Wildfire, Wind, Warming, Mora and Las Vegas

Something is terribly out of balance with our spring weather this year, and, on reflection, many years in the past. All the warnings and dire predictions about global warming seem to be hitting home and coming true right now in the northern part of our state with scorching winds and raging blazes. The wildfire season has come to New Mexico two months earlier than its traditional June appearance. And I’m sure it will stretch into October or beyond. It’s as if the laws of nature have shifted, somehow, with the rising temperatures. Natural patterns, even biological laws, are being altered to our detriment. And weather anomalies are the new norms everywhere, including South Asia, and all over the American Southwest, and countless other human habitats.

Among the worst wildfires in New Mexico history — The Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires — have been burning continuously since April 6 and have consumed some 166,000 acres of forest and grass lands in and around the village of Mora and the city of Las Vegas as of late last week. While part of the Hermit’s Peak Fire was started purposefully as a “prescribed burn” by the U.S. Forest Service, it quickly got out of control, fanned by powerful, freakish winds and drought conditions that have been the major cause of its tragic and devastating spread. The situation has gotten so desperate that Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, in an unprecedented move, asked President Joe Biden to preemptively make a disaster declaration to release funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help stave off a worse calamity even before the fire is out. The president did so.

I am sure there will be months of analysis and discussion of these fires with many conflicting views. But it seems troublingly all too real to me and many like-minded friends that the natural forces pushing the fires’ destructive power come from long range and, as yet, hard to detect nuances of climate change in New Mexico.

From my own personal perspective as a person trying to grow small crops and trees here for over 60 years and keenly conscious of the weather, it seems undeniable that the endless procrastination in curbing global warming has allowed temperatures to rise and drought to intensify in such a way that in New Mexico, as elsewhere, climate is undergoing a gruesome metamorphosis. The seasons are dryer, as they are all over the west, and in New Mexico at least the temperatures and winds seem to have slid up a month. What used to be the cold, slightly damp, potent winds of March now have moved into a drier and hotter April with disastrous effects when it comes to wildfires. April has become hot as late May used to be, and I fear that May will be like broiling June once was. Last year this “upping” of months saw us not really experiencing even a mild winter until mid to late November, but we were luckily spared catastrophic wildfires then. This morphing is a trend now of at least five to six years, with the heat regularly taking off in early May, as it was predicted to do again May 7 with a temperature of 91 in Albuquerque. Not terribly long ago, the last freeze in the Valley here was traditionally May 15.

The consequences of this inexorable overturning of historic patterns are every bit as dire in New Mexico as climate scientists have been predicting for decades. When wildfires threaten the very existence of one of the state’s most treasured and beautiful cities — Las Vegas — you can feel the future drying up and crackling right before our eyes.

Las Vegas is an architectural treasure of national significance, with more National Trust for Historic Preservation registered buildings per capita than any city in the country. It has two of the state’s most beautifully reconstructed historic hotels — The Plaza and the Castaneda. It’s the home of Highlands University and the United World College. I consider Las Vegas, with its richly cosmopolitan, down-to-earth culture and tradition of social grace and toleration, as my second hometown. The thought of it being damaged in any way is intolerable. I join thousands of New Mexicans helplessly watching the speed and direction of the wind, as it determines the fate of a city so many of us love.

We’re living a lesson right now of what happens when polarized politics and loony ideology get in the way of pragmatic science and the communal interests of good conscience and common sense. I wonder what the condition of our forests would be today if over the last ten years — four of which were under a Republican, climate change denying administration — we had gathered the expertise and money needed to clear the forest floors of northern New Mexico of their tangle of flammable materials.

If local and world leaders had started to take climate change seriously and had diligently worked to reduce greenhouse gases even 30 years ago, there’s a good chance the intense effects of an overheated atmosphere would have been diminished. Now, everywhere in the world, especially in southern India, where temperatures are soaring at 120 degrees, and in the water-starved American Southwest, climate change is showing us directly that the science community has proven it has the kind of accurate predictive tools that people and governments must start to take seriously moving into the perilous future that is morphing itself right now into the immediate and calamitous present.

Southern California is so hot and short of water that more than 6 million residents will be restricted to outside watering for only one day a week starting this month. And there’s a good chance residents will have to resort to using gray water, non-toxic recycled household water, to make up the difference. It could happen here, too. The Department of the Interior will hold back almost a half a million acre feet of Colorado River water this year going from Lake Powell to Lake Mead and then to Arizona, Nevada and California, all so Lake Powell can continue generating vital hydroelectric power for millions of homes in the Southwest.

With such water restrictions and cutbacks — along with interstate water litigation like we’re seeing between New Mexico and Texas over the Rio Grande and a possible reduction in crop diversification — we could also experience increasing agricultural failures in the Southwest and perhaps even rolling nationwide food shortages.

It’s hard to maintain a usefully positive perspective on these unprecedented upheavals in the nature of things. I find myself turning increasingly to biological researchers. A new book published last year — “A Natural History of the Future,” by applied ecologist Rob Dunn — is proving to be helpful. Dunn uses “biological laws” and hypotheses to make predictions about the future. One is called the diversity-stability hypothesis, which states that areas with the large diversity of species have a better chance of sustaining themselves than an area dominated by monocultures. Dunn provides a map of the world that denotes countries that range from high diversity to low diversity of crops. It turns out that China, India and certain parts of central Africa and Chile have the greatest crop diversity in the world and are therefore somewhat buffered from the devastation that climate change could bring to their agriculture. Canada, the United States, much of Europe and the Middle East grow a relatively less diverse series of crops and could succumb more readily to climate change and help to bring about a global food crisis. “If we imagine the future will include good years and bad years, as well as rarer and yet inevitable years of truly terrible drought, pest, and plague, then we are better off if … we plant a greater diversity of crops,” Dunn writes.

California’s agricultural “cornucopia” could be hard hit by a growing water crisis on the Colorado River. California’s “77,500 farms produce more than 400 commodities and two thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts,” according to the The Mercury News. That doesn’t sound like a paucity of crop diversity, but if individual farms focus only on a few major crops that could become a problem for them, should the diversity-stability hypothesis hold true over time. The same could be said for New Mexico’s drought-stricken agriculture in a time of climate change. The state’s massive dairy industry, its large number of ranches and the 1.5 million head of cattle they grow, its nation-leading pecan and chile industries and its productive onion and pistachio farms also represent a modicum of diversity for the state as a whole. But not so for individual farming and growing enterprises, which, when it comes to species diversity, often amount to near monocultures.

So here we are living in a world that’s changing at breakneck speed all because of us and our often counterproductive ingenuity and insatiable energy needs, a Frankensteinian world we created that is on a rampage completely out of our control. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fires raging around us, the probable water rationing ahead of us and the possible food shortages to come have all been caused by companies, politicians and ideologues who’ve denied that human-made climate change is real. And in doing so have crippled for decades all efforts to curb and reverse this lethal trend. What an absurd, utterly unnecessary and brutally tragic situation we human beings have made for ourselves and the rest of life on this planet.

If there’s hope at all — and there always is — it’s to be found in what we’re witnessing in the spirit, the kindness, the sense of community and the utterly admirable and heroic tenacity of the people of northern New Mexico as they struggle with fire and weather beyond our imagining until now. They remind us that the human will to not only survive but to prevail — as William Faulkner once said — should never be counted out. And that’s as true fighting local fires as it is grappling with the seemingly impossible task of getting the world’s leaders to take climate change seriously. Hope is both a last resort and a first step.

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

(Photo by John Fowler)