Silt, sand and sediment are choking the Rio Grande, creating islands and broad banks of exotic vegetation that are slowing the water flow of the river. Bill Wellman, superintendent of the Big Bend National Park is working to implement natural methods to clear the intrusions and help claim what is left of this once great river.
Projecting Power Point slides on the screen during his lecture to the Sierra Club last week, Wellman compared a 1955 photograph of a vegetation free and clearly channeled Rio Grande at the mouth of the Santa Helena Canyon to a recent shot of the same place, where a small green forest of non-native Salt Cedar and Giant Cane grew over and around an easy sloped, slightly trickling Rio Grande.
“The Rio Grande is flowing at 1/6th of historical levels,” Wellman said. “The river is unable to move the silt, sand and sediment.”
“We’ve had an 8 1/2 foot build up of silt since 1991,” Wellman said.
Salt Cedar also known as Tamarisk and the Giant Cane, are non-native exotic plants that act as sediment traps.
“The river banks have become extremely stabilized by the exotic vegetation,” Wellman said.
The clogging of the river essentially slows the flow, eliminating the braided nature of the old river, sometimes creating a myriad of channels that eventually end stagnate, sometimes a single deeper channel, and sometimes forcing it underground. There are places between Fort Quitman and the Rio Conchos where the river does not flow at all.
As the population in the west boomed both in the USA and Mexico the demand for hydro-electric power and water also increased. Two major dams were completed in 1916: Elephant Butte in New Mexico on the Rio Grande and La Boquilla in Chihuahua on the Rio Conchos, a river that flows into the Rio Grande at Ojinaga. Today the dams are a major part of the slow-flowing Rio Grande problem, each taking billions of gallons of water out of the confluence each year.
The domestic and industrial water needs of the booming two million plus population of the El Paso-Juarez metropolitan area is another factor endangering the river.
A third problem is the farming below El Paso-Juarez in the Juarez Valley where water thirsty Pecan groves and onion farms stay wet with flood irrigation systems. The Rio Grande at this point looks more like one of the many skinny irrigation canals zig-zagging through-out the area.
“The question is, what can we do with what’s left of the river?” Wellman asked.
“Dam operators like steady flows,” Wellman said. “We’re having conversations with people who control the river’s flow, trying to get them to mimic something closer to the natural flow of the river. We need major releases to coincide with the monsoons – so we can move silt. Not the steady trickle they’re giving us now.”
“Our compacts with Mexico specify a certain quantity of water but give no time constraints,” Wellman said.
Doing what he can politically upriver is one thing but closer to home at the Big Bend, Wellman is focusing on the water-guzzling, sediment-trapping intruders; Salt Cedar and the Giant Cane.
“We can chop down the Salt Cedar and the Giant Cane but its expensive and takes a long time,” Wellman said.
The new attack plan for the Salt Cedar is to release the Salt Cedar Beetle, an insect found in Kazakhstan and the surrounding Central Asian region.
They hope to obtain an 85 per cent control factor on the tree utilizing the beetle’s healthy appetite for the tree’s leaves.
“These beetles grow exponentially and once they eat most of the trees, most will die,” Wellman said. “They will almost starve to death before they’ll eat anything else.”
The Parks Service presently have the beetles in cages along release sites on the river. They expect to release them into the wild in early fall.
“It may take five or ten years for the beetles to do their job,” Wellman said.
Controlling the Giant Cane is almost a bigger problem according to Wellman.
In the past, burning the Giant Cane and then treating the reduced biomass with herbicide was one way of getting rid of the cane. An old fashion method, recently done at a national heritage site near Yuma, AZ., produced “excellent results,” according to Wellman, but the labor-intensive, shovel-dig operation was very expensive.
Bulldozing is another option, however, Wellman explained, “Bulldozing is more manipulative than we like to do in a national park.”
“Ideally, we want to use the river as our bulldozer,” Wellman said.
“Giant Reed doesn’t have the roots that the Tamarisk has,” Wellman said. “If we can get the flow higher, cave in the banks, we can get it down river.”
The Rio Grande like most rivers in the western USA are puny compared to their former size, before the mass migration toward the Pacific that all started shortly after the Civil War when the telegraph and railroad lines connected east with west. Today we are left with remnants. Restoration to former glories, except in certain places, is almost impossible. What do we do with what we have left is key, and people like Bill Wellman will continue to seek the answers.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Forgotten River
The Forgotten River
Twenty-five miles west of a snow-covered Chinati Peak, where the pavement ends for Texas Highway 170, near Candaleria, a buzzard circled in the March sky. Its extended black wings with white trailing edges soared against a mountainous back drop – the Cerros Colorados on the Mexican side of a trickling Rio Grande.
Known as the Forgotten River in this reach of its journey to the Gulf of Mexico, the slim waters of the Rio Grande slither past one of three gauging stations set up between Fort Quitman and Presidio, a one hundred and eighty six mile stretch that showed signs of a bigger flow in its past. The breadth of the river at the Candalaria Gauge is no more than ten feet but the valley width here is probably a thousand. Its been a dry winter, but more importantly, El Paso and Juarez, with a combined population in excess of two million humans, lies 250 miles up stream and suck up nearly every precious molecule of water released from the stingy Elephant Butte Reservoir further upriver in New Mexico.
“The Rio Grande ends in El Paso,” Mike Hill, West Texas Regional Director of Texas Parks and Wildlife, said.
The Rio Grande starts in Colorado, absorbing the spring run-off of melting snow in the Southern Rockies near Silverton. It meanders toward New Mexico where in 1916 the Elephant Butte Dam was built five miles east of Truth or Consequences to provide hydro-electric energy and irrigation water. Under a recently revised agreement, the Elephant Butte Reservoir is required to release more water to Texas. But even under this new agreement, the Forgotten River is likely to remain forgotten and more ditch than river.
“It doesn’t start again until the Rio Conchos flows into it at Ojinaga,” Hill said.
The buzzard wings started to flap again. It seeks food and the next set of air currents to ride. It floats high above the river valley, steely eyed, combing the desert geography for the dead.
The Army Corp of Engineers reports that 101 arroyos feed the Forgotten River reach. Annual rainfall is said to be 14 inches but the closet weather station is in El Paso. The evaporation rate is high especially in the summer where temperatures bake over a hundred degrees for weeks straight and humidity, dried by west winds, can be as little a five per cent in the afternoons.
Salt Cedars also known as Tamarisk cover the rocky valley in a swath of yellow-green. The tree imported from Asia in the 19th century as an ornamental plant and spread nationwide by government programs to contain stream erosion, now devastates the native Cottonwood and Desert Willow trees along the Forgotten River. It’s a thirsty tree too, guzzling water at perhaps twice that of a native.
“The Tamarisk changes the PH of the soil,” Hill said. “It changes the ecosystem. The only way out may be fire or the beetle.”
The salt cedar has no natural predators in the area and so its growth goes unchecked. But the Crete Beetle from Khazakstan has shown promising signs that it can slow the growth of the intrusive tree. Thousands of these beetles are being released into the Forgotten River this year.
“It’ll take three years to get hard results on the beetle’s progress,” Hill said.
More buzzards join the hunting circle above. They swoop and pull up, riding waves of air like a giant roller coaster in the sky.
Farmers on both sides of the river in the fertile El Paso Valley divert water through a myriad of cement canals and flood irrigate their crops. Thirsty pecan groves and alfalfa hug the river on the USA side and on the Mexican side, where labor is cheaper, truck crops such as cantaloupe and onions grow.
“The river is completely plumbed,” Hill said. “It’s one sick puppy.”
One of the goals of Texas Parks and Wildlife in the Big Bend region is to restore the state lands and watersheds to their pre-European form, “1491” as some refer to this condition. Bringing back the Rio Grande may be their biggest challenge.
Last week’s snow has melted from Chinati Peak. A little water has flowed down the San Antonio Valley and into the Forgotten River. Nature may be the only one who remembers.
Twenty-five miles west of a snow-covered Chinati Peak, where the pavement ends for Texas Highway 170, near Candaleria, a buzzard circled in the March sky. Its extended black wings with white trailing edges soared against a mountainous back drop – the Cerros Colorados on the Mexican side of a trickling Rio Grande.
Known as the Forgotten River in this reach of its journey to the Gulf of Mexico, the slim waters of the Rio Grande slither past one of three gauging stations set up between Fort Quitman and Presidio, a one hundred and eighty six mile stretch that showed signs of a bigger flow in its past. The breadth of the river at the Candalaria Gauge is no more than ten feet but the valley width here is probably a thousand. Its been a dry winter, but more importantly, El Paso and Juarez, with a combined population in excess of two million humans, lies 250 miles up stream and suck up nearly every precious molecule of water released from the stingy Elephant Butte Reservoir further upriver in New Mexico.
“The Rio Grande ends in El Paso,” Mike Hill, West Texas Regional Director of Texas Parks and Wildlife, said.
The Rio Grande starts in Colorado, absorbing the spring run-off of melting snow in the Southern Rockies near Silverton. It meanders toward New Mexico where in 1916 the Elephant Butte Dam was built five miles east of Truth or Consequences to provide hydro-electric energy and irrigation water. Under a recently revised agreement, the Elephant Butte Reservoir is required to release more water to Texas. But even under this new agreement, the Forgotten River is likely to remain forgotten and more ditch than river.
“It doesn’t start again until the Rio Conchos flows into it at Ojinaga,” Hill said.
The buzzard wings started to flap again. It seeks food and the next set of air currents to ride. It floats high above the river valley, steely eyed, combing the desert geography for the dead.
The Army Corp of Engineers reports that 101 arroyos feed the Forgotten River reach. Annual rainfall is said to be 14 inches but the closet weather station is in El Paso. The evaporation rate is high especially in the summer where temperatures bake over a hundred degrees for weeks straight and humidity, dried by west winds, can be as little a five per cent in the afternoons.
Salt Cedars also known as Tamarisk cover the rocky valley in a swath of yellow-green. The tree imported from Asia in the 19th century as an ornamental plant and spread nationwide by government programs to contain stream erosion, now devastates the native Cottonwood and Desert Willow trees along the Forgotten River. It’s a thirsty tree too, guzzling water at perhaps twice that of a native.
“The Tamarisk changes the PH of the soil,” Hill said. “It changes the ecosystem. The only way out may be fire or the beetle.”
The salt cedar has no natural predators in the area and so its growth goes unchecked. But the Crete Beetle from Khazakstan has shown promising signs that it can slow the growth of the intrusive tree. Thousands of these beetles are being released into the Forgotten River this year.
“It’ll take three years to get hard results on the beetle’s progress,” Hill said.
More buzzards join the hunting circle above. They swoop and pull up, riding waves of air like a giant roller coaster in the sky.
Farmers on both sides of the river in the fertile El Paso Valley divert water through a myriad of cement canals and flood irrigate their crops. Thirsty pecan groves and alfalfa hug the river on the USA side and on the Mexican side, where labor is cheaper, truck crops such as cantaloupe and onions grow.
“The river is completely plumbed,” Hill said. “It’s one sick puppy.”
One of the goals of Texas Parks and Wildlife in the Big Bend region is to restore the state lands and watersheds to their pre-European form, “1491” as some refer to this condition. Bringing back the Rio Grande may be their biggest challenge.
Last week’s snow has melted from Chinati Peak. A little water has flowed down the San Antonio Valley and into the Forgotten River. Nature may be the only one who remembers.
Alternative Fuel: Algae Anyone?
Algae, Anyone?
When Dr Rudolf Diesel built the first diesel motor in Germany in 1886, the fuel he used to power the engine was from pressed peanuts. His vision: grow plants to make fuel oil to make power. Over one hundred years later, and now at the end of cheap fossil fuel, that vision is becoming reality.
Dr Keith Klein, Professor of Industrial Technology at Sul Ross State University is part of that new energy reality.
After receiving a small research grant in 2003, Dr Klein began working on ways to convert energy from the sun. It started with a solar roof system and has evolved, with the help of a couple of more research grants, to a self-contained “sunlight collection system that processes and transports sunlight for the more efficient production of fuel and food with minimal water use.”
Dr Klein stood next to a giant steel structure on the wings of the IT building at the Sul Ross campus and held a stainless steel panel toward the mid-day sun. “Can you feel that?” he asked.
I jerked my arm back.
“Concentrated light,” he said. “Imagine thirty-seven suns of concentrated light.”
Ken Bairlipp, a collaborator on the project and former aviator and FAA flight instructor, stood to the side. “The French are already melting steel with the sun,” he said.
Klein leans against one of the twelve foot diameter parabola wheels that are secured to the ends of the thirty foot steel structure. “These hold the reflector panels. We can concentrate the reflection of each panel into one single beam of light.”
Klein swings his arm slowly across the sky. “A computer triggers two electric motors to swing the parabola, allowing the panels to follow the sun for maximum energy reflection”
“We direct the concentrated light to a single point and then refract it,” Bairlipp said.
This is where the algae comes in.
Plants use only the blue and red frequencies of light’s spectrum. Klein and Bairlipp plan to split the light and send the blue and red to a tube that contains a slurry of water and algae. The concentrated blue and red light turbo-charge the photosynthesis process creating a super-growth medium inside the sealed slurry tubes .The result: Tons of rich green algae.
So what?
“When the lipids are squeezed out of particular types of algae they can produce fifty per cent of their mass in vegetable oil,” Klein said.
Dr Diesel would be happy.
But its not over yet. The infrared light and the green light that were not used in the photosynthesis process are directed to other sources: the green light is sent to solar cells and the infrared heat boils water, both generating electricity. Each then can be used to power the computer and electric parabola motors making the system self-sufficient.
I want one in my back yard.
“How much?” I asked.
“We’ve got $1800 in it so far,” Klein said.
To feed the algae, CO2 and nutrients such as carbon, phosphates and other fertilizers are injected into the slurry pipeline, the growing medium.
“A lot of research is being done to find ways to use and recycle sewage and animal waste,” Bairlipp said. “We’re thinking, why not have one of these next to a sewage treatment plant or a feed lot.”
“Everything algae needs is in crap,” Klein said.
“The bio-gas released from the anaerobic digestion of sewage is 40-60 per cent methane,” Bairlipp said.
“You can run generators off methane and take CO2 out of the exhaust,” Klein said. “Algae requires a lot of CO2.”
The sun is straight over head now and there’s no wind. It’s hot and bright. We walk toward the building.
“One of my students asked, ‘What happens if it doesn’t work?’” Klein said, standing in the shade. “I told him, ‘That’s why we call it research.’”
When Dr Rudolf Diesel built the first diesel motor in Germany in 1886, the fuel he used to power the engine was from pressed peanuts. His vision: grow plants to make fuel oil to make power. Over one hundred years later, and now at the end of cheap fossil fuel, that vision is becoming reality.
Dr Keith Klein, Professor of Industrial Technology at Sul Ross State University is part of that new energy reality.
After receiving a small research grant in 2003, Dr Klein began working on ways to convert energy from the sun. It started with a solar roof system and has evolved, with the help of a couple of more research grants, to a self-contained “sunlight collection system that processes and transports sunlight for the more efficient production of fuel and food with minimal water use.”
Dr Klein stood next to a giant steel structure on the wings of the IT building at the Sul Ross campus and held a stainless steel panel toward the mid-day sun. “Can you feel that?” he asked.
I jerked my arm back.
“Concentrated light,” he said. “Imagine thirty-seven suns of concentrated light.”
Ken Bairlipp, a collaborator on the project and former aviator and FAA flight instructor, stood to the side. “The French are already melting steel with the sun,” he said.
Klein leans against one of the twelve foot diameter parabola wheels that are secured to the ends of the thirty foot steel structure. “These hold the reflector panels. We can concentrate the reflection of each panel into one single beam of light.”
Klein swings his arm slowly across the sky. “A computer triggers two electric motors to swing the parabola, allowing the panels to follow the sun for maximum energy reflection”
“We direct the concentrated light to a single point and then refract it,” Bairlipp said.
This is where the algae comes in.
Plants use only the blue and red frequencies of light’s spectrum. Klein and Bairlipp plan to split the light and send the blue and red to a tube that contains a slurry of water and algae. The concentrated blue and red light turbo-charge the photosynthesis process creating a super-growth medium inside the sealed slurry tubes .The result: Tons of rich green algae.
So what?
“When the lipids are squeezed out of particular types of algae they can produce fifty per cent of their mass in vegetable oil,” Klein said.
Dr Diesel would be happy.
But its not over yet. The infrared light and the green light that were not used in the photosynthesis process are directed to other sources: the green light is sent to solar cells and the infrared heat boils water, both generating electricity. Each then can be used to power the computer and electric parabola motors making the system self-sufficient.
I want one in my back yard.
“How much?” I asked.
“We’ve got $1800 in it so far,” Klein said.
To feed the algae, CO2 and nutrients such as carbon, phosphates and other fertilizers are injected into the slurry pipeline, the growing medium.
“A lot of research is being done to find ways to use and recycle sewage and animal waste,” Bairlipp said. “We’re thinking, why not have one of these next to a sewage treatment plant or a feed lot.”
“Everything algae needs is in crap,” Klein said.
“The bio-gas released from the anaerobic digestion of sewage is 40-60 per cent methane,” Bairlipp said.
“You can run generators off methane and take CO2 out of the exhaust,” Klein said. “Algae requires a lot of CO2.”
The sun is straight over head now and there’s no wind. It’s hot and bright. We walk toward the building.
“One of my students asked, ‘What happens if it doesn’t work?’” Klein said, standing in the shade. “I told him, ‘That’s why we call it research.’”
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
"The Havels" Review
Czeck celloists Irena Havlova and Vojtech Havel (The Havels) brought their story to Marfa last month, in a two part musical performance at the Goode-Crowley Theater that was part jazz, part sci-fi sound track woven together in the belly of a whale and laced with Indian gin-fizzes and the ghost of Ravi Shankar grinning in the background.
These were musicians at the top of their game. They’ve been playing together since 1985. They write their own stuff and its wholly other – unique, perfect maybe, because it has no comp. Cellos, Tibetan Bowls, piano, an occasional voice and candles – but mainly cellos, alto and tenor balanced in an unreal way – going places, in and out of sync, as needed.
The first act seemed to be their story: original attraction, fatal, screechy, mid- game unison, lover lows, grinding melodies, highs, abrupt stops, a chime, train-thunder and a bench-sharing, four-handed piano finale.
Their influence: notes we cannot hear? Or pre-perestroika poets of east Europe; them who was in and out of the Soviet orb – mad dictators, a country polluted politically, industrially, Transylvanian gypsy fiddlers like Csiszar, playwrights like Vaclav Havel. The Havels got freed-up in Prague somewhere along the line, perhaps only behind locked doors to experiment in the unclassified. But the breaking of the Berlin Wall and three journeys to India, set these poet/musicians on their way to international acclaim and to feather their cellos on high octane. Check out their “Little Blue Nothing” on YouTube.
I almost ran over Vojtech trying to park for a pre-performance party at the newest restaurant in town “____ “. Much like his music, he gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret. Was it Marfan drip oozing out of his expression or did he just not understand that pick-up trucks in Texas get the street and the sidewalks too under emergency U-turn conditions?
At the party I gave him a three minute apology and he gave me one of those looks again. After realizing at the theater that he was half the act, it all seemed to work out – interpretation is a funny thing. I still don’t know if he speaks English.
The second act included more chanted words from a language where I only understand the name of a ski resort; Banska Bystreka. A lot of Banska Bystreka and again tremendous powerfully conducted sounds wrapping together for our personal deconstruction.
You don’t get this everywhere. Ballroom Marfa has done it again.
These were musicians at the top of their game. They’ve been playing together since 1985. They write their own stuff and its wholly other – unique, perfect maybe, because it has no comp. Cellos, Tibetan Bowls, piano, an occasional voice and candles – but mainly cellos, alto and tenor balanced in an unreal way – going places, in and out of sync, as needed.
The first act seemed to be their story: original attraction, fatal, screechy, mid- game unison, lover lows, grinding melodies, highs, abrupt stops, a chime, train-thunder and a bench-sharing, four-handed piano finale.
Their influence: notes we cannot hear? Or pre-perestroika poets of east Europe; them who was in and out of the Soviet orb – mad dictators, a country polluted politically, industrially, Transylvanian gypsy fiddlers like Csiszar, playwrights like Vaclav Havel. The Havels got freed-up in Prague somewhere along the line, perhaps only behind locked doors to experiment in the unclassified. But the breaking of the Berlin Wall and three journeys to India, set these poet/musicians on their way to international acclaim and to feather their cellos on high octane. Check out their “Little Blue Nothing” on YouTube.
I almost ran over Vojtech trying to park for a pre-performance party at the newest restaurant in town “____ “. Much like his music, he gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret. Was it Marfan drip oozing out of his expression or did he just not understand that pick-up trucks in Texas get the street and the sidewalks too under emergency U-turn conditions?
At the party I gave him a three minute apology and he gave me one of those looks again. After realizing at the theater that he was half the act, it all seemed to work out – interpretation is a funny thing. I still don’t know if he speaks English.
The second act included more chanted words from a language where I only understand the name of a ski resort; Banska Bystreka. A lot of Banska Bystreka and again tremendous powerfully conducted sounds wrapping together for our personal deconstruction.
You don’t get this everywhere. Ballroom Marfa has done it again.
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