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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 thousand points of diversion in this one

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