Sibley’s Rivers of Words | the Blog

Hard times in the Colorado River region. A near-average snowpack dissipated into an inflow into Powell Reservoir of only 40 percent of average; dry soils in the headwaters and high deserts, and increased evaporation and plant transpiration in a warming world are taking big tolls. And the negotiators for the seven Basin states, trying to…

We left the Colorado River a couple months ago to explore the Trumpsters’ effort to use the public lands in the river basin to ‘unleash American energy’ and return us to the glorious age of cheap petroleum – and why it’s not happening. At that time, the seven states in the river’s basin were in…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…