The days are getting deliciously longer. Delicate spring green is just beginning to show itself in the elms and cottonwoods. Daffodils in sunnier parts of gardens are making nascent moves upward. We’re all scratching and stretching and yawning, trying to wake up to life after COVID, or almost after, or so it seems — “Neanderthal” governors in Texas and Mississippi spurning masks and “opening up” their states without public health restrictions, notwithstanding.
And what do we find as we rub the quarantine dust from our eyes? A brave new world about to come apart at the seams.
COVID is far from over. Retro leaders in Brazil, for instance, are trying again to ignore a highly contagious new strain of the disease that could sweep through their country and up into North America and around the world. Democracy is whimpering as Republicans here are hell bent on passing racist voter suppression laws in state legislatures. Trumpian bull horns are blaring conspiratorial mayhem at every turn. Grief darkens the lives of COVID survivors in hundreds of thousands of American families stricken by the disease. Public schools all over the country are struggling, and in some places are struggling unto death. Millions of Americans are trying to keep going without paychecks while conservative politicians dither in partisan straitjackets. The whole world seems to be in emotional tatters from spending the last year in what must feel to most extroverts like solitary confinement.
And in New Mexico and the Southwest, we awaken to Spring in the depths of an ongoing drought and soon-to-be heat wave that has caused water planners in the Middle Rio Grande Valley to ask farmers to lay fallow as much of their land as they can this year to preserve water here and downstream. In fact, while COVID preoccupied our attention, as it still must if we hope to stay safe from its more contagious variants, climate change intensified so sharply that it’s come close to creating a different kind of landscape throughout our homeland here. It’s like burning toast in the toaster. You can still tell it came from bread, but it’s functionally useless.
As of last week, for instance, Drought.gov, a federal website, designated all of New Mexico as being “abnormally dry,” with 82 percent of the state in “extreme drought.” That includes Albuquerque, of course.
Since 2008, the Albuquerque metroplex has come to rely on water from the Colorado River moving through the San Juan Chama Drinking Water Project to keep our aquifer from shrinking ever faster. But last year and the beginning of this one, according to Andy Mueller, the Colorado River Conservation District general manager, the Colorado River has been hit by climate change “incredibly fast and incredibly hard.” Climate change, he said, “is drying out the headwaters… And everybody in the Colorado River Basin needs to be concerned.” Will Albuquerque get its full allotment of Colorado River water this year? It remains to be seen, but it’s doubtful. And Albuquerque’s lucky compared to California, Alaska and Arizona.
High Country News, in a startling piece on climate change in the West last November, reported that not only was February 2020 in California the driest on record, but Nome, Alaska, had the hottest May since records started being kept in the early twentieth century. The temperature in Phoenix last year was over 100 degrees for 145 days! By the end of October, Phoenix had suffered 197 heat-related deaths, nearly five times the yearly average since 2000. But it got only one inch of rain during its whole monsoon season from June through August, then no rain at all in September and October.
The Colorado River Compact, which governs the use of river water, expires in 2026 and is being renegotiated now. If the current drought follows precedent and worsens, some experts fear that the major urban centers in California, Nevada and Arizona could find themselves reducing their take of the Colorado River by as much as 40% or more in just thirty years. That would bring booming growth to a halt.
The great storage lakes on the Colorado, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are right now down to 40 percent capacity.
Unless the impossible happens, and climate change reverses itself, the Brave New World of Almost Post-COVID, will see us all in the West living very different lives and having vastly lower economic and quality of life expectations than we have even right now. The West could see a population exodus. The whole myth of “inevitable growth” has already flown out the window on dusty wings. Conservation and water rationing will become, in the not-too-distant future, as normal as masks and social distancing. And this will cause serious political and social unrest, as water scofflaws rage and gather in mobs to denounce “the hoax” of climate change.
As they used to say in the funny paper, “don’t look now,” but our Brave New World is already here. And COVID or no COVID, climate change is turning the landscape of the West, prosperous cities and all, into a dusty, down-at-the-heel old oven.
What’s to be done? Like masks and social distancing, the answer is pretty simple: Wake up, use less and try not to do anything that makes it worse. That might not seem like much, but that’s what we’ve got — short of becoming aggressive political savants and operatives who work with inspired diligence to drive climate change and pa ndemic deniers out of office and back to the caves from whence they came.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
You give me hope that this dark night of COVID will result in better stewardship of our earth and other behavioral changes that will make a difference to our future. Perhaps that will be some sort of “silver lining” in the face of so much loss. Reading your column every Monday morning always imbues my week with important things to think about… thank you for that.