Wednesday July 29, 2026
Chaco Canyon Public Comment
I have started the practice of submitting public comments on contentious agency proposals, as I shared earlier with my comment on proposed changes by the Office of Management and Budget to the federal funding process . Yesterday I submitted another comment, this time on a plan by the Bureau of Land Management to revoke protections adopted during the Biden administration for a 10-mile buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. This plan would open this area to oil, gas, and mineral extraction. Here is a good overview of the controversy.
As I did with the OMB proposal, I am sharing the text of my comment below.
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I strongly oppose the proposed revocation of Public Land Order 7923, the public lands withdrawal surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This proposed revocation is described in the July 2026 BLM environmental assessment document DOI-BLM-NM-F010-2026-0002-EA, hereafter referred to as the BLM document.
The Chaco Canyon landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has outstanding cultural and natural value to humanity as a whole. It is one of only 23 such sites in the United States. In 1972 the United States was the first to ratify the international treaty to preserve such sites for humanity. The Chaco Canyon cultural landscape extends well beyond the boundaries of the National Historical Park (NHP). It is a landscape sacred to the Pueblo peoples who live in the area. According to the BLM document, there are at least 145 traditional cultural properties including 9 great houses within the 10 mile buffer surrounding the NHP.
The BLM document itself states that “the Pueblo tribes view the Chacoan landscape as an integrated cultural system spanning northwest New Mexico and beyond, not a collection of isolated sites. They see its network of roads and interconnected communities as reflective of a society that thrived through regional connections rather than isolation…Maintaining this landscape is considered important by the Pueblo tribes for its cultural and historical integrity.” (Page 28).
The proposed revocation has been a travesty of public process. In April 2026 BLM opened a public scoping period for only seven days. This was entirely online with no in-person meetings. Despite the short window, BLM received over 100,000 comments, but Appendix E of the BLM document intentionally omits any summary of the content of these comments. The window to comment on the present BLM document is almost as short, only 14 days.
This dismissal of public input contrasts strikingly with the process that led to the issuance of PLO 7923 in 2023, which took a year-and-a-half with eight public meetings and a 120-day public comment period which elicited over 110,000 comments, all of which followed a decade of public engagement by Tribal groups such as the All Pueblo Council of Governors.
There is no justification in the BLM document for overturning this extended public process that led to the creation of PLO 7923, other than referring vaguely to the executive orders EO 14241 and SO 3418. By the analysis presented in the BLM document, the economic benefits of oil, gas, and mineral development within the NHP 10-mile buffer would be extremely modest. The analysis estimates that only 14 jobs would be created across the four county region over a twenty-year period.
But the BLM document fails to analyze possible economic losses to the region that might result from reduced visitation to Chaco Culture NHP as a result of destruction of the buffer lands. As an example, Chaco Culture NHP is renowned as a dark sky site for public astronomy. (See the Chaco Culture NHP webpage at https://www.nps.gov/chcu/planyourvisit/nightsky.htm.) The BLM document acknowledges (Appendix C, AIB-11) the potential for increased sky glow as a result of development of the buffer zone. Brighter skies means less reason for amateur astronomers to visit the NHP. More generally, the failure to study impacts to the recreational economy of the region as a result of buffer zone development is a substantial weakness of the BLM economic analysis.
The cultural landscape surrounding Chaco Canyon dating back at least 1200 years is a treasure for all Americans. Any development in the vicinity would irrevocably disrupt the integrity of the landscape, all for a few dollars worth of energy resources seized in an unethical affront to the public engagement process. I urge BLM to keep Public Land Order 7923 as it stands.
Tuesday July 28, 2026
In Praise of Public Transport
A friend of mine is flying to Germany today. We met at the Mexican restaurant kitty-corner from the railway station for lunch before she left. It’s now possible to get to San Francisco International Airport by taking the train from Davis to Richmond, switching to BART there and boarding a subway train that stops basically inside the international terminal.
Resources for public transport are always under tremendous stress. Improvements tend not to be lucrative for the local governments that implement them, but they do improve the quality of life of the citizens they serve. I’ve driven others to and from SFO and it’s not a lot of fun; there is always a lot of traffic on the Bay Bridge. So much better to hop on a train, spare the air, spare the aggravation.
These are the kinds of factors that are brushed aside in the name of efficiency…
Monday July 27, 2026
Soccer Cultures of the United States
I recently watched a video on How can MLS become an elite league?. The discussion touched on the different soccer cultures in the United States. One of the discussants, Paul Tenorio, always responds to the question of “Will soccer make it in America?” with the assertion that soccer has made it in America, it is just very bifurcated, with many islands of soccer interest. This got me to try to enumerate the various soccer cultures in the United States. Researching this took me to some marketing literature which was helpful, but marketing clusters aren’t quite the same thing as cultures, which I will not very rigorously define as nexuses of activity and knowledge. Anyway, here’s my list. People can and often are members of several of these.
- Heritage soccer fans. These are subdivided into Latin American heritage soccer fans and European heritage soccer fans. These are people who grew up in environments where soccer was a dominant sport and they picked up their fandom from family, friends, or local traditions.
- World culture sponges. These are sports followers who at some point learn that soccer is the global game and start to absorb all that culture — the famous players, the teams, the geography, the history.
- Youth soccer culture. This is subdivided into children’s recreational soccer and elite youth club soccer. This includes both the youth participants and the parents who are organizing their activities.
- College soccer culture. These include both the players on college teams as well as the students and community members who go to their games.
- Local fandoms. These are people that get drawn into the fanbase for a nearby team. Think Portland Timbers or Seattle Sounders.
- Women’s soccer fans. These are people who are drawn to the dominance of US women’s soccer internationally and at the league level and appreciate its importance to youth and college women’s sports.
- Gen Z soccer fans. They tend to learn about soccer through global social media and video games (e.g. EA Sports) and often are fans of charismatic players rather than of teams.
- Multi-sports soccer fans. They follow lots of American sports but have been drawn into soccer because of events like the arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami in 2023 and now the 2026 World Cup.
- Long-time American soccer inhabitants. People for whom soccer has been huge in the course of their life. They often have played or play it at an amateur or professional level, and keenly track the development of the USMNT, USWNT, MLS, NWSL, USL, and so on.
Sunday July 26, 2026
Test Knit
Nimble Needles is the website of a German knitter named Norman. He is a brilliant teacher and I’ve learned a lot from him over the time I’ve been following him on YouTube. So when he asked for volunteers to knit a sample sock for an upcoming class and time themselves, I signed up.
Socks are divided into five parts: the cuff and leg, the heel, the gusset, the foot/instep, and the toe. Since the cuff, leg and foot lengths can all be altered by how long they are, the sample just has to contain these five pieces. I think Norman was hoping for an upper time limit of 1.5 hours; I did this in an hour and 37 minutes. I’m not a slow knitter and I have a lot of experience knitting socks, but I was watching a show while I knit this which might have slowed me down. Anyway, I hope the data is useful to him.
Saturday July 25, 2026
Boxcars
. There is a line of the California Northern Railroad that runs north-south behind the Davis Food Co-op near our house. I often like photographing the freight cars that are parked on this line. For my urban sketch today I drew two of the boxcars linked together and parked near the food co-op.
Friday July 24, 2026
Thursday July 23, 2026
Scallions For Stirfry
At some point I learned that the combination of scallions, ginger, and garlic is considered the holy trinity of Chinese cooking. Maybe that is so — at any rate it is a key part of a favorite dish of ours that I made for lunch today, called deliciously spicy tofu. The recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey’s Eastern Vegetarian Cooking book (page 201): basically one takes the ginger, garlic, and scallions and stirfry them, adds tofu, and mix in a chili-bean sauce.
As a bonus, scallions, ginger, and garlic are all fun to sketch.
Wednesday July 22, 2026
Best Cat Toy
Predicting what toys your cat (or dog, or child) will like is the stuff of multi-billion dollar industries. I picked up this leather cord in Portland, Oregon over ten years ago and found it recently in my sewing box. It’s become the absolute favorite of both Esme and Winston, the latter sitting patiently above the toy box hoping one of us will pick it up and start throwing it around.
Tuesday July 21, 2026
The Old Church
I didn’t get a chance to do my urban sketch on Sunday until after the World Cup final. It was hot and I did not want to wander too far so I sketched the old Newman Catholic Center church at C and 5th. This church was declared structurally unsafe a few years ago and is unused; the congregants meet in newer buildings on the same grounds.
It was advantageous to sketch the church in the late afternoon because I had shade while I was sitting on my stool in a parking lot across the street. I think this is my favorite sketch I’ve done of the church.
Monday July 20, 2026
Rhoticity
As someone fascinated by language, I find my YouTube feed often contains sometimes quite arcane posts on linguistics. Dr. Geoff Lindsay is a linguist originally from Manchester. I just came across this piece on rhoticity (the pronunciation of the letter “r” in places other than before a vowel) in the northwest of England. There is a small slot that runs from Blackburn and Darwen (east of Preston) down to about Clitheroe, where “r” is (or was; this is a disappearing linguistic feature) pronounced in words like “park” (where most of England, including Lancashire, pronounces this word as “pahk” or even “pohk”). This small pocket is shown on the map at right. It’s worth noting that 60 years ago, a lot of the region and much of the West Country would have shown up as bright red, not yellow as it is now and shrinking.
Rhoticity in England is devalued, made fun of by us schoolkids who said “ooh arr ooh arr” in the 70s to mock a Somerset or Cornwall accent, slow country bumpkin Worzel-Gummidge types. But rhoticity in Blackburn is given high prestige in the community (according to the linguist interviewed by Lindsay); it’s fascinating.
My father was from Blackburn, but moved away to attend university in Leeds (still in the north but in Yorkshire on the other side of the Pennines), then to London as a management trainee and finally to California via the Antipodes. Growing up, I always imagined his rhoticity to be an American contamination, but it turns out it wasn’t. He did incorporate some American expressions into his speech which you’d expect, but “that’s a right load of tripe” and “I wouldn’t give a tin of beans for it” held on throughout his life.
I must have been eight or so when he said — discussing the first world war and his disgust with incompetent military personnel — that “Earl Haig was a butcher.” Rhotic “r” in Earl and butcher; the “but” in “butcher” pronounced like “but” the conjunction.