His experience might just be the new normal for the American Southwest, writes William deBuys in his book, A Great Aridness. It was published late last year, months after one of the Southwest’s driest summers in recorded history, during which fires of unprecedented size scorched hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. This summer is even worse; forest fires have already broken last year’s records. Springs, wells and irrigation ditches are bone-dry. Farms are withering. We’ve all heard the gloomy scenarios of global warming: extreme weather, drought, famine, the breakdown of society.
Yet deBuys says we don’t really know if the current drought in the Southwest is a consequence of global warming. Periodic, decades-long droughts have been relatively common in the last few thousand years, according to analyses of dried lakebeds. Most of the area’s famously collapsed civilizations âeuro;” Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Galisteo pueblos âeuro;” are thought to have died out for lack of water in these extended dry periods, which deBuys calls “megadroughts.”
Lynn Montgomery has been farming in Placitas for more than 40 years. Like many farmers in northern New Mexico, he irrigates his land with water from an acequia, a type of canal system implemented by Spaniards, who’d adopted the technique from the Moors. This year, the second in a row, Montgomery’s acequia has run dry. Last year, summer rains came in time to save his crops, but this year they haven’t come.
First to go were his young Italian prune trees. The more established pear trees were next. Now, his decades-old grape vines are dropping their fruit and clinging to their lives. The 30-year-old asparagus patch is toast, as are the perennial herbs, garlic and strawberries. Even the weeds are dead.
Harold Trujillo is member of an acequia near Mora, N.M. All the acequias in his Sangre de Cristo mountain valley, near the headwaters of the Pecos River, are dry, he told me. Before this year, the worst he remembered was 2002, which, according to the Colorado state engineer’s office, was the region’s driest year in the last 300.
“In 2002, there were natural ponds that never dried up. Cows could drink out of them,” Trujillo says. “Now those ponds are dry.”
Meanwhile, Lynn Montgomery is retooling his farm. He’s installed a holding tank, in which he’ll be able to store precious acequia flow in future years, before it goes dry again. And he’s switching from traditional flood irrigation, the way it’s always been done in Placitas, to more efficient drip tape. Perhaps ingenuity and resilience will help him cope with the new normal.
Ari LeVaux is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org), where this column first appeared.
