summertime fire and rain

Summertime

www.sierracountynewmexico.info

The absence of posts has not gone unnoticed. This short post will do little to excuse the long stretch of silence, but it must suffice. A "Year in Reflection," was in the works, but it was so slow-going it was abandoned before it hit this blog. In lieu of a year-in-review piece, the interviews I have completed are being coded for qualitative review and analysis. The data I have gathered is immense. It is finally coming together intellectually. My heart remains in the town, wandering around and wanting sweets from the Ppassion Pie, objecting to my professional objectivity. My head is finally wrapping around patterns, however, and soon I will present drafts sections of my dissertation. 

For most readers it will be unbelievably dull. Dissertations are created for a small select group of individuals, the last mighty hurdle before joining the ranks of the massively educated. Most dissertation drafts are presented as conference papers. I will blatantly display my attempts here for all to read. I will strive to write clearly and academically, a thing I have seen done. But it was done by the writers who line my top shelf of favorite texts, and I am not altogether convinced I am capable of doing such a thing. In the process, regardless, I will inform my small by devoted audience about place, place making, modernity, diaspora, history, theory, and all manner of academic and popular subjects.   

My writing desk, mouldering mounds of files and books, raw and transcribed interviews, and various sundry goods will be transported to Monticello next week, so the work of writing this dissertation can be finished even as I finish up my final few interviews. I could spend the next several years interviewing people from the town. What I make of all I have learned from others will be the subject of my monthly posts from this point forward.

On another note, as I think about water, water, water--this molecular miracle that runs through my dissertation, I finish this long over-due post with a brief but powerful article about our arid lands. The rains have come, lashing and tremendous in short bursts. The Silver Fire blanketed the town and region under heavy yellowed skies, laying low over 200 square miles, or 1140,00 acres. Although 80 percent contained, the month old fire made for unsettled citizens throughout the region and too much misery to calculate. The western wildfires in the past several years have taken lives and homes and country. Do they change how we think of the world? What we do in the world? Do they give us pause to reconsider how we live and the fragile ecosystems of the arid lands? And what about our fragile towns, and fragile selves?

 www.abqjournal.com

 

There is not a drought

http://www.ruidosonews.com/ruidoso-opinion_columnists/ci_23555598/there-is-not-drought

Jerry Ortiz y Pino/NM Senate, District 12

Posted:   06/27/2013 06:09:04 PM MDT

The interim legislative Water and Natural Resources Committee met in Santa Fe and heard updates on New Mexico's water situation so sobering that the usual back-slapping and good-natured ribbing with which most such gatherings conclude were noticeably muted. 

The litany of symptoms of our current plight wasn't what left most participants shaken last week. Rather, it was a reminder from the leader of a newly-formed drought subcommittee that a growing number of scientists suggest New Mexico's lack of rain does not necessarily mean we are in a drought-a temporary moisture shortfall that eventually corrects itself. 

Researchers point to evidence from the past thousand years that absence of rainfall is the norm. The past 50 years were the true aberration. In short, we may not see more rain for a very long time.

Since we've only been receiving 6 to 10 inches annually during this abnormally wet recent era, we should take steps immediately to deal with the implications of a prolonged period of 1 to 3 inches of rainfall per year.

All our water policy and planning is premised on that 6 to 10 inches figure. It forms the basis of multiple compact obligations to neighboring states, agreements with the federal government and promises to in-state industry, tribal governments, urban communities, farmers and ranchers. If that level of rain doesn't materialize, our margin of error is slim; we suffer serious cutbacks. And if we don't get moisture for two or more years in succession (like now), we deplete reserves and rapidly face catastrophe. 

There are many signs of the disaster our current policy plus two years of lower rainfall have produced in 2013:

Ranchers throughout the state have on average reduced the size of their herds by two-thirds, and   many have sold off all their animals under duress. 

Farmers who have been promised three acre feet of irrigation water will have to get by this year with three inches. This means many crops will fail, and others will have lower yield. 

There will be little to no pecan crop this year in the Mesilla Valley. The lack of irrigation water has forced orchardists to prune their trees back to the main trunk in an effort to save them.

Four lakes in this state have severely limited access. (The water level is so far below the boat ramps that they pose a genuine public safety hazard if anyone attempts a launch.) Elephant Butte, our iconic recreational reservoir, faces water levels lower than the year the dam was built over a century ago.  

Farmers in the Carlsbad Irrigation District are locked in conflict with other farmers upstream-not because of river flow overuse (there is no river flow), but because pumping wells north of the district has lowered the aquifer and drastically affected availability of water for Carlsbad irrigators.

A similar issue has prompted a formal lawsuit against our state by Texas. It contends farmers in the Mesilla Valley, who turned to well water as compensation for the lack of ditch water, are negatively impacting El Paso-area agriculture. If we lose that court case, the state of New Mexico could be compelled to pay damages as high as a billion dollars.

Tinder-dry conditions in our mountains and forests have closed most of them to visitors. The air is heavy with smoke and ash from numerous blazes already destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of vegetation. 

Albuquerque has seen 20 percent of its urban trees, its life-giving canopy, lost to lack of rainfall and restrictions on water use required over the last two years. 

And wildlife, desperate for food and water, will increasingly be forced to confront people in our foothill and suburban developments-with a resultant loss of life and limb for animals and occasionally people.

 All this is the product of two years of reduced rainfall. What if experts are correct and it's decades before we achieve the 6- to 10-inch levels again? How do we adjust to that frightening reality? How will Albuquerque, which is dependent on San Juan-Chama water rights purchased years ago, deal with a scenario in which the San Juan River Basin runs dry?

Photos of bone-dry Heron Lake and El Vado Reservoir circulated at the committee meeting were not comforting, to say the least. Water rights are only enforceable if there is water to own. A couple more years of thin Colorado snowpack like the last two will make our city's vaunted rights theoretical at best. It's clear that if we're to avoid the fate of earlier civilizations in this area that disappeared when rivers and springs dried up, we have to change our thinking and our policies.

We need revamped agriculture. Is New Mexico really an ideal place for cotton cultivation or dairies - both among our biggest agricultural crops, but both water-intensive?Perhaps if we receive 6 to10 inches of rain a year. But what if we live in a new era of 1 to 3 inches?We need to ask other hard questions. Is it wise to rely on unproven technology to bail us out? Does desalinization of brackish water from deep aquifers offer anything more than a temporary fix? Can we build a pipeline from the Mississippi Valley to move millions of acre feet uphill - and does that make economic, environmental or social sense?

Would systems for water recycling and reuse change the situation enough to justify the capital investments required? Is cloud seeding anything more than a pipe dream? Perhaps most crucially, can a New Mexico with 1 to 3 inches of annual rainfall for the foreseeable future sustain even its current population-let alone a growing one?Water, our most precious natural resource, must be kept high on the agenda of our state policy-makers. Further, we ought to demand answers from the candidates in next year's state elections.

Anyone who aspires to be governor for the next four years will face no bigger challenge New Mexico's water policy problems. Those alone may be the key to making a choice among the candidates.We haven't seen leadership on this front from Gov. Susana Martinez so far. Has she finally decided on a direction she wants to take us? Do any of her challengers have more than platitudes to offer? If we don't demand answers-if we are too unrealistic or too politically paralyzed to act decisively-the inexorable processes of nature will continue, and we will simply resign ourselves to becoming their victims.

The Anasazi left us important advice: Pray for rain, of course. But as a people, act as if the answer to those prayers won't arrive for a hundred years.