Private Story
Precious Stream Through a Dry Landscape: The Pecos River
Twenty years ago I followed the Pecos River in New Mexico and Texas for a story about this precious, dwindling water supply. The Pecos, as even the Supreme Court has noted, is a complicated river. It starts simply enough in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico as a bubbling stream. The water flows roughly north to south through eastern New Mexico and western Texas, eventually joining the Rio Grande along the U.S. border with Mexico. It is an important water source for both American states.
It is the 1948 Pecos River Compact that makes the river so complicated. Central to the deal is the idea that the Pecos River should stay as it was in 1947. Each year, Texas is supposed to get the amount of water that the 1947 river would have released past the state line. Texas fought a fourteen years’ court battle over the division of water rights, with the Supreme Court in 1988 finally deciding New Mexico had stolen $14 million worth of water.
In 2002, when I visited communities along the river, people worried mostly about centuries old water rights, spillage by people in other counties and cities, and the unfairness of the Pecos River Compact. Nobody yet worried about climate change arriving on the banks of the Pecos.
That will be different now. A recent study by American climate scientists shows that global warming has pushed what would have been a moderate drought in southwestern North America into megadrought territory. It is the most extreme drought in the Southwest in 1,200 years, and the past 22 years rank as the driest period since at least 800 A.D. Drought and climate change-induced aridification is ongoing already in the Pecos River Basin, with less snowfall in the headwaters and more winter precipitation falling as rain.
Water managers of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, whose mission is to manage, develop, and protect U.S. water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner, describe the basin as arid with a limited and highly variable water supply. About 80% of the water in the Santa Rosa Reservoir, located at the top of the system, goes to agriculture, but in 2021 the peak flow of snowmelt runoff into it amounted to only a trickle of about 5 cubic feet per second. The total volume during the runoff period was about 700 acre-feet, or 56 times less than the historical average. That means less water for all downstream users.
A claim on the water by the New Mexico oil industry is also threatening the state’s ability to meet its water-sharing obligations to Texas. Other concerns include having enough water in the system to support threatened species, like the Pecos bluntnose shiner, which needs a certain river flow. Population growth in Roswell, Carlsbad and other communities along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico could also impact future demands.
A Visura Project Grant would allow me to go back to see how things have changed from the baseline I documented twenty years ago. I want to hear what people who depend on this precious water source think and fear, who is paying the price. I also want to look at some of the tools they might already use to stretch resources to help sustain viable agriculture as challenges grow: like irrigation; infrastructure improvements, greenhouses, and growing different crops and "water banking”.
In short: I want to tell the story of an American river waking up to climate change.
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