Sibley's Rivers of Words

Humpty-Dumpty just sat on a wall, But Trumpty-Mumpty started a brawl; And fallout from the brawl Like the fall from the wall Might never go back together at all. I was chastised by a couple readers after the last post: you’re just giving the Trumpty-Mumpty dynamic duo what it wants by focusing on what it is doing. What we want to know is what this is going to mean for us out here in the arid lands, and thoughts on what we should be doing about that. What does it mean here in the Colorado River region? This led me to wonder: is focusing too much on what nasty people are doing just another form of surrendering to them? In chess, and probably all other competitive sports, there’s the matter of the ‘impetus’: one player or team of players will achieve the point in a game where they are ‘calling the shots,’ forcing the other player(s) to react to their … Read More

The old world is dying and a new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters. – English translation of a French   paraphrase of a statement by   Italian anarchist Antonio Gramsci Fiddling while Rome burns – that’s what it felt like, thinking about the next blog post on the intricate subtleties of learning to live with the Colorado River, while all around us things we value are being broken by a PINO and his self-appointed unelected shotgun, claiming that a 1.5 percent voter ‘mandate’ gives them license to do any damn thing they want to us and to the institutions we have evolved over 250 years to try to govern ourselves. PINO: President in Name Only, not just because he is not behaving the way presidential behavior is constitutionally defined, but mostly because the PINO himself is not satisfied with ‘president’; he has publicly stated his belief that ‘king’ would be a better name … Read More

Well, with the fate of constitution democracy in the courts where we know the mills grind slowly (as opposed to the grinders who break things quickly); and with the money frozen for farmers doing well by doing good in water conservation; and neither white smoke nor black smoke arising from the chimneys of the enclaves trying to envision the next decade or so for the Colorado River – I’ll take a break from my wonkish efforts to think outside the box, to remember a friend and mentor, and friend of the River, who thought outside the box often in the last half of the 20th century. The cantankerous Colorado River water community recently lost a valued member, L. Richard Bratton, a water attorney in the Upper Gunnison River Basin from 1958 till his death January 28. Dick Bratton’s scope of influence went beyond the Upper Gunnison mountain valleys, however; he was a creative thinker who never met anyone he could … Read More

Belated season’s greetings, dear readers! The season being the long dark days as our turning planet slowly tilts our part of the planet again toward the star we circle – moving us into a new year-cycle that will probably again be ‘one of the ten warmest years in recorded climate history’ – if not ‘the warmest’ again. But we are officially no longer going to be concerned about that, right? The voters have spoken, with the usual one-percent victory taken by the winner to be a landslide mandate. And what the voters decided, by that one-percent margin, is that we, as a nation, the Untied States of America, shall officially cease to believe that we are changing the climate; we’ve given ourselves license to linger in the denial and anger stages – denial that it is happening, and anger at anyone who wants to blame us for that which we can now officially refuse to believe is happening. And we … Read More

Voz del pasado The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about ‘new politics’ and ‘honesty in government,’ is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers…. – from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson Hunter Thompson put the term ‘fear and loathing’ into our cultural dialogue in the early 1970s: first in 1971 with ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ then with ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’ in 1973, a long rambling essay into America’s political character based on his coverage for Rolling Stone of the 1972 election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. ‘Fear and loathing’ is a pretty … Read More

I would be remiss in whatever responsibility I feel to the Colorado River if I did not remind you of the implications of the coming election for the river and our future with it. I don’t say ‘the future of the river’: the river will always be here in some form or another, but we may not always be here interacting with it  – certainly not 40 million of us taking it for granted. And this election, like the last one – and probably the next one, if there is a next one – are and will be playing a determinative role in which way our future with the river goes. At some point, the American people have got to seriously confront the fact that phenomena like Hurricane Helene, heat domes, town-consuming wildfires and an enduring drought are climate-driven consequences of the way we do civilized life, and they will only get worse if we don’t do something to change … Read More

An Apology: Our service that sends these posts hs malfunctioned; this one sat in limbo for the past two weeks. I hope we have things back to where we can again get it to you every 3-4 weeks.  – George In the last post here, with the Colorado River’s Upper and Lower Basins in stalemate over how to distribute the suffering after the 2026 expiration of the Interim Guidelines, I suggested we use the time to do what we’ve all been saying we need to do, but find it hard to do: ‘think outside the box.’ The ‘box’ in this case being the Colorado River Compact. We can go back to Monday-morning-quarterbacking the rivermeisters as they try to figure out how to drag the Compact, its misbegotten two-basin division and its Marley’s-chain Law of the River into the 21st century. But for the moment – let’s just indulge in imagining river scenarios that might actually reflect Colorado River realities in … Read More