When Victory Isn’t a Possibility, Adapt. Above All, Don’t Despair.

In the wake of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) dire predictions earlier this month, a New York Times editorial by Auden Schendler and Andrew P. Jones had this headline: “Stopping Climate Change Is Hopeless. Let’s Do It.” The IPCC had given the people of our planet a mere dozen years, until 2030, to avoid the ultimate traumatic point of no return when CO2 levels would start to render much of our developed world uninhabitable.

With Hurricane Francis leaving the Georgia and the Carolina coasts in ruins, and Hurricane Michael all but wiping out the Florida Panhandle, all within less than a month, the IPCC predictions had a fateful certainty about them. “Let’s Do It,” the Times said, but do what? Change our little lives and become climate saints, all 9 billion of us, seemed to be the implication of their answer. Brains glazed over, despite the call to Quixotic arms.

And won’t all our efforts now be merely Quixotic gestures anyway? Actually not. Of course we should all spend as much political capital as we can lobbying to reduce the use of fossil fuels. And we must all do our little parts, from switching to low-energy light bulbs to turning off appliances when not in use, to buying hybrid cars if we can and electric ones if we have enough financial leeway to experiment.

Still, stopping climate change may be beyond us, but trying to adapt to it, in countless ways appropriate to countless endangered places, will never cease to be an option. Localities will have to take care of themselves, realizing that the trillions and trillions of dollars in oil, gas and coal still in the ground will be extracted and used to make a profit at the expense of the rest of us. We do have powerful examples of how localities can adapt, but equally horrendous examples of utter failure, chalked up to incompetence, malign indifference and public ignorance.

Among the most hopeful examples of adapting to climate change and beating all the odds is right here in the Southwest: the Texas town of El Paso, some 267 miles south of Albuquerque in the ever drier Chihuahuan Desert. And some of worst examples of failure are right here, too: Kirtland and Cannon Air Force Bases and Los Alamos and Sandia Scientific Laboratories.

El Paso shows us what can happen when you face up to reality, tell the truth, plan ahead for the long term and have the inspired leadership it takes to knock down obstacles and keep going no matter what.

The military industrial complex in New Mexico and, it’s safe to assume everywhere else, shows what happens when you fudge the truth, work various prestidigitations on public awareness, deny, dodge, dissemble and do nothing, or next to nothing at all, to remedy problems that exist in the public record, but not in popular consciousness.

And both examples, oddly, ultimately involve the same precious resource — water in general and groundwater in particular.

El Paso’s water history is nothing less than a marvel in this time of procrastination and obfuscation. In the 1980s, city leaders realized that a protracted drought was not an anomaly, but a taste of things to come. The city was pumping so much water from its aquifer, the Hueco Bolson, that it would run dry in the foreseeable future. So the city launched a massive education campaign, and a system of incentives and penalties, that resulted in residents cutting their use in half. Per capita daily use in El Paso now is somewhere around 122 gallon. It’s about 135 gallons in Albuquerque, which also has been very aggressive in water conservation, to our city’s lasting credit.

But El Paso went many steps further. It created ponds of treated wastewater that seeped back into the aquifer, being further cleansed by sands and gravels. When it was pumped out for use, it was retreated, as all water is, to drinking standards. This was an early form of recycling gray and black water. Albuquerque discharges its treated waste water into the Rio Grande to fulfill compacts with Texas and international agreements with Mexico.

Then El Paso took the giant leap to raise the many millions in federal dollars to build what turns out to be the largest inland desalinization plant in the world, eventually producing some 24 million gallons of potable water a day from the brine beneath the fresh water aquifers. It’s thought that most freshwater aquifers in our region have five-to-ten times more brackish water beneath them, ancient sea water from hundreds of millions of years ago. The waste products from desalinization in El Paso are injected into a deep geological formation 22 miles from the production sites.

Two years ago, El Paso finished a pilot project with a “toilet to tap” or “direct potable reuse” cleaning system that would produce 10 million gallons of water a day if it was up and running at full size. The city is currently seeking the funds to complete this program and make itself “drought-proof” for the climate changed future.

That’s what I call adaptation at its best — facing problems, making feasible long-range plans, using appropriate technologies, educating the public and seeing the plans through to the end. The Texas Observer has done an overview of El Paso’s water success called “El Paso Is On the Cutting Edge of Water Conservation, It Really Has No Choice.” I urge you to read it.

While El Paso is methodically adapting to the local pressures of climate change, it seems as if the military industrial complex in the Southwest and elsewhere is, if not methodically then persistently, befouling aquifers under or near virtually all its facilities.

The notorious 24 million gallon jet fuel spill into the aquifer around Kirtland Air Force Base near the sweet spot of Albuquerque’s drinking water system is not an anomaly. And jet fuel is not the only befoulants that get into groundwater from Air Force and other military bases. Cannon Air Force Base west of Clovis, NM, for instance, reports that carcinogens linked to fire-fighting foam have found their way in large quantities into groundwater near the base. Davis Monthan AFB and Luke AFB in Arizona, along with Edwards AFB in California, the decommissioned George AFB in California’s Mohave Desert and many more all have befoulants of one kind or another, including jet fuel, in groundwater around them. As with the Kirtland spill, the public and many critics all are left with the feeling that the military and its civilian backers not only downplay the severity of groundwater contaminations, but also use the least expensive, and least effective, means to clean it up and drag their knuckles under the guise of elaborate, lengthy, indecipherable reports with odd and seemingly capricious changes in data.

But when it comes to obfuscation, the “normal military” is a piker compared to the world of nuclear research and development that makes it a standard practice to deny any human hazard in any of multifarious operations, as we saw a few weeks ago when a Boston biohazard prevention firm presented evidence of plutonium particles in dust accumulations all around northern New Mexico. Public health hazards were immediately denied by officials as per usual. We’ll look at more of this history of denial in next week’s column.

It goes almost without saying that nuclear waste gets into groundwater, too. And its existence there is denied and untreated, in glaring comparison to the model of El Paso facing up to its problems and actually exerting the effort to fix them.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

 

(Image derived from photos by Luke McKernan and David Martyn Hunt)