Worst Southwest Drought in 1,200 Years! What Does It Mean?

The last twenty or so years have been the driest in the Southwest since around 800 A.D, according to climate scientist A. Park Williams of UCLA, as quoted recently in the New York Times. That means it’s been drier here in the 21^st century than it was during the drought of 1150-1200 A.D that caused the inhabitants of the great, early Puebloan civilization of Chaco Canyon, and many other sites in New Mexico and southern Colorado, to abandon their homes and move hundreds of miles, in an often violent diaspora, into the river valleys of the Rio Grande, Chama, Pecos and smaller waterways.

It doesn’t take much of a leap to wonder if a similar fate awaits many of the 40 million or so Americans who live in the Southwest now, as climate change withers our landscape, dries up our surface water and causes us to mine groundwater in ever frighteningly large quantities with no reliable recharge from imported river water or from vanishing rain and snow.

A continued drought could reduce the populations of major cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City, El Paso, even Denver, Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Drought could put western cities, accustomed to almost automatic growth, at a competitive disadvantage with reviving Midwest and water-rich East Coast cities. Drought could severely diminish the productivity of two of the nation’s great breadbaskets in the Imperial Valley and Central Valley of California, and severely threaten both traditional and corporate agriculture in New Mexico and Arizona.

Ongoing aridification will surely trigger increasingly stringent water rationing in cities and croplands. It could put a halt to new urban growth and leave existing housing stocks rattling like ghostly suburbs. Hydro-electric power from Lake Powell and other sources is already drastically diminished. Drought-caused brownouts and blackouts are looming. And ever deepening drought could weaken traditional water laws and customs, like prior appropriation, and impose draconian federal oversite on western states and sovereign tribal nations.

Drought has already caused an ominous early flair up of regional and cultural water conflicts in New Mexico. At this year’s legislative session, Senate Bill 100, the Cannabis Regulation Act, tried to push through language that erased a rule requiring would-be cannabis farmers to prove that they had valid water rights before getting licensed for production. The New Mexico Acequia Association, which represents some 800 acequias with existing water rights, objected, saying that with no proof of water rights new cannabis growers could irrigate with domestic wells or from sources on which acequias were dependent, draining water from already struggling communities. The bill passed the Senate and went to the House Judiciary Committee but was not discussed or voted on.

The anti-water rights language was supported by Republicans and Senators from southern New Mexico. Acequias are mostly in the central and northern part of the state. The conflict revealed not only a definite partisan split, but also a troubling north/south clash of cultures which portends even more serious social and ethnic animosities down the road as drought becomes the new normal.

The conflict also brought into focus new realities of traditional water law and custom confronting privatization and market forces all across the arid Southwest, and especially in our home state. It’s true, I believe, that the entrenched legal system of “prior appropriation” (first water users get water first for “beneficial use” in a crisis), along with the customs of “use it or lose it,” will never be entirely abandoned in the West, but in some ways prior appropriation is already compromised almost beyond recognition. For instance, claims of senior rights have to be proven historically by a legal process known as adjudication that can sometimes take decades to resolve. Native American and Hispanic farmers, and other long-time agriculturalists, tend to have senior rights over the later, or junior rights, of cities. This causes an urban/rural conflict that can get downright nasty, as it did in California some 14 years ago when farmers and agribusiness refused to give in to urban requests for more equitable distribution of water.

In a climate-change caused drought, it’s conceivable that senior water rights holders could make “a call” and get their water before cities and city dwellers get theirs. In New Mexico, we’ve gone to extraordinary lengths never to have to make such a “call” — even to the point of simply not adjudicating water rights at all. That’s the case in the Middle Rio Grande Valley where no declared water rights have ever been adjudicated. In a state where nearly 90 percent of public drinking water comes from groundwater, prior appropriation rights are amorphous and confusing at best, with the state engineer having permit power over some groundwater basins but not others. These vagaries leave water and non-adjudicated water rights vulnerable to the depredations of market privateers and their ability to buy water rights and sell water at will.

This may all seem witheringly arcane, with its unfathomable legalize and jargon. But climate-change caused scarcity will require that many of us become unhappily more familiar with the exhaustive process of water wrangling in the courts. Currently around a dozen water adjudications are going on in northern New Mexico involving tens of thousands of water users in what must seem to be an interminable legal hell. And in some cities, like Las Vegas, New Mexico, residents are getting used to stringent water rationing, so much so at times they can only water their gardens with graywater. Those of us who lost water in this month’s freeze in the North Valley were reminded dozens of times every day of how thoughtlessly we take the luxury of clean, running water for granted.

The meaning of the worst drought here in 1,200 years is simple. We are already running out of water, one faucet, one sprinkler, one carwash, one new corporate giant at a time. What can we do?

We can demand that legislators appropriate adequate funds for the state’s water agencies and universities to engage in an emergency research effort to find out exactly how much water we have, and how much of our groundwater is polluted — and then spend the money to clean it up.

The city and county could re-integrate the semi-autonomous Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority and have the city and county planning departments do water planning in an open and accountable way. They could hold public discussions on the city/county’s Water 2120 program, a vital set of principles, practices and goals that I bet not one in ten thousand city and county residents even know exists. The mayor, the city council and the county commission could stop postponing the inevitable, start getting water consumers ready to seriously diminish their water use and begin accumulating funds to help lower-income citizens prepare for the scarcity ahead.

State government could use the power of public relations to alert the citizens of our state that a 50 Year Water Plan is underway. Almost no one but water planners and dedicated citizen volunteers knows anything about it. The state must work to have it become common knowledge, and coordinate with city and county planning, to inform us all of the progress and implications of this effort, generally taking water scarcity out of the shadows and make what it should it be — a matter of urgent and ubiquitous public interest.

This is no time to cloak water planning and water pollution in public indifference. The worst drought in 1,200 years is an emergency. It’s politically, socially and morally irresponsible to continue to just brush it aside and look the other way.

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