Wind Power in New Mexico

It's windy where the High Plains drop off

Driving through part of the 60-megawatt Caprock Wind Ranch south of San Jon

According to Wind Projects in New Mexico, current wind farms in the state produce 496 megawatts with 430 turbines, and future projects in and near NM will produce an additional 545 megawatts. New Mexico business and residential power consumers can choose to purchase electricity produced by wind power through the Public Service of New Mexico's "Sky Blue" program. As PNM says, "it's an easy and affordable way to demonstrate your commitment to our state and its environment."

Things I Didn’t Know about Prairie Dogs

Humans and prairie dogs are, quite simply, in competition for the same land. People want the land for growing crops, grazing cattle, and for new construction, and the prairie dogs get in the way of all of those things. You can read about the history of the relationship between prairie dogs and humans in Becoming a pest: Prairie dog ecology and the human economy in the Euroamerican West, by Susan Jones. Environmental History, Oct. 1999.

Prairie dog colonies used to stretch for miles. Prairie dogs are prairie restorationists, helping undo some of the damage caused by humans. They help conserve water by channeling rainwater back into the water table, and they help improve soil health. By 1960, the population had been reduced by perhaps 98% by disease, poisoning, shooting, and habitat destruction. I see this destruction every day, right down the street from my house, where new houses are being constructed right in the middle of prairie dog towns. I suppose from the contractor’s point of view the prairie dogs are tearing up the next house lot he plans to build on.

The Prairie Dog Coalition is “dedicated to the protection of imperiled prairie dogs and restoration of their ecosystem [by providing] information and advocacy training, [facilitating] communication and planning, and [promotion of] conservation projects.” They explain that prairie dogs are “keystone species,” supporting an entire ecosystem:

Nine species can be considered to be dependent on prairie dogs and their colonies; burrowing owl, black-footed ferret, mountain plover, ferruginous hawk, golden eagle, swift fox, horned lark, deer mouse and grasshopper mouse. Twenty more species benefit from opportunistic use of prairie dog colonies. Species that benefit from prairie dogs and the habitat they create include desert cottontails, lizards, prairie rattlesnakes, badgers, bald eagles, coyotes, vultures, prairie falcons, bison, pronghorn, mule deer, mourning doves, killdeer, barn swallows, red-tailed hawks, and harriers.

The Prairie Dog Coalition web site is loaded with information, resources (including the Prairie Dog Ecosystem Science Library , slide shows, etc.

For another web site with photos and general information: http://www.bobatkins.com/photos/PDZ1.HTM

The World Without Us

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
~Joni Mitchell(Big Yellow Taxi)


When I was a child I believed that pavement was permanent—that once that piece of earth was covered, it would never be seen again. Now that I’ve read Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us, I know that at least some of the things we do to the earth are not permanent.


Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. ~Yeats (The Second Coming)

Weisman asks the question—What would happen if humans suddenly disappeared everywhere?—then “lets us view our Earth’s current myriad stresses from the disarming vantage of a fantasy in which we supposedly no longer exist, yet somehow we get to watch what happens next.” (p. 277). He shows us what would eventually happen to our homes, our cities, domestic and wild animals, farmlands, the great wonders of the world, the places where we have scarred the face of the earth, our art, our music, and even our radio transmissions.

While reading about what the world be like without humans, I learned about a great number of subjects along the way:
-Rothamsted Research in England, where agricultural research has continued for over a hundred years
-The legacy of our dependence on plastics and petrochemicals
-The Mannahatta Project, which aims to “reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today.”
-The building of the Panama Canal; and the underground cities of Cappodicia in Turkey
-The invention of chemical fertilizers, elephant research, gene splicing—my personal list of things I learned about goes on and on.

Here are a few statements from the book that might interest you:
· Plastic debris may be “the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans” p.125
· 200 bacteria species call our bodies home
· Every four days the human population of the world rises by one million
· It has been estimated that humanity’s current total biomass wouldn’t fill the Grand Canyon


For animated sequences showing what would happen to a house and to New York City without the existence of humans, see the World Without Us web site at http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html.

To hear a National Public Radio interview with Weisman that includes call-in questions from radio listeners, go to "Imagining a World Without Humans" on Talk of the Nation with Ira Flatow, Sept. 7, 2007 at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14241572.

Some Amazing Statistics for Blog Action Day

If you are a blog fan, you probably read somewhere that October 15th was Blog Action Day—a day when as many Bloggers as possible wrote something about the environment. It was a project to get as many people as possible thinking about environmental issues, no matter what their interests. There were posts about ways to live greener, how to eat locally and why, and links to companies with environmentally friendly initiatives.

As you might expect, having so many different personalities expressing opinions on the same topic resulted in some unusual statements. One blogger suggested that we all drive the biggest cars possible because “If, as the theory says, our reliance on fossil fuels like petrol is the cause of the problem then it seems clear that the best way to end that reliance is to use it all up as fast as possible. Only then will car manufacturers consider it economically viable for their business to heavily invest in alternative fuels.”

When I published my environmental issue post on the Ogallala Aquifer the latest news was that almost 16,000 bloggers were taking part in the project. Here are the final numbers, which are even more impressive!

20,603 Blogs Participated
23,327 Blog Posts (search Google Blog Search to find them)
14,631,038 RSS Readers

See all the statistics for Blog Action Day at http://blogactionday.org/#1

Ogallala Aquifer

This is it—Today is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single issue on everybody’s mind—the environment. According to the Blog Action Day web site: Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future. Close to 16,000 blogs with over 12 million readers are participating. This would be a great day for you to contribute to an environmental charity. Start here. http://blogactionday.org/charities .
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I am certainly no water expert, but I hadn’t lived in the southwest for long before I decided I wanted to learn more about the subject. Newspaper articles often referred to the Ogallala Aquifer, so I wanted to find out what it was and why it was important. Here is what I’ve learned.

The Ogallala Aquifer is a vast deposit of water lying under eight states in the High Plains of the U.S.: South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. It is variously estimated to cover between 174,000 and 225,000 square miles, and lies between 50 and 300 feet below the surface. It was formed about 10 million years ago of gravelly soil that holds groundwater down below the water table. Experts believe that the aquifer contains roughly the amount of water contained by Lake Huron. Drawdown, or water use, of the aquifer occurs when agricultural, industrial, and residential users withdraw water for surface use. About 94% of the water is used for irrigation in areas that formerly were a part of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. Recharge, water going back into the aquifer, comes from rainwater and snowmelt, a slow process in this dry climate area. Since the 1970s it has been apparent that drawdown is greater than recharge, leading to an ongoing depletion of the aquifer.

Adding a whole new aspect to any water discussion is our search for alternative fuels. The biofuel ethanol seems like a great answer to our dependence on oil-producing nations. However, in order to produce one gallon of ethanol, three to six gallons of water are used. Even more water is used in growing the corn necessary to make the ethanol.

The states concerned wrestle with issues of water policy, conservation, sustainability, and ethics. Should the water be used now, or should policy dictate sustainability? Do we continue with current irrigation practices to grow the corn and wheat that our economy demands, or should we conserve for the future? Do we continue expansion of biofuel production at the cost of permanently damaging water resources?

For more information, research, and discussions about the Ogallala Aquifer, see the following links.

Conserving the Ogallala Aquifer. http://www.choicesmagazine.org/2003-1/2003-1-04.htm

Ogallala Aquifer and Ethanol - The Potential for Another Dust Bowl: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/09/21/ogallala-aquifer-and-ethanol-the-potential-for-another-dust-bo/

Ogallala Aquifer Depletion: http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/issues/society/ogallala/ogallala.html

Producing Ethanol Could Strain Resources: http://environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?tagID=1550

Water Encyclopedia: http://waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-Po/Ogallala-Aquifer.html

Water-Level Changes in the High Plains Aquifer, 1980-1999: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2001/fs-029-01/