Across the West, we have recently endured the winter that wasn’t. Here on the Western Slope, we worry about the diminishing Colorado River, but we also need to look at rivers on the other side of the Continental Divide.
For millennia, Pueblo peoples have carefully used water from the Rio Grande River to irrigate their soils, tend their crops and sustain their cultures. Now the lifeblood of New Mexico, the slender silver thread of water running down the middle of the state is in trouble. Because of climate change, overuse, over allocation and ongoing drought, the state will be 750,000-acre feet short of water within five decades.
The Rio Grande forms our international boundary with Mexico, and it begins in the Colorado snowpack above Creede where creeks and streams empty into the Rio Grande Reservoir. Drop by drop, water spills and splashes over rocks along U.S. Highway 160 as the river turns at Del Norte to make its way south to Albuquerque, Los Lunas, Belen, Socorro, Truth or Consequences and down to Las Cruces.
Along the way it has watered crops and provided life for the Pueblo villages of Taos, Okhay Owingeh, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, Santa Ana, Sandia and Isleta among others.
“The history of water planning in New Mexico is in some ways a history of exclusion,” said Phoebe Suina in Greenfiretimes.
Pueblo peoples always adjusted to the river’s ebbs and flows. Suina explains that life “was meant to be difficult. But that’s OK because it teaches us not to take things for granted and to always remember to be in balance.”
Today there is no balance. Pueblo peoples must teach other New Mexicans hard lessons about living with limited water supplies. When I recently visited Elephant Butte Reservoir, built between 1910 and 1916 to hold 2 million-acre-feet of water and to irrigate 178,000 acres of land in New Mexico and Texas, the water level was extremely low. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Reclamation Act, which began the 20th century orgy of dam building across the American West. The hubris was clear – we would irrigate, “reclaim,” the desert for small farmers. We would bring flowing water to the parched deserts of the Rincon, Mesilla and El Paso valleys so that agriculture would thrive.
Did we respect Native water rights or traditions? Were they even acknowledged? No. Pueblo peoples who had lived along the Rio Grande for centuries were never consulted about water rights or extensive diversions. The Spanish who had come after 1692 to the Rio Arriba or upper Rio Grande had built Acequia Madres or mother ditches to move water from creeks and streams. Hispano farmers irrigated small fields along laterals or narrow canals ceremonially cleaned once a year by local men as documented in William deBuys’ excellent book “River of Traps: A Village Life.” But the Reclamation Act was not about sustainable farming; it focused on industrial agriculture.
In the searing heat of June in southern New Mexico, I looked down at the top of the largest dam in the state at Elephant Butte, dedicated Oct. 19, 1916. Then I looked north and I saw the rock outcropping that Anglo pioneers thought resembled an elephant. Water lapped low edges of the butte. From its height in 1942, the reservoir is now only 8.8% full. In the fall, the bed of the Rio Grande in Las Cruces is deep sand. All the water has been siphoned off.
“If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water,” scientist Loren Eiseley said.
Luna Leopold puts it in a less poetic way. He said: “Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children’s lifetime.”
Our bodies are 60% water, and yet in the arid Southwest we waste it on lawns and golf courses. Twenty-five years ago, the Rio Grande River, headed for the Gulf of Mexico, failed to reach the sea despite pleadings of the 1991 International Boundary & Water Commission.
Fish suffer, too. The Rio Grande Silvery Minnow, once abundant in the Rio Grande, the Chama, the Pecos and the lower Jemez River, has seen its habitat greatly reduced. Flood plains, side channels, small pools, slow eddies and all places for fish breeding grounds are diminished. The species does not need large quantities of water. It’s a minnow after all, but it does need a continual flow.
According to the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Wildlife Notes, “Now, with habitat degradation, the minnow’s floating eggs have become its Achilles heel. They often drift down the Rio Grande into the deep, inhospitable and predator-laden waters of Elephant Butte Reservoir.”
Listed on the Endangered Species List in 1994, Hybognathus amarus is the last of a group of endemic native minnows that originally swam in the Rio Grande.
An interpretive sign states, “The four other species no longer exist there; two of them no longer exist anywhere.”
As it gets hotter, we need more shade. So do native fish species adapted over millions of years to low, cool pools shaded by cottonwood trees. Rio Grande cottonwoods, a subspecies of the plains or prairie cottonwoods, are not doing well either because they need floods to dampen their deep roots. Now there are no floods and less and less shade within the Rio Grande riparian corridor. The largest tracts of cottonwoods are in central New Mexico from Espanola to Belen.
I visited the Biopark in Albuquerque to study native fish in the state and along the Rio Grande. I learned that most native fish are not doing well. At the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park, our guide spoke about fewer and fewer cottonwood trees and retreating bosques.
As the Rio Grande River corridor dries out and water is sucked up by invasive plants, drought now contributes to fire danger. As our tour group walked down to the river, we encountered large, bizarre metal structures like children’s jacks but much bigger and wrapped with steel cables to hold them in place. The goal of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been to keep the river in its straight north-south channel when rivers naturally wander across their flood plain restoring bosques and giving water to infant cottonwood trees.
“Channelization, levees to protect communities, impoundments to store water for irrigation purposes – that all changes the river,” said Glenn Harper, who works for Santa Ana Pueblo.
If summers are hotter because of climate change, winters are shorter. Our snowpack is melting two weeks sooner. Peak water flows could arrive as much as a month earlier, dramatically impacting agriculture.
Wildlife refuges along the Rio Grande include Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge and Bosque del Apache. We need the bosques or wetland areas for river resilience. The Rio Grande is, after all, one of the longest rivers in North America, and it provides drinking water and irrigation for millions of people and thousands of farmers. Managing the river has sparked lawsuits for decades. Colorado, New Mexico and Texas still dispute their 1938 river compact.
In Spanish, agua es vida – or water is life – yet “losses of current water-use levels will dramatically and negatively affect communities and environments across the region,” according to academic experts.
We need to listen to our Pueblo Indian neighbors and perhaps talk to a Silvery Minnow or two. If they survive, so will we.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
