Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Paradise Revisited
The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.
On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”
On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.
Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—up from $100 just two years ago—and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.
The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.
Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.
The mythology of blinding-inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—the one that drove me here—is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”
All of that should make him any writer’s hero.
The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a biosecurity declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.
I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”
One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a directionless youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.
During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”
In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.
On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.
Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.
In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” [...]
Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.
No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.
After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.
The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)
On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.
Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—up from $100 just two years ago—and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.
The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.
Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.
The mythology of blinding-inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—the one that drove me here—is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”
All of that should make him any writer’s hero.
The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a biosecurity declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.
I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”
One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a directionless youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.
During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”
In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.
On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.
Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.
In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” [...]
Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.
No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.
After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.
The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)
by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Will Matsuda for The Atlantic
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Air Conditioners to Anchovies
China keeps the U.S. and Japan Cool. And most other places. The Chinese make more than 80% of the world’s air-conditioners. And they could… stop.
The demand for Chinese air-cons is rising world-wide, as heatwaves proliferate. Viral videos this week show customers fighting over the devices at shops in Europe.
by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:
The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks.
Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.
Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]
Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.
The world’s biggest fan clubs for air-conditioning are the United States, and two Asian allies/ vassals, Japan and South Korea. In these three places, 88% to 91% of homes have such devices (IEA estimates).
Is there any risk of China halting exports, in the way the US might do? Thankfully not, at the moment, analysts say. China keeps the industry entirely politics-free: We build, you buy, at a price that benefits both sides.
The 'Assembled In...' Trick
The world has 2.4 billion air conditioners, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. But few people around the planet are aware that their aircons come from China, because of branding techniques.
by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:
***
One of the world’s current hottest commodities is in the midst of a huge disruption. It may sound like I’m talking about oil and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but this is even more severe. The supply shock is far greater — and so is the price response: Global production has plunged as much as 40% from a year ago; prices are up 80% over the same period to an all-time high. The commodity in question? The humble anchovy.
The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks.
Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.
Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]
In mid-May, Peru imposed a 15-day ban on anchovy fishing; the moratorium was later extended until June 10. Then, the government in Lima shocked the fishing business with an indefinite ban. The South American anchoveta is the world’s largest single-species fishery. The ban has triggered a dramatic drop in global fishmeal production, which industry executives estimate to be down 30% to 40% from a year ago.
With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]
With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]
Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.
by Javier Blas, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: REDA/Universal Images Group Editorial[ed. Globalization and supply chain logistics.]
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Careening Toward a Breaking Point
Image: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Denver Post/Getty Images
Monday, July 6, 2026
Beating the Heat
Long before air-conditioning, people around the world came up with ingenious ways to beat the heat. But, really — wear dark, billowing robes? And drink tea?
The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.
Water That Sidewalk
In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.
The practice, called uchimizu, grew out of Japan’s tea ceremony tradition. It was originally a purifying ritual and an act of welcome for guests. But uchimizu also has an effect on temperature thanks to what’s known as evaporative cooling — when water evaporates, it pulls heat out of the hot ground.
A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.
According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.
Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass
Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.
The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.
The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.
If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.
“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”
Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)
It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.
A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.
“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.
For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.
Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
[ed. And there are other options too, from architectural to personal/practical. My buddy Jerry was telling me about folks in Texas who used to, maybe still do, dig small pit caverns (like root cellars) a few feet below ground with an attached conduit routed upward into their house. The cool air from just a few feet below ground is enough. Another option would be design features that encourage air flow and ventilation, see also: How Old Dubai's historic streets beat extreme heat (BBC).]
The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.
Water That Sidewalk
In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.
A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.
According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.
Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass
Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.
The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.
The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.
If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.
“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”
Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)
It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.
A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.
“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.
For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.
Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
[ed. And there are other options too, from architectural to personal/practical. My buddy Jerry was telling me about folks in Texas who used to, maybe still do, dig small pit caverns (like root cellars) a few feet below ground with an attached conduit routed upward into their house. The cool air from just a few feet below ground is enough. Another option would be design features that encourage air flow and ventilation, see also: How Old Dubai's historic streets beat extreme heat (BBC).]
'We Are Screwed'
Data Center Alley is facing a climate test.
Searing temperatures this week could push energy demand to record levels on the mid-Atlantic’s electric grid, which fuels the country’s data center boom in Virginia.
To relieve some of the pressure, the Department of Energy granted permission Tuesday to the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to potentially force data centers to use backup diesel generators.
The move highlights the growing challenge of meeting rising electricity demand from data centers as the grid strains to keep the region cool during a period of extreme heat.
Many data centers rely on backup diesel generators, which release planet-warming emissions and lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health. The challenge is particularly acute in Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s data center boom. State regulators have permitted more than 8,000 diesel generators at data centers in recent years, according to data from the state Department of Environmental Quality.
DOE’s order would allow data centers to run generators beyond limits for emissions that EPA has categorized as a “possible human carcinogen.”
Meeting higher electricity demand from air conditioning use during heat waves was already a challenge, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. Adding data centers to the equation makes it harder.
“This is exactly what we expect in a warming world,” she said. “Even a modest increase in baseline temperature causes an exponential increase in heat extremes. You find yourself crossing these heat extremes much more frequently.” [...]
PJM has sufficient generating reserves to withstand intense summer heat waves, according to a recent assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But it is anticipating electricity demand far in excess of what it was expecting when it issued its summer reliability assessment in May.
Demand is projected to peak around 166 gigawatts on Thursday afternoon, exceeding the all-time record of 165 GW set in 2006. PJM predicted that summer demand would hit 156 GW this year, though it also included an “unlikely but plausible” scenario where electricity demand crests around 169 GW.
“It’s scary. It worries everyone when you see those kind of numbers,” said Abe Silverman, a former New Jersey utility regulator.
The grid should have enough generation to satisfy that power consumption, but the combination of higher temperatures, increased demand from data centers and a regulatory system straining to keep pace with skyrocketing electricity use is a worrisome dynamic, Silverman said.
The future looks even scarier. “The projections for data center loads dwarf the amount of data center load we have now,” he said. [...]
A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright blamed the tight grid conditions on the Biden administration. [ed. Of course.]
“We are reversing those failures and using every available tool ensuring Americans in the Mid-Atlantic have continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes,” Wright said in a statement accompanying the order on diesel generators.
Communities are caught in the middle. In Virginia, one-third of data centers are located within 500 feet of residential areas or schools, according to state auditors.
Some neighbors are bracing to see if their Fourth of July celebrations will be affected by unhealthy air.
“Nothing says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like breathing in diesel fumes,” said Elena Schlossberg, who runs a grassroots organization opposing data centers in Prince William County, which has 33 completed data centers and 31 more on the way.
No one wants the grid to collapse, she said, but she argued it’s not fair when neighborhoods pay for Virginia’s data center boom with their health.
“Either way, we are screwed,” Schlossberg said. “Either our lights go out or we get to breathe in this pollution.” [...]
“Last summer it was like, is everyone seeing what we are seeing?” said Ann Bennett, who oversees data center issues at the Sierra Club of Virginia. “This time around people are already emailing us asking if they should expect more diesel and how to protect themselves from the fumes during this heat wave.”
The number of diesel generators in the state has grown since then. Bennett, who has tracked DEQ permits for the machines, found that the agency allowed 3,790 additional diesel generators in 2025.
“This time, we are all anxiously anticipating what is going to happen, and we have thousands more generators to worry about,” she said.
by Ariel Wittenberg and Benjamin Storrow, Politico | Read more:
Searing temperatures this week could push energy demand to record levels on the mid-Atlantic’s electric grid, which fuels the country’s data center boom in Virginia.
To relieve some of the pressure, the Department of Energy granted permission Tuesday to the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to potentially force data centers to use backup diesel generators.
Many data centers rely on backup diesel generators, which release planet-warming emissions and lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health. The challenge is particularly acute in Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s data center boom. State regulators have permitted more than 8,000 diesel generators at data centers in recent years, according to data from the state Department of Environmental Quality.
DOE’s order would allow data centers to run generators beyond limits for emissions that EPA has categorized as a “possible human carcinogen.”
Meeting higher electricity demand from air conditioning use during heat waves was already a challenge, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. Adding data centers to the equation makes it harder.
“This is exactly what we expect in a warming world,” she said. “Even a modest increase in baseline temperature causes an exponential increase in heat extremes. You find yourself crossing these heat extremes much more frequently.” [...]
PJM has sufficient generating reserves to withstand intense summer heat waves, according to a recent assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But it is anticipating electricity demand far in excess of what it was expecting when it issued its summer reliability assessment in May.
Demand is projected to peak around 166 gigawatts on Thursday afternoon, exceeding the all-time record of 165 GW set in 2006. PJM predicted that summer demand would hit 156 GW this year, though it also included an “unlikely but plausible” scenario where electricity demand crests around 169 GW.
“It’s scary. It worries everyone when you see those kind of numbers,” said Abe Silverman, a former New Jersey utility regulator.
The grid should have enough generation to satisfy that power consumption, but the combination of higher temperatures, increased demand from data centers and a regulatory system straining to keep pace with skyrocketing electricity use is a worrisome dynamic, Silverman said.
The future looks even scarier. “The projections for data center loads dwarf the amount of data center load we have now,” he said. [...]
A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright blamed the tight grid conditions on the Biden administration. [ed. Of course.]
“We are reversing those failures and using every available tool ensuring Americans in the Mid-Atlantic have continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes,” Wright said in a statement accompanying the order on diesel generators.
Communities are caught in the middle. In Virginia, one-third of data centers are located within 500 feet of residential areas or schools, according to state auditors.
Some neighbors are bracing to see if their Fourth of July celebrations will be affected by unhealthy air.
“Nothing says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like breathing in diesel fumes,” said Elena Schlossberg, who runs a grassroots organization opposing data centers in Prince William County, which has 33 completed data centers and 31 more on the way.
No one wants the grid to collapse, she said, but she argued it’s not fair when neighborhoods pay for Virginia’s data center boom with their health.
“Either way, we are screwed,” Schlossberg said. “Either our lights go out or we get to breathe in this pollution.” [...]
“Last summer it was like, is everyone seeing what we are seeing?” said Ann Bennett, who oversees data center issues at the Sierra Club of Virginia. “This time around people are already emailing us asking if they should expect more diesel and how to protect themselves from the fumes during this heat wave.”
The number of diesel generators in the state has grown since then. Bennett, who has tracked DEQ permits for the machines, found that the agency allowed 3,790 additional diesel generators in 2025.
“This time, we are all anxiously anticipating what is going to happen, and we have thousands more generators to worry about,” she said.
by Ariel Wittenberg and Benjamin Storrow, Politico | Read more:
Image: Francis Chung/Politico
[ed. Water issues, too. Number of data centers in Virginia: 749. Providers: 109.]
Saturday, July 4, 2026
How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest
The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.
There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.
The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.
At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.
In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.
Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.
Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.
The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.
Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.
The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”
While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]
Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.
Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.
[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and subsisted on many of them.]
At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.
In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.
Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.
The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.
Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.
The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”
While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]
Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.
Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.
by Kari Traylor, JSTOR | Read more:
Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons
Non-Technological Constraints to AI
Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.
By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.
The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.
We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.
The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.
The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.
A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.
“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”
There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.
Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.
Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.
Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.
Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]
It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.
Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]
The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.
But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.
Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible.
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]
By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.
The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.
The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.
The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.
A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.
“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”
There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.
Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.
Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.
Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.
Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]
Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.
It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.
Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]
The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.
But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.
Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible.
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]
Cadillac Desert
CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. Illustrated. 582 pp. New York: Viking.
It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.
The money has gone into Federal water projects in the Western states - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future. More than a century ago John Wesley Powell, the nation's pioneer hydrographer and an explorer of the Grand Canyon, concluded that so much of the West was virtually desert that if all the flowing water in the region were applied to it, the water would spread too thin to make much difference.
But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.
It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.
The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.
Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.
Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.
''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''
It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.
But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.
It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.
The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.
Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.
Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.
''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''
by Gladwin Hill, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. A classic, and the bill's about to come due.]
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth
A Monument to Man’s Arrogance
Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.
Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.
But all that water is not nearly enough to sate the five million citizens of the Phoenician sprawl and the farms and the tribal communities. The rest comes from the Colorado River by way of the Central Arizona Project: a series of pumps, tunnels, and canals that every year move 456 billion gallons of Colorado River water 336 miles from the northwest. 5 billion of those gallons evaporate into the desert air before they ever reach Phoenix.
This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.
But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.
This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.
This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.
For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:
But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?
What if we asked them?
Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.
Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.
This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.
But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.
This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.
This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.
For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:
No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.The Sierra Club’s cover story in 2022 described the coming Colorado River crisis. Their introduction ends with this:
No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture…The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. It means “all used up” or “exhausted.”There are many more invocations of the Hohokam; I’ll quote just one more here to drive home the point. The ur-text of writing on the water crisis in the west, the book that all others cite as their inspiration, is the 1985 book Cadillac Desert. The chapter that discusses the Central Arizona Project begins this way:
The original 400,000 Arizonans were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya further south. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea. When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves.It’s easy to see why the Hohokam story is used as a hook. It’s too good not to use. A people settle by the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers and build a great civilization until the changing climate or their overuse of water forces them to leave. The writers of all these pieces start by saying the disappearance of the Hohokam is a mystery, but then make it clear that the answer to this mystery is the same as whatever they believe to be the biggest problem with modern-day Phoenix: climate change, irrigation overuse, poisoned crops, social conflict, etc.
They were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? Drought remains a possibility — perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen — but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much. And that is the exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.
But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?
What if we asked them?
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
[ed. Less about current water problems (and possible solutions) in the Phoenix area today and more about the history of Hohokam society that predated it. An interesting and detailed account of a unique and forward-thinking society quite advanced for its time. See also: Friday Book Club - Cadillac Desert (DS).]
Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026
Asteroid Day was cofounded in 2014 (the year after the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor air burst) by physicist Stephen Hawking, B612 Foundation president Danica Remy, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, filmmaker Grigorij Richters, and Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). Remy, Schweickart, Richters, and May initiated Asteroid Day in October 2014, which they announced during a press conference. It was launched on December 3, 2014.
In 2016, the United Nations proclaimed Asteroid Day be observed globally on June 30 every year in its resolution. The event aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations from a catastrophic event. - Wikipedia
There are about a million asteroids in the Solar System with the potential to strike Earth and destroy a city. Astronomers have discovered only 1% of them. Asteroid Day is an effort to educate the public and encourage policy makers to fund this important effort.
King Tut may have celebrated an ancient Asteroid Day by asking his assistants to make a dagger out of a broken-off asteroid that landed on Earth. Astronomers discovered that the blade of the knife contained much more nickel than is found in terrestrial iron, an amount consistent with iron meteorites, especially with one found in the year 2000 in the Kharga region in northern Egypt. For more information about the dagger, go to http://goo.gl/BHBivd. (via: Bruce Palmquist, Daily Record)
[ed. Brian May was also an astrophysicist? Wow. A man of many talents. Another one would be Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, guitarist for Steely Dan and US missile defense contractor/consultant.]
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Home Invasions
At four in the morning I heard a scratching that sounded like someone was trying to break into our new home. J. and I were not yet fluent in the house’s natural yawning and moaning—the way it sighed when stretching its pilings and beams, or grunted against a pummeling Florida gale, or shuddered when thunder clapped—and I often startled at sounds, trying to discern which ones required attention. And I’d recently been diagnosed with partial hearing loss in my right ear, which meant I couldn’t make out certain sounds but also imagined noises that weren’t there.
In the predawn dark it was hard to tell if my tenuous hearing was playing tricks on me. Then I felt a paw press my calf. Arrow was awake. The dog had heard it too.
I got up to ensure the windows were locked. Outside, a gentle wind stirred the mango tree’s canopy. A distant streetlight flickered on and off like a lighthouse beacon.
J. groaned and rolled over. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
Arrow growled, jumped off the bed, and began sniffing along the baseboards, moving the length of the room. When he galloped down the stairs, J. and I dutifully followed.
Arrow stood by the back door, ears up, eyes on us. Everything was just as we’d left it. Everything was silent—until it wasn’t. A scraping so violent it made my fingernails ache issued from a corner of the dining room. Afraid of scaring whatever it was away, J. eased open the back door, and the two of us stepped outside.
Frogs chirruped. Something—a bird, a fish, a single, lonesome alligator—shattered the glassy black surface of the pond. J. ran a flashlight over the siding, the eaves, the roof. Nothing.
“It’s already inside,” he said.
“Squirrels?”
“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.
“Not squirrels,” said the pest-control specialist who came later that morning, after J. had left for work. Squirrels are daytime animals, he explained. They sleep at night.
I hoped he would say opossum. I hoped he would say, even, raccoon. Either would have been inconvenient and unpleasant but more easily remedied—a Havahart trap, a relocation to a nearby nature preserve, a single hole to fill. Instead he said exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the Year of the Rat are shrewd, fickle, creative, thrifty, and wise. They are a litter of cowardly, hot-tempered, picky musicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and writers. They may be plagued by a weak constitution and prone to head colds and other viruses. I was born in the Year of the Rat and, coincidentally or not, possess many of these characteristics. Though I’ve always considered myself hardy, my partial hearing loss—the cause of which doctors were yet unable to explain—suggested otherwise.
Each year of the Chinese zodiac has a corresponding element. Mine is water, which makes me a water rat. Water is an element of hiding and suggests an inability to choose something and stick to it. At times I’ve been true to my watery nature, having been accused of being unable to commit to a job, a person, a responsibility. My initial ambivalence about moving to Florida supported such accusations, and buying a house with J. was my attempt to act against type.
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.” He wore a utility belt below a belly like unproofed bread dough. As he walked, his belt jangled with keys, flashlight, laser pointer, measuring tape, Swiss Army knife. He sweated beyond what was socially acceptable, even by Florida standards.
I hadn’t heard them before, but it turned out other people had. J. confessed to noting some rustling when he’d been up late a few weeks earlier. And my brother said he’d heard something when he and my sister-in-law had stayed overnight. Earlier in my life I might have been surprised, angry even, to learn they’d withheld the truth, but by then I’d come to believe it was human nature to look away, to plead ignorance. That was precisely what I’d done for months when my ear had begun to alert me, persistently, that there was a problem.
“I’ll close up the entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Set traps, fog the attic.” The fogging, he assured me, was safe for humans and canines—so safe, in fact, that it wouldn’t even kill the rats. Instead it left behind a perfume they found intolerable, driving them away.
This was my introduction to the pest-control business, and over the next several months I discovered that exterminators each have their own predilections, their preferred baits and traps, their brands of flashlights and trash bags in which to dispose of their prey. I also learned that, along with sound machines promising to transmit high-frequency pitches detected only by vermin, fogging is a scam.
Criminal or immoral tricksters are called “dirty rats” or “rat finks,” but Rat Guy #1 didn’t strike me as either of these. For one of what would be many visits, he arrived with his octogenarian mother who had been “bored outta my gourd” and “wanted a look-about.” Our generally discriminating dog loved him. When his truck appeared in the driveway, Arrow wailed at the front door, anxious to be let outside to spastically run circles around the man with an excitement he rarely demonstrated for anyone else, including J. or me. This was the most persuasive argument in favor of trusting Rat Guy #1.
In the predawn dark it was hard to tell if my tenuous hearing was playing tricks on me. Then I felt a paw press my calf. Arrow was awake. The dog had heard it too.
J. groaned and rolled over. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
Arrow growled, jumped off the bed, and began sniffing along the baseboards, moving the length of the room. When he galloped down the stairs, J. and I dutifully followed.
Arrow stood by the back door, ears up, eyes on us. Everything was just as we’d left it. Everything was silent—until it wasn’t. A scraping so violent it made my fingernails ache issued from a corner of the dining room. Afraid of scaring whatever it was away, J. eased open the back door, and the two of us stepped outside.
Frogs chirruped. Something—a bird, a fish, a single, lonesome alligator—shattered the glassy black surface of the pond. J. ran a flashlight over the siding, the eaves, the roof. Nothing.
“It’s already inside,” he said.
“Squirrels?”
“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.
“Not squirrels,” said the pest-control specialist who came later that morning, after J. had left for work. Squirrels are daytime animals, he explained. They sleep at night.
I hoped he would say opossum. I hoped he would say, even, raccoon. Either would have been inconvenient and unpleasant but more easily remedied—a Havahart trap, a relocation to a nearby nature preserve, a single hole to fill. Instead he said exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the Year of the Rat are shrewd, fickle, creative, thrifty, and wise. They are a litter of cowardly, hot-tempered, picky musicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and writers. They may be plagued by a weak constitution and prone to head colds and other viruses. I was born in the Year of the Rat and, coincidentally or not, possess many of these characteristics. Though I’ve always considered myself hardy, my partial hearing loss—the cause of which doctors were yet unable to explain—suggested otherwise.
Each year of the Chinese zodiac has a corresponding element. Mine is water, which makes me a water rat. Water is an element of hiding and suggests an inability to choose something and stick to it. At times I’ve been true to my watery nature, having been accused of being unable to commit to a job, a person, a responsibility. My initial ambivalence about moving to Florida supported such accusations, and buying a house with J. was my attempt to act against type.
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.” He wore a utility belt below a belly like unproofed bread dough. As he walked, his belt jangled with keys, flashlight, laser pointer, measuring tape, Swiss Army knife. He sweated beyond what was socially acceptable, even by Florida standards.
I hadn’t heard them before, but it turned out other people had. J. confessed to noting some rustling when he’d been up late a few weeks earlier. And my brother said he’d heard something when he and my sister-in-law had stayed overnight. Earlier in my life I might have been surprised, angry even, to learn they’d withheld the truth, but by then I’d come to believe it was human nature to look away, to plead ignorance. That was precisely what I’d done for months when my ear had begun to alert me, persistently, that there was a problem.
“I’ll close up the entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Set traps, fog the attic.” The fogging, he assured me, was safe for humans and canines—so safe, in fact, that it wouldn’t even kill the rats. Instead it left behind a perfume they found intolerable, driving them away.
This was my introduction to the pest-control business, and over the next several months I discovered that exterminators each have their own predilections, their preferred baits and traps, their brands of flashlights and trash bags in which to dispose of their prey. I also learned that, along with sound machines promising to transmit high-frequency pitches detected only by vermin, fogging is a scam.
Criminal or immoral tricksters are called “dirty rats” or “rat finks,” but Rat Guy #1 didn’t strike me as either of these. For one of what would be many visits, he arrived with his octogenarian mother who had been “bored outta my gourd” and “wanted a look-about.” Our generally discriminating dog loved him. When his truck appeared in the driveway, Arrow wailed at the front door, anxious to be let outside to spastically run circles around the man with an excitement he rarely demonstrated for anyone else, including J. or me. This was the most persuasive argument in favor of trusting Rat Guy #1.
by Lenore Myka, The Sun | Read more:
Image: © Doug McMains
[ed. I had a rat problem in my last house. The constant rustling in the walls drove me crazy, day and night. After setting traps in the attic, I'd remove on average one, sometimes two dead ones every other day. They kept coming until I finally found their entry point - a small crack in the foundation the size of a quarter. I'd skipped it before because it just didn't look like something a rat could squeeze through. But that was it, and I eventually got them under control after barricading their front door. My friend Jerry in Texas had an even bigger problem. I forget if it was a warning light that kept turning on and off, or a hose leak or whatever, but the problems kept escalating until he finally took his car into the shop to have it checked out. That's when they discovered that a rat family had built a nest up inside the car frame, just behind the gas tank. Apparently they'd been there a long time, as evidenced by all the chewed wires, hoses, and other debris they found. The funny thing is that during the previous month or two after he'd started noticing these problems he'd driven over 700 miles between various states, many on bumpy, dusty backroads. Hard to imagine what that must have felt like for those guys, burrowed way up there in the undercarriage. Tough, scrappy little animals.]
[ed. I had a rat problem in my last house. The constant rustling in the walls drove me crazy, day and night. After setting traps in the attic, I'd remove on average one, sometimes two dead ones every other day. They kept coming until I finally found their entry point - a small crack in the foundation the size of a quarter. I'd skipped it before because it just didn't look like something a rat could squeeze through. But that was it, and I eventually got them under control after barricading their front door. My friend Jerry in Texas had an even bigger problem. I forget if it was a warning light that kept turning on and off, or a hose leak or whatever, but the problems kept escalating until he finally took his car into the shop to have it checked out. That's when they discovered that a rat family had built a nest up inside the car frame, just behind the gas tank. Apparently they'd been there a long time, as evidenced by all the chewed wires, hoses, and other debris they found. The funny thing is that during the previous month or two after he'd started noticing these problems he'd driven over 700 miles between various states, many on bumpy, dusty backroads. Hard to imagine what that must have felt like for those guys, burrowed way up there in the undercarriage. Tough, scrappy little animals.]
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
June 23, 1988: James Hansen Testified to Senate About Climate Change
Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. . . . the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for ‘clean coal.’ . . .The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. — James Hansen
Hansen was also arrested on this day in 2009 during a protest against mountaintop removal mining at Massey Energy Company.
Hansen has stated,
Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred. . . In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.
by Zinn Education Project | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. "According to science historian Spencer R. Weart, Hansen's testimony increased public awareness of climate change. According to Richard Besel of California Polytechnic State University, Hansen's testimony "was an important turning point in the history of global climate change." According to Timothy M. O'Donnell of the University of Mary Washington, Hansen's testimony was "pivotal," "ignited public discussion of global warming and moved the controversy from a largely scientific discussion to a full blown science policy debate," and marked "the official beginning of the global warming policy debate." According to Roger A. Pielke of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Hansen's "call to action" "elevated the subject of global warming and the specter of associated impacts such as more hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, to unprecedented levels of attention from the public, media, and policy makers." - Wikipedia.]
[ed. "According to science historian Spencer R. Weart, Hansen's testimony increased public awareness of climate change. According to Richard Besel of California Polytechnic State University, Hansen's testimony "was an important turning point in the history of global climate change." According to Timothy M. O'Donnell of the University of Mary Washington, Hansen's testimony was "pivotal," "ignited public discussion of global warming and moved the controversy from a largely scientific discussion to a full blown science policy debate," and marked "the official beginning of the global warming policy debate." According to Roger A. Pielke of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Hansen's "call to action" "elevated the subject of global warming and the specter of associated impacts such as more hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, to unprecedented levels of attention from the public, media, and policy makers." - Wikipedia.]
[ed. Which was all it took for climate change skeptics to spring into action, and here we are...]
Monday, June 22, 2026
The Modern Efficiency of Squid Fishing
How Japanese Fishermen Use Robots To Catch Billions Of Squid (IE).
Video: YouTube
[ed. For calamari lovers. Squid fishing has gotten pretty efficient these days (and they land some big ones!). I remember catching them at night with my brothers in Kona, to use as bait for over-night tuna fishing (Ika Shibi). We'd go a ways offshore, put out a parachute anchor, then turn on the floodlights to attract them to the boat. Soon there'd be hundreds of them darting in and out of the light, coming from nowhere, out in the middle of the ocean. Using a multi-pronged snagging jig we'd catch our needed supply in no time. Fun! But wierd too - being surrounded by darkness except for the lights illuminating a small circle around the boat. It felt like fishing in a swimming pool.]
Sunday, June 21, 2026
Slow Motion Disaster
Water in the Colorado River is dwindling to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and the seven states whose residents and farmers depend on the river can’t agree on a fair way to divide up what’s left.
Negotiations are going nowhere despite more than six months of ongoing talks, plus cajoling by the Trump administration, which twice gathered governors in hopes of a breakthrough that never came. States are already sniping at aspects of a water-use plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation is set to unveil this summer and impose later this year, and they’re threatening to sue each other over water deliveries, raising the prospects of prolonged legal battles just as Western states face demands to sharply reduce water use.
The river’s system of reservoirs and canals was designed for the climate and population of a century ago. It has strained to adapt to a declining water supply and enormous growth in communities in the river basin, despite improvements in efficiency that mean even booming cities are using less water than in the past. Water rights that may date back to the arrival of European settlers also complicate matters. And a year of extreme drought is making it even harder to decide how much each state can draw from the Colorado.
It is not for lack of effort.
“We have invested time, effort and money in trying to facilitate a multistate agreement,” Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in an interview this month, moments after signing a deal that could one day augment the basin’s supply using desalinated water from a plant in Carlsbad, Calif.
But a day later, Cameron told a conference of water experts in Boulder that states have repeatedly rejected proposals for compromise. He said he doesn’t expect any state to be pleased with the measures the federal government is expected to take to delay or prevent reservoirs from dropping to critical lows in the short term.
“I think we’ve succeeded in making everyone unhappy, and maybe making everyone mad,” he said.
About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.
But the states have been unable to agree upon water cuts that would reflect the new reality.
In the river’s lower basin — which includes growing urban areas in California, Arizona and Nevada; vast agricultural operations; and the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead — communities have agreed to significant reductions in recent years. A new proposal that the states are asking the federal government to consider would curtail use even more, but the lower basin states and tribal nations have asked upstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to cut back, too.
But anytime winter snowpack in the river’s headwaters is meager, the upper basin is forced to use less water, so those states have resisted committing to permanent annual water use cuts. While a 1922 compact divides the United States’ share of the river’s flow equally between the two basins, the less-populated upper basin consumes significantly less water each year than the lower basin.
The stalemate between the basins has deepened as the stakes rise. An existing water-use plan expired this winter, and the states missed key deadlines to agree on a new one, which must be in place by October to avoid chaos and confusion in water deliveries.
A mild winter and extreme spring heat left winter snowpack so depleted that Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the upper and lower basins, risked falling below levels critical for hydropower until federal officials began emergency actions to shift water around and keep dams generating electricity. [...]
So far, Trump administration officials have resisted imposing any plan unilaterally, though Cameron said the bureau had “not been passive.” It has offered $454 million for water conservation projects across the basin, using money left over from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under President Joe Biden and included $4 billion for drought response in the West. Cameron said less than $100 million is left to help pay for more water savings.
“We have floated, three times, solutions that we thought represented something that the seven states could agree on,” Cameron said. “Turns out we were wrong.”
With the states unable to agree, the federal government is set to put new guidelines in place. Cameron said he expects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department includes the Reclamation Bureau, to release a plan in July to govern use of the river for the next decade. Before that plan becomes final, it would need approval from a White House that has so far not gotten very involved in Western water issues.
A draft plan released in January included a range of options, some of which would make significant cuts across the lower basin, where the federal government’s control of reservoirs gives it more power to cut off flows. The alternatives would force water shortages, mostly in the lower basin, based upon reservoir conditions. They include varying levels of cutbacks that would leave some risks of unplanned emergency water shortages in the lower basin.
Arizona is especially vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on the reservoirs and its relatively junior water rights.
As the talks stall, the threat of litigation is looming larger, even though negotiators have said they are hoping to avoid court battles that would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive and unpredictable. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, warned Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he would seek to block federal drought relief funds from any states that sue over Colorado River water.
In Arizona and Colorado, state officials have been readying lawyers and setting aside public funds for a legal fight over water. Earlier this year, television ads paid for by a coalition of Arizona water users warned that the state is “being targeted” with crippling cuts. Officials in both states said litigation was a real possibility.
In public comments submitted in response to the federal proposal, the states have hinted at contradictory legal interpretations of the 1922 compact, offering dueling arguments that both suggest that the Trump administration was at risk of violating that document. In dispute is whether the compact requires upper basin states to deliver a set amount of water downstream, regardless of conditions, or if the compact simply bars those upstream states from using more than they are officially allotted. [...]
Because the 1922 agreement is only about 1,700 words long, Entsminger suggested that the states might never agree on what exactly each of them is entitled to — and that was all the more reason for them to find common ground without resorting to litigation.
Negotiations are going nowhere despite more than six months of ongoing talks, plus cajoling by the Trump administration, which twice gathered governors in hopes of a breakthrough that never came. States are already sniping at aspects of a water-use plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation is set to unveil this summer and impose later this year, and they’re threatening to sue each other over water deliveries, raising the prospects of prolonged legal battles just as Western states face demands to sharply reduce water use.
It is not for lack of effort.
“We have invested time, effort and money in trying to facilitate a multistate agreement,” Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in an interview this month, moments after signing a deal that could one day augment the basin’s supply using desalinated water from a plant in Carlsbad, Calif.
But a day later, Cameron told a conference of water experts in Boulder that states have repeatedly rejected proposals for compromise. He said he doesn’t expect any state to be pleased with the measures the federal government is expected to take to delay or prevent reservoirs from dropping to critical lows in the short term.
“I think we’ve succeeded in making everyone unhappy, and maybe making everyone mad,” he said.
About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.
But the states have been unable to agree upon water cuts that would reflect the new reality.
In the river’s lower basin — which includes growing urban areas in California, Arizona and Nevada; vast agricultural operations; and the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead — communities have agreed to significant reductions in recent years. A new proposal that the states are asking the federal government to consider would curtail use even more, but the lower basin states and tribal nations have asked upstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to cut back, too.
But anytime winter snowpack in the river’s headwaters is meager, the upper basin is forced to use less water, so those states have resisted committing to permanent annual water use cuts. While a 1922 compact divides the United States’ share of the river’s flow equally between the two basins, the less-populated upper basin consumes significantly less water each year than the lower basin.
The stalemate between the basins has deepened as the stakes rise. An existing water-use plan expired this winter, and the states missed key deadlines to agree on a new one, which must be in place by October to avoid chaos and confusion in water deliveries.
A mild winter and extreme spring heat left winter snowpack so depleted that Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the upper and lower basins, risked falling below levels critical for hydropower until federal officials began emergency actions to shift water around and keep dams generating electricity. [...]
So far, Trump administration officials have resisted imposing any plan unilaterally, though Cameron said the bureau had “not been passive.” It has offered $454 million for water conservation projects across the basin, using money left over from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under President Joe Biden and included $4 billion for drought response in the West. Cameron said less than $100 million is left to help pay for more water savings.
“We have floated, three times, solutions that we thought represented something that the seven states could agree on,” Cameron said. “Turns out we were wrong.”
With the states unable to agree, the federal government is set to put new guidelines in place. Cameron said he expects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department includes the Reclamation Bureau, to release a plan in July to govern use of the river for the next decade. Before that plan becomes final, it would need approval from a White House that has so far not gotten very involved in Western water issues.
A draft plan released in January included a range of options, some of which would make significant cuts across the lower basin, where the federal government’s control of reservoirs gives it more power to cut off flows. The alternatives would force water shortages, mostly in the lower basin, based upon reservoir conditions. They include varying levels of cutbacks that would leave some risks of unplanned emergency water shortages in the lower basin.
Arizona is especially vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on the reservoirs and its relatively junior water rights.
As the talks stall, the threat of litigation is looming larger, even though negotiators have said they are hoping to avoid court battles that would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive and unpredictable. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, warned Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he would seek to block federal drought relief funds from any states that sue over Colorado River water.
In Arizona and Colorado, state officials have been readying lawyers and setting aside public funds for a legal fight over water. Earlier this year, television ads paid for by a coalition of Arizona water users warned that the state is “being targeted” with crippling cuts. Officials in both states said litigation was a real possibility.
In public comments submitted in response to the federal proposal, the states have hinted at contradictory legal interpretations of the 1922 compact, offering dueling arguments that both suggest that the Trump administration was at risk of violating that document. In dispute is whether the compact requires upper basin states to deliver a set amount of water downstream, regardless of conditions, or if the compact simply bars those upstream states from using more than they are officially allotted. [...]
Because the 1922 agreement is only about 1,700 words long, Entsminger suggested that the states might never agree on what exactly each of them is entitled to — and that was all the more reason for them to find common ground without resorting to litigation.
by Scott Dance, Seattle Times/NY Times | Read more:
Image:Chet Strange /The New York Times
[ed. For a fictional and nightmarish vision of what a full blown water fight between states might devolve into, see: The Water Knife. For a detailed historical account (along with all the back-stabbing and dirty dealing) that produced water allocations and the sprawling cities we see now in the West, see: Cadillac Desert.]
[ed. For a fictional and nightmarish vision of what a full blown water fight between states might devolve into, see: The Water Knife. For a detailed historical account (along with all the back-stabbing and dirty dealing) that produced water allocations and the sprawling cities we see now in the West, see: Cadillac Desert.]
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
Telescope Ranching
[ed. Awesome. An example of the intrinsic economic value of undisturbed natural environments. A few more: eco-tourism, hunting and fishing lodges/preserves, photo-safari's; air taxi operations, outfitters, etc. etc. Many people just assume that if land isn't somehow 'developed' it's just sitting there, worthless. Then there are even worse ideas: like putting up a border wall/fence with miles of security and search lights to be installed at Big Bend National Park.]
Big Bend National Park is known as one of the outstanding places in North America for stargazing. In fact, it has the least light pollution of any other national park unit in the lower 48 states.
Big Bend National Park is known as one of the outstanding places in North America for stargazing. In fact, it has the least light pollution of any other national park unit in the lower 48 states.
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