An unruly summer of 2013 (updated)

It's been a busy year and I have had little time to update, much less maintain, this little water blog on most-things-New Mexico-but-not-all. In the 8 months, much has changed in terms of lawsuits, roadblocks in the large adjudication cases in the state of New Mexico (like the Lower Rio Grande, aka the large dry colon serving sand, sediment, and scarcely much water into Texas). And yet, other aspects seem hauntingly familiar of 2012: fires, and the post-fire flooding across regions of Colorado and New Mexico. Let's lead with the larger context, drought and record or near-record low levels in the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. And this is Forbes magazine, mind you, talking about how to responsibly 'price' water in the Southwest.

The Lower Rio Grande adjudication is dragging one, lurching, even as the water itself (or "wet water" as engineers hilariously call it) is drying up. While some of the stream system issues are starting to look vaguely settled, there are still a large number of unresolved matters on this stem of the river. In other news, New Mexico sued Texas back in 2012, and now Texas has sued the state of New Mexico unsurprisingly. Where will it get them? The only people to benefit in the political wake are likely to be the attorneys on retainer. And will it matter if there is little water to be moved past the critical (geopolitical) gage at San Marcial? Do people sue over "zero"? Part of the difficulty in southern New Mexico is that even if territory is difficult to 'share' (much less governance) the surface and groundwaters are shared. Everyone knows this. And yet the latest decision by the NM State Supreme Court just made the State Engineer's job a new nightmare with the Bounds case. (I dare you to read it, then reflect on what it means, not just for this corner of NM but for the entire state). Groundwater pumping is not a "new" problem as the photo (above) illustrates, but the combination of both groundwater and surface water over-allocation has finally bitten. Trying to enforce the Supreme Court's ruling is going to be a bit like trying to ban sneezing on the street.

After two to three years of serious drought in AZ, CO, and especially NM, the rains finally broke with the arrival of the monsoons. People in my neck of the woods, or what's left of the woods, would be a lot happier in any other given year. But on the heels of the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire, and the most recent 2013 Black Forest fire, a lot of rain in a small amount of time makes people nervous. There's a reason for that. If the recent batches and scale of western forest fires are strongly coupled to large-scale atmospheric changes (notice I said "if"), then it is going to heighten our need to understand these coupled Earth systems on a micro, meso, and macroscale. In other words, the atmosphere (climate) is changing the hydrosphere (water declining), which is then affecting the biosphere (forest fires), and with disastrous lithospheric consequences (flash flooding) to human settlement (the Noosphere) on all counts.

The videos coming out of Manitou Springs, in July and August of 2013, following a small amount of rain in a short time period, illustrate the rather scary consequences of it all. Granted, Manitou is set in a small basin, so the problems are amplified. Granted, I'm able to write this from verdant Chicago, where I'm spending a few months at the Newberry Library, teaching some undergraduate students from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest - they're here for our seminar and to do some linked independent projects looking at the marvelous archival collections here - so it's a strange relationship by distance. But as I look at old sources on water, and cultural perceptions of water and water users I'm again reminded of how strongly skewed people are in their view of "what should be" the right way to use water. In the next post, I'll share a few of these sources, a few quotes, from the 19th century sources at the Newberry, to illustrate what I mean. Until then, stay dry (if you're getting rain), or think of rain if you haven't seen much of it. Un saludo cordial.