You may have noticed in the midst of the heat, that even though the monsoons came early this year, the land is pretty dry. The Rio Grande stopped running past Albuquerque quite a while ago. EBID will stop delivering its meager allotment of 4 inches per acre of water to its members today. Think of that, no more surface water for irrigation this year. Until Spring next year, all the millions of gallons of water used for irrigation will come from the ground, never to be replenished. If you haven’t yet noticed, we are in severe drought. In fact, southern New Mexico has been in drought for 26 years, even longer if you count the drought in the late 90s that broke for a year or so. Yet, we’re still living from day to day as we have always lived as if there were no crisis at all, as long as the tapwater keeps flowing, gardening, pressure washing, keeping our favorite trees alive, whatever.
But the crisis is not nature’s doing, which is what we seem to think when we talk about the super el niño or about the drought. It is our doing. The first complete study of water use in the whole Rio Grande/Rio Bravo basin from Colorado to Mexico shows that the long term cause of our crisis is our over-consumption: Richter, et al. “Overconsumption Gravely Threatens Water Security in the Binational Rio Grande-Rio Bravo Basin,” https://rdcu.be/fq52o. Click that link and take a look at our historical interaction with the arid climate of New Mexico. It’s a story of how to create a crisis.
So, we live in the desert but act as if we don’t. We don’t seem (at least by our actions) to appreciate this red, mineral rich, sculptured land. Instead, we act as if we imagine how nice it would be to sit in the cool shade of a tree looking across a fuzzy green vista.
Whatever the reasons for our over-consumption, it can’t go on. And, the first step back from the brink is the settlement of the Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado suit. See https://sierracountycitizen.org/what-you-need-to-know-june-5-2025-texas-v-new-mexico-and-colorado/; Supreme Court decides Texas v. NM – Sierra County Citizen; and Texas v. NM, going forward – Sierra County Citizen, where I discuss various aspects of the case in relation to Copper Flat Mine.
The settlement is an in-your-face moment of our over-consumption. For years, we — you and I — in the Lower Rio Grande Basin (which stretches from Elephant Butte to Texas and Mexico) have been using water that belongs to Texas and Mexico. I’m speaking not just about river water but groundwater, because along the river, groundwater is connected to the river flow. That means municipalities that don’t fix their leaking systems. It means commissions that push development, which always require more water both inherently in what is developed and in population growth. And that means us individually happily pursuing a life style that requires more and more water.
It all turns out to have been theft, grand larceny by the size of it. The settlement requires us to pay back that overuse and conduct our affairs (your and my water use in the future) so that we don’t do it again.
At this moment, we don’t know how to do that, but we do know that if we don’t do it, the penalties are set and severe. Major players are negotiating that now, and they have till October to agree to a plan. If the players don’t decide on something, the state must step in. The state’s only recourse is the control of water rights. So, right now, all water rights are up in the air.
Shortage of water is one crisis we are in. With the settlement of the suit, there is a shortage of water rights. That is a second crisis we will be living in. Ironically, while we were individually a major cause of these crises, individually we can’t solve the problem directly. Individually putting in water saving showers and toilets will do nothing to abate the structural crises we have created.
Only as citizens, as members of the social and political groups that underpin government and non-government associations, can we do something to engage with the structural problem.
If you are interested in what that might be like, I recommend you register to join a workshop on the consequences of the settlement with Nat Chakares, the General Counsel for the State Engineer, and Norm Gaume, former director of the Interstate Stream Commission. Go to this link: Workshop: Lower Rio Grande Settlement – Facts and Fictions – New Mexico Water Advocates (it’s the New Mexico Water Advocates’ website). There you will find a description of the workshop, information as to time and place, and a button to click in order to register to get a zoom link. Mark that on your calendars: July 23rd at 6:30 pm.
Let me give you one example of how unwittingly we use ever more water. In the good, old days, people opened up their adobe houses at night to cool them down and then closed them up to keep the heat out. Ranchers often had screened in porches where they slept at night. But then in the 30s, almost a hundred years ago, swamp coolers were being manufactured and sold in the southwest. That’s progress and development that directly translated into water consumption.
The next step you all know is refrigerated air conditioning, which is so ubiquitous now that many people don’t even know how to use a swamp cooler, just turning them on without opening a door or window to let the air flow through, undermining the whole evaporative principle of cooling.
I have heard people defend air conditioning over swamp coolers by saying that they save water. That is an advertising hype. Manufacturing air conditioners can make more money than manufacturing swamp coolers because there are more and more complicated parts to refrigeration; so, development-wise, air conditioning is a preferable advancement. But saving water is not one of the features of air conditioning. To make the electrical energy that runs refrigeration units, electric companies boil water away to make steam to run generators, and that process takes enormous amounts of water, nationally more water than anything else we do. Our use of energy constantly rises, but whether we generate electrical energy with coal, gas, oil, or nuclear, water is consumed and its use rises correspondingly.
In this story, it’s not our comfort that is driving the increased use of water. It’s the profit drive for technologically new products, the constant need for industrial expansion, and the investment in development which creates and conditions — often with a pretense of betterment — our need for increasing comfort. All along this progression, water and other natural resources are consumed in greater and greater quantities.
Max, the link you provided for registration to the workshop did not work for me.
I used https://nmwateradvocates.org then clicked on the registration link there.
Thanks for the info
Thank you, Deb. I fixed it. Stupid of me: the link I put in went to my email where i got notification of the workshop.