I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
That’s the intriguing notion Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck set out in a post on his personal blog over the weekend.
Fleck, who covers water issues pretty darn closely and always conscientiously for New Mexico’s largest newspaper, says that he’s heard repeatedly that the greatest single water source for the Rio Grande between Otowi in Los Alamos County and Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico comes from Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant.
Fleck acknowledges that he can’t prove it, but he notes that the flow from natural sources between Otowi and Elephant Butte is “largely ephemeral, flowing primarily during flash floods.” Because of that, Fleck writes, “I’ve got no reason to doubt the ‘biggest tributary in the middle Rio Grande’ thing.”
Fleck goes on to add:
“By my back-of-the-envelop calculation, the treatment plant’s contribution this time of year is upwards of 10 percent of the river’s flow downstream from this point.”
His blog post isn’t meant to evoke the yuck reflex among his readers as far as I can tell. It’s an opportunity to ask and weigh in on some important questions regarding water policy in arid settings like New Mexico. That subject has been much on his mind of late, Fleck writes, because he is following San Diego, Calif.’s project to clean up some of the city’s sewage and return it to the water system there.
In the case of the effluent released into the Rio Grande here in New Mexico, he notes the water is used by irrigators downstream of Albuquerque, ultimately ending up in Elephant Butte Reservoir and on to water users to the south.
One of the points in Fleck’s blog post seems to me that cleaning up the water from the sewage and putting it back into the water system reduces the Albuquerque area’s overall consumption. But that process doesn’t reduce the consumption to zero, and that’s the rub. There are still important questions consumers and policy makers have to ask themselves in this arid setting we call home.
