There’s a numb helplessness, a kind of gray anesthetic fog that’s settling over the political landscape these days. National politics is a nightmare of clowns and distracted groundskeepers sweeping up what the Elephants leave behind. But the piles are getting too big and no one really knows what to do with them. And so there’s also a lot of bleak pondering going on.
In Albuquerque, we see a kind of aimlessness, the beginnings of a mayoral race that seems to have no issues attached to the candidates, at least as far as news coverage is concerned, and a governor’s race with no competing narratives so far, trying to build up steam for next year in perhaps the most desperate and bitter political climate we’ve seen in New Mexico.
So what might those competing narratives be? On the right, they’ll surely be a glossy kind of do-nothingism, anti-tax fundamentalism, a hostility to local business, a debunking of science and engineering, and a relentless effort to privatize public services.
And the left? The statewide election narrative of 2018 for progressives should have among its corner stones the two underlying necessities of our future – clean water and higher education.
Most everything else flows from them – including rethinking how to correct our chronic poverty and the social ills it causes, combatting our image as a bottom-of-the-barrel wasteland, battling the environmental injustices that afflict rural and urban New Mexicans alike, and moving on from our abysmal failure over at least the last eight years to support local business and stimulate our economy beyond the oil and gas boom and bust cycle of doom.
In a dry state, water is literally a matter life and death. In a poor state, higher education is literally the difference between being a dead end slum state or one that has prospects for future. Water and higher education lubricate the possible. They are the universal solvents, so to speak. Everything works better with them and worse without them. They are the riches that matter. They put the gold leaf pavilions of the squandering classes to shame.
Without clean water in some abundance and without a seriously funded higher education system, New Mexico will dry up, physically and intellectually. In our turbocharged information age, a state like ours will remain at the bottom of all the rankings if its leadership and perception of the future is seen as stupid, backward, and unenlightened.
That’s exactly what has happened to us since Governor Martinez vetoed state funding for higher education across the board after the legislative session ended two weeks ago. And even if she back-peddled last week saying, according to The New Mexican, that “we’re not going to not fund higher education,” her thoughtless political ham handedness smeared New Mexico’s national reputation in the worst way possible, portraying us as a Dog Patch place, a state where “pointy-headed intellectuals” are kept in their place, a state that’s as much a desert of the mind as it is an arid badlands.
Without a well-funded and well-respected system of higher education, our ability to think our way out of our problems, problems which demand all the brain power and imagination we can muster, will dry up and blow away along with the future of our children. When higher education is undermined, professionalism is undermined. Veto funds for higher education and you’re vetoing funds for cancer research, high-quality health care, nursing, rural doctoring, water research and conservation strategies, an equitable court system with respectable legal representation, county extension agencies, surveyors, agriculture modernization, alternative energy research, pharmacies staffed by New Mexicans, training world class engineers, architects and planners. You’re cutting funds for artists and musicians who contribute to the creative enlightenment of the state, historians who can give us perspective, teachers who nurture the future, and management and administrative professionals who help keep us moving ahead. And if you include community colleges, you’re vetoing funds for food service training, accounting, automotive and big machinery mechanics, and a host of other skills that give New Mexicans upward mobility in a down-and-out economic climate.
Damaging higher education, by neglect or malice, is really no different than purposefully sabotaging the state’s dams and bridges. When the intellectual infrastructure of a state starts to crumble because state government is run by myopic misers and political mud wrestlers, we find ourselves living in a world that no longer works.
If the Left in New Mexico can’t become the champion of innovative, aggressive water management, then we will be at the mercy of other states in the Southwest who understand that water comes under the category of first things first.
And when you look at states around us you see that New Mexico is behind the curve again, with no visionary, long-range statewide water plan using the latest data in place, and few people in power willing to even pronounce the most important words of our age – climate change. That’s where eight years of a far-right action vacuum has brought us. When it comes to drought and the pollution of our most precious resource, clean ground water, New Mexico is a sitting duck. We need leadership to harness our universities to help create a complete water picture for our state, including characterizations of all thirty or more ground water basins and all major pollution events.
Unlike most states in the Southwest who have been planning for drought and struggling to come up with viable water strategies for the future, New Mexico has been relatively adrift. But there have been important exceptions—urban conservation in much of the state, especially in Santa Fe, water banking projects like Albuquerque’s Bear Canyon Recharge program, desalination efforts in Alamogordo and “toilet to tap” water treatment in Cloudcroft, and a much needed aquifer mapping program and rural well monitoring project run by New Mexico Tech in conjuction with the New Mexico Rural Water Association and the state Environment Department. These are useful efforts. They show what can be done. The fear is, of course, that much, much more will be required for our survival in the future.
When it comes to the seven states that share the Colorado River, New Mexico seems the least active in caring for its water future. Granted we only get slightly more than three quarters of a million acre feet per year. That’s the second lowest, after Nevada, of the state allocations. But we are in the same drought situation, more or less, as our other peers in California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. And any of those states, down the road, with the help of the Department of Interior, could try to better their situation at our expense. And that also includes, Texas, which has a major lawsuit against us in the U.S. Supreme Court over the Rio Grande.
Our inactivity is grounded in our conviction, I think, that our low population has not compromised our reserves of fresh underground water. But Texas thinks we pump so much water from around the Rio Grande that we’ve diminished their allocation granted by the Rio Grande Compact. And we really know very little about how badly our underground water has been polluted by industrial, military, and mining waste. The only thing we’re sure of is that it has.
The Colorado River plays an important role in Albuquerque’s future and in the sustainability of Santa Fe and other towns. But competition for its shrinking abundance is getting fiercer. Utah is ready to use its huge allocation for the first time by importing 1.7 million acre feet into the Salt Lake City area via the Central Utah Project (CUP). Denver is planning aggressively for a growing population and more water use. The drought in Arizona has caused water planners to bank Colorado River Water, via the Central Arizona Project (CAP), for years. But drought in the Colorado Basin has Arizona water managers deeply concerned. The Colorado river is over-allocated to the tune of one million acre feet a year. That only spells disaster down the road for everyone.
All around us cities and states are frantically preparing for climate change triggered mega-drought. El Paso has the largest inland desalination plant in the world, and will soon have the largest toilet-to-tap treatment facility in the country. Los Angeles is experimenting with flood control by creating urban wetlands and recharging its aquifers, and going so far as to create large toilet-to-tap pilot projects. San Diego is desalinating ocean water in large quantities. New Mexico’s had eight years of doing zero about preparing for hard times.
Next year’s gubernatorial race needs a bring water, pollution, heat, and drought into public consciousness in a sustained and detailed way. We can’t hide from the future forever.
While so much depends on the Democrats having a good election next year to at least slow down the Trumpian juggernaut, both political parties appear to be disenchanting the majority of their voters – if low voter turn outs are any indication.
The national narratives of the Left and the Right are falling apart. Splintering and factionalism is the new reality. But in the Southwest, the focus is intense if still largely downplayed in public discourse. And much of it is about water and innovation, the environment and education, drought and the scholarship that can lead to new thinking, new imagining, and new hope.
Are we entering a new phase of American politics where local and regional issues overshadow grandiose national platitudes and international dumb shows? Is the new world ahead one where states’ rights are no longer a defensive concept, a means of blocking change, but have morphed into a dynamic environment for the evolution of a knew kind of politics based on a pragmatic consensus about fundamental issues of survival? We’ll find out next year.
The 2018 election season really must address climate change directly. As the National Geographic said about the “Seven things to know about climate change,” in its April 2017 edition: “1. The world is warming. 2. It’s because of us. 3. We’re sure. 4. Ice is melting fast. 5. Weather is wreaking havoc. 6. Species are being disrupted. 7. We can do something about it.” We need that kind of realism and positive outlook next year in New Mexico. We need a Left narrative that says that anything that hurts our water supply has to stop, including fracking. Anything that supplies us with clean energy and leaves our water alone we should embrace, including wind and solar power.
Anything that damages our ability to think and research clearly about the future – such as having a punitive and vindictive attitude toward higher education – has to be seen for what it is, petty, nasty, wasteful political revenge that endangers our survival in the Oven World ahead.
Let’s make next year’s election season a referendum on sanity and see if the Left really has a viable life of the mind anymore.
“We can do something about it.” That comment says it all. Making sure our voices are heard by our elected officials and voting for ones who believe in “doing something about it” is the way forward.