditch bearing the name of co-workers. I love living in a town with a ditch that’s been continuously, tenuously irrigating this land since the 1700s. I love dodging traffic by turning down a “Dead End” street, knowing that only means cars, that bikes can pop out on …
Important observation from Jack Schmidt, Utah State Colorado River guy, on the new constraints on Colorado River management as Lake Powell and Lake Mead drop: “We’re in crisis management, and health and human safety issues, including production of hydropower, are taking precedence,” said Jack Schmidt, director of the center for Colorado River Studies at Utah …
Continue reading ‘Crisis Managemnent on the Colorado River’ »
Audubon’s Jennifer Pitt, one of the most stubbornly optimistic actors in the Colorado River Basin, wrote this Friday: [F]ederal officials project that within two years, the water level in Lake Powell could be so low that it would be impossible for water to flow through the dam’s turbine intakes. When that happens, it’s clear the …
Watching the back-and-forth among the U.S. Department of Interior and the seven Colorado River Basin States over Glen Canyon Dam operations over the last few months, I’d been thinking that we’ve dropped into an area where the rules developed in 2007, and tweaked in the years since, no longer apply. In short, if we use …
