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Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 3
We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. – Journalist Ron Suskind quoting unnamed George W. Bush advisor in a 2004 New Yorker essay. There it is again – the invocation for most of the 20th century. But – wait: aren’t we in the 21st century? Well,…
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Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 2
We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. – Journalist Ron Suskind quoting unnamed George W. Bush advisor in a 2004 New Yorker essay. Get used to it: I’m probably going to be using that quote at the head of every post here for the near future…
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Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 1
We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’ That is indeed the way things seem to be sorting out today, in imperial…
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Back to Romancing the River: What’s Your Reality?
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…
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Romancing the River: Learning to Live in the Anthropocene
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…
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Romancing the River: Remembering Dick Bratton – and His Times
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…
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Romancing the River: To Halve and Have Naught, Part 2
A voice from the dark called out, ‘The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster.’ – Denise Levertov We have developed the resource; Now we have to learn how to share it. – Greg Hobbs The Trumpster Rebellion – is it organized enough to call it a…
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Romancing the River: To Halve and Have Naught
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…
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Romancing the River: Bluffing a Call, Calling the Bluff
Breaking news! The Lower Colorado River Basin is threatening the Upper Basin with a ‘Compact Call’ if it does not agree to share some major cuts in river use! Well, actually the news broke a week ago – and now there’s more news: just as I was wrapping this analysis of the ‘Call’ up yesterday,…
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Romancing the River: Forging on in the Era of Fear and Loathing
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…
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Romancing the River: The Existential Election – Again
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…
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Romancing the River: The Headwaters Challenge 2
In the last two posts here (one of which you got twice, my apology), I’ve been trying to ‘revision’ the Colorado River as the classic desert river that it is. All rivers are composed of runoff – water from precipitation that did not soak into the ground, collecting in streams that ‘run off’ to the…
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Romancing the River: The Headwaters Challenge
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…