New Mexico’s rivers need their waters

A climate change author defends the “more-than-human” world
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By LAURA PASKUS
Courtesy of Source NM

This week, New Mexico’s largest river ground to a halt in Albuquerque. (Photo by Laura Paskus)

A pair of panting crows peers down from a cottonwood perch, croaking when I pass. Yellow breasted chats call from brush along the river channel. And a single, dazzlingly white egret hops knee-deep into a warm, brown puddle, stabbing the water for fish.

Traffic roars across the Central Bridge in Albuquerque, and the tiny fish in the puddle at my feet flurry back and forth, seeking shade or safety or some way out. Fish larger than my thumbnail have already died in the dry channel.  

For almost 30 years, the Middle Rio Grande has dried in the summer south of the state’s largest city. When the drying also reached the Albuquerque stretch in July 2022, people rushed to the riverbed, peering over the bridges, posting their grief on social media.

Now, here we are again.

This year, drying in the Middle Rio Grande began in April — and this week, New Mexico’s largest river ground to a halt in Albuquerque.

Irrigation canals are already empty; months ago, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District warned farmers and homeowners irrigation season could end as early as May. For now, cities like Albuquerque will shift toward pumping groundwater. And most of us won’t notice any big changes in our daily lives. 

Meanwhile, every time the river dries, the more-than-human world suffers. 

At first, predators feast on the dead and dying fish. It’s noisy as birds clamor and flies and other insects swarm the fish carcasses. 

Then things get quiet. 

Beavers disappear. Coyotes, foxes, badgers, skunks, cottontails, bobcats, and other wildlife become increasingly desperate. Swallows and songbirds die or move on once there aren’t insects. Ducks, killdeer, cormorants, geese, herons — and in fall, sandhill cranes — have no water. The young waterbirds die first; they can’t fly away from predators or toward another flowing stretch of the river. Soon, even the turkey vultures leave, kettling up in committees of 50 or 100 birds. 

Drying reverberates throughout the system, killing and stressing trees, increasing fire risks, devastating groundwater supplies — and making the future less secure, not just for the species we share our state with, but for humans, as well. 

For more than 20 years, I’ve reported on river drying, for print, online, radio, and television news outlets. During that time, I’ve never heard a coherent, factual, or honest argument that a dry riverbed benefits humans. And I’m never going to stop saying this: New Mexico’s rivers deserve rights to their own waters. Especially in a warming world. 

Right now, billions of people across the world are experiencing extreme rain events, catastrophic wildfires and the floods that follow, longer and hotter heat waves, melting glaciers, rising seas and expanding aridity. Here in New Mexico, we’ve known for decades that the state is warming, snowpack is decreasing, forests are drying out and climate change is wreaking havoc on our farms, rural communities, ecosystems and wildlife. 

Given the current state of our nation, some state and local leaders might say it’s still not time for state and local climate action. Some people will be well-meaning or earnest; others will continue to mimic disinformation campaigns from industries like oil and gas. 

But we know that the Trump administration’s actions on climate change will cause devastating, long-term harms to people and our planet. And while it’s tempting to dismiss these actions as ignorant or haphazard, they are not. 

To be clear: The administration’s actions are deliberate, calculated and carried out by “climate realists” like U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who told The Guardian earlier this year, “The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” adding: “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

When I walked to the Rio Grande this morning, I felt ashamed to stand in her broken river channel — again — and ashamed to think of the trade-offs we accept, while the more-than-human world suffers for our actions. And inaction. 

With the crows watching, the chats calling and the egret hunting, I thought about what it’s been like, year after year, to watch a river dry and an ecosystem and its species suffer. 

​And I know that in this moment, it’s time to take a bird’s eye view of our rivers and watersheds, to peer down into the landscape and see what we can do -- as a state, within our local communities and neighborhoods and even in our own yards. It’s time to decide what we’re willing to trade, and what we’re unwilling to let die.