Unsettled Waters: A blog on water rights in the American West

Last post of 2011! It’s been too long, yet again. So this will be the last post for this calendar year of 2011. There are so many issues and events of interest to cover, since last August, I’m not sure where to start. So here I’ll simply start with some regional issues, first with Texas (?!), then moving on to the usual New Mexico water issues, challenges, and battles. There was also big news out of Santa Fe, namely with the appointment of a new state engineer. Finally I drop a plug or two for some books that have recently appeared that should be of interest to all residents of the Southwest if you care (at all) about water in our region. NPR had an interesting story on water issues in Texas specifically that I thought was worth sharing – see below. I’m not sure if they are “things you didn’t know” about water in the Lone Star state, but some are intriguing. Water in Texas: http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2011/11/15/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-water-in-texas/ The water year i...

For this month's post, I'm choosing to focus on the state of New Mexico's " active water resource management" program , which I'm unofficially re-naming the active water resource monitoring program. Why? Read on... I'm just back from the Rio Mimbres, in southwestern New Mexico, a beautiful and verdant valley even in this horrible drought year (the driest on record for most parts of the state, serious business). In past posts, I'd made mention of the Mimbres as both fully adjudicated and already in the AWRM program that the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) runs. About eight years old as a piece of state statute, less old in terms of actual existence, AWRM has triggered controversy, grumbling, and one lawsuit that questioned its legality. On the Mimbres, the trigger was the Bounds case, and it has created real difficulties for folks on the so-called "upper Mimbres" (basically north of Rt 152 that runs E-W across the valley) with folks dow...

This is a long-overdue quick post to get my blogging engine running again. I'm now back in New Mexico, on the outskirts of the captial, with a spectacular view from our casita of the Jemez Mountains and its current state of smoke and fire. In the first week of July, the scene was straight out of a Lord of the Rings set of Mordor ( photo ). I'm here to not only try to write several pieces on the larger water governance, adjudication, and acequias project but also to work with one of our Southwest Studies majors and a rising senior at Colorado College , Andrew Wallace. He has chosen to look at the Aamodt adjudication, now in settlement talks with all stakeholders, and how legal pluralism is or is not visible in the original case and the run-up to the settlement itself. Legal pluralism is a concept that originates from the critical legal studies literature, as well as from anthropologists like Laura Nader who made extensive use of it in her work, that speaks to whether multipl...

Well, more than two months have gone by (again), and I'm in the position of playing a bit of catch-up for the purposes of this blog. Hopefully I can begin to re-commit to these writing activities now that stand-up teaching (always a curious phrase) is over for me at CC. I wanted to report on a fascinating, and inter-disciplinary, conversation hosted by Sylvia Rodriguez (Prof Emeritus, UNM Anthropology) this past March 18, 2011 at the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. The point of the conversation was the water adjudication process in New Mexico , putatively, but we wandered far and wide on topics ranging from ecosystem rights to water, to Powell' original "watershed" democracy proposal in the 19th century, to how other states have coped (or haven't) with the demands of a general stream adjudication. After some formal and informal introductions, our discussion started to hone in on the real issues of "why adjudication" started...

This month's "acequias and adjudication" update will be old news for most of you who follow these issues closely, so apologies in advance. The point of this small post is to push through the seemingly finalized and maybe mundane details of an adjudication "settlement" and ask "what comes next?" The Aamodt ( Pojoaque Basin , NM) and the Abeyta (Taos Valley, NM) adjudications have been legally resolved through settlements funded, finally, by the U.S. Congress and the President's signature. This is good news for residents who worried about the long-term implications of these two pending lawsuits that embroiled locals, state officials, attorneys, the respective tribes, and finally, the federal agencies. Both of these lawsuits, shockingly, were older than I am, born in the late 1960s when water infrastructure and future projects pushed the state to finally file suit to document the water rights in the two water basins. You can easily find the detai...