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The greenest places I ever saw in two deployments were both river valleys, and both were where we did the most fighting. The Arghandab, west of Kandahar, runs through pomegranate orchards and grape rows that have been irrigated the same way for longer than anyone can date precisely — a green corridor maybe a mile wide, cut into a landscape that is otherwise the color of a manila folder in every direction to the horizon. The Tigris and the Euphrates do the same thing at a larg

I met David the day before I started drinking after years then months. That's not his name. I've changed it, and I've changed it to mine, because of what I'm about to tell you. He wanted a cigarette. I only had a vape, so I shared it. He was disheveled, standing out in that heat, and he talked — about his girl, about hating being in Española, about how you have to watch out for people here because people are no good. He had scratches on his neck. He told me she goes after him

I did the algebra without thinking about where it came from. I've used the word algorithm my whole life without knowing it's a Latinized mangling of al-Khwarizmi's name — the man whose book gave us the word "algebra" itself, working in Baghdad a thousand years before anyone in Rio Arriba County dug a ditch. I know the acequia outside my door by its Arabic root, as-sāqiya, carried through Al-Andalus into Castilian and then into this valley. I have neighbors whose grandmothers

Before the stone did know its name The Word did move, it had no frame No hand as yet had made it still No wall had learned to hold its will Then down it fell as waters fall Not sin, but weight, and but a call And matter closed her hand so tight And named the fist a throne of light A hand did reach and touch the stone It carved a mark upon the bone Yet never knew what it had caught Was never his, and never bought But Sophia stayed beneath the flood She moved as root beneath th

Picture a two-megawatt unit humming in the mechanical room of Santa Fe Community College. Not a building. A closed box the size of a delivery truck, tucked next to the boilers, running inference and video processing for the college's own systems and a handful of regional partners. Its cooling loop comes out the other side at fifty degrees Celsius, piped straight into the campus heating system. In August, the surplus heat runs a greenhouse instead. Net water consumption: close

The exhaust camshaft was one tooth out of time. That's the whole problem, mechanically speaking. One tooth, out of however many, on a chain that has to be exact or the engine bends its own valves against its own pistons the first time it turns over. I didn't know that when I started. I didn't know a lot of things when I started. I pulled a 2011 Prius apart in my driveway because nobody else would, and I found that out the hard way, staring at three timing marks that were supp

I came home from two weeks on the road with almost nothing left, and one night, alone, something happened to my seeing. I loved my senses that night. I mean that plainly — the way the air sat in the room, the weight of my own hands, the sounds a house makes when nobody else is in it. I loved them and I did not trust them. Both at once. The old suspicion was awake in me, the one the Gnostics wrote down eighteen centuries ago: that the senses are the furniture of a false world.

Understanding the Acequia System This week, I mapped every named acequia in my county. Not as a figure of speech. I pulled the State Engineer's public records — every point of diversion, every mapped ditch line — and joined them at a desk in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. The count came back: 544 named acequias, ditches, and laterals. More than four thousand diversions tied to those named lines. Forty-two land grants with water still moving through them. Over thirteen thousan

A citizen's framework for siting American AI infrastructure before the basins decide for us. The question Washington is asking is where do we put the data centers. The question Washington should be asking is what does the watershed permit. I write from the upper Rio Grande, where ditches older than the republic still move water by gravity and consent — so I have seen what it looks like when a watershed is asked. That inversion is the entire argument. Right now, private capita

Grant County did the policy work. The watershed still paid. On January twenty-seventh of this year, the Grant County Public Utility District board met in Ephrata, Washington, and unanimously approved a power purchase agreement with a Houston natural gas company called VoltaGrid. The agreement authorizes a twelve-megawatt on-site gas turbine to be installed on the Vantage Data Centers campus in Quincy, behind the customer's own meter, to serve a single hyperscale tenant until

What Washington decides about American water is being decided without us. A note from the Llano ditch. I walked the Llano ditch this spring. The water was moving the way water moves in a ditch that has been moving water for a long time — slowly, with the small turbulences that say this is alive, under cottonwoods that have been drinking from it longer than the United States has had a constitution. The mayordomo who walked part of it with me did not need a clipboard. He knew w

The Sacred Flow of Water This year, we face a drought in our watershed. Water is scarce, a precious resource slipping through our fingers. Yet, we are not the first to confront this challenge. For centuries, our acequia communities have managed water with wisdom. This wisdom is born from living on this land, from understanding that water is shared. It flows through all of us. How we use it upstream affects everyone downstream. Now, we have a chance to deepen that wisdom and h

The Essence of Farming Farming gave birth to civilization. And depending on how we farm, it can give birth to new ones. We carry a much bigger and older role in nature than we do in civilization. For most of human history, our relationship with the land wasn't a lifestyle choice — it was the source of meaning, rhythm, and identity. It was the job no one could take away. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that. The Illness of Civilization Civilization is sick. Not metaphorical