New Mexico Water and the Environment in 2050
By Laura Paskus, Adrian Oglesby and Fred Harris
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About this ebook
The land, water, and air that make New Mexico a Land of Enchantment are facing increasing threats due to drought, climate change, and declining environmental quality protections. In this E-short edition from New Mexico 2050, noted environmental journalist Laura Paskus and Adrian Oglesby, a water law and water management expert, demonstrate how, in the face of such challenges, citizens can preserve and enrich New Mexico’s natural resources.
Laura Paskus
Laura Paskus is an environmental journalist and a correspondent whose work has been widely published. She is the producer of New Mexico In Focus’s series “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present, and Future.”
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New Mexico Water and the Environment in 2050 - Laura Paskus
ISBN for this digital E-short: 978-0-8263-5613-0
© 2015 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved. Published 2015
This E-short includes abridged content and chapter 5, New Mexico Environment and Water,
from New Mexico 2050, edited by Fred Harris.
Cover photograph by Lila Sanchez
Designed by Lila Sanchez
Contents
New Mexico 2050? A Prefatory Poem
Hakim Bellamy
Preface: What Can We Be? What Will We Be?
Fred Harris
New Mexico Water and the Environment in 2050
Laura Paskus and Adrian Oglesby
Epilogue
Fred Harris
Contributors
Index
New Mexico 2050?
A Prefatory Poem
Hakim Bellamy
New Mexico has been called
lots of things
by the Upper 48.
My favorite
is recession proof.
Like some sort of backhanded condiment,
like vinegar, when I ordered chile,
like drought, instead of desert,
like climate change for dinner
instead of rain for breakfast.
But mean
is not what they mean.
When poor is the new normal,
you can’t feel the economy flatline.
Just like you couldn’t feel it
when it was booming.
Just like the bottom of the ocean
unmoved by the waves.
What they meant
is irrelevant,
even insignificant.
Because we take everything
as a compliment.
Because at 2050,
with the oldest state capital in the country,
we look damn good for our age.
Compared to their Dow Jones Average
we are finally exceptional,
breaking the curve
one border at a time.
36 years from here,
New Mexico will still be exotic to others
and enchanting to us.
We’ll still be inventing
new names to call ourselves.
Still be creating new races
every monsoon season of love.
New Mexico will still be magic,
Like a horizon-taut canvas
making something out of nothing.
Pulling a rabbit out of the mesa
waiting a sign, with both ears
to the sky.
Nothing under its sleeve
but sacred heart ink.
Acequia Sangre underneath
its adobe-flavored skin.
Hungry for the snowpack
to finally shed a tear.
As the highways grow
wider and western than the Rio.
As the river banks
collapse like a recession
in vein.
As the scales of justice
elevate us out of poverty
instead of shackling us to it.
As the education system
weights opportunity
over place of worth.
As the sites
become more sacred,
and the sacred
becomes more scarce.
New Mexico will endure,
evolve and enchant,
as it has always done.
Under many different names . . .
But what about
the Nuevomexicanos?
Preface
What Can We Be? What Will We Be?
Fred Harris
The past is prologue. True. And so is the present. But in New Mexico, neither of these is necessarily destiny.1
A local announcer once opened the great annual Montana Crow Indian Fair Rodeo with the words, Ladies and Gentlemen and all you white people, we have cowboys here tonight from all over the world—and many other places!
Well, I’m not a cowboy exactly, not an Indian either, but I’ve been nearly all over the world, and many other places, and I’ve never found any place I like as much as New Mexico. That’s the truth.
We’ve got our problems. Everybody knows that.
And maybe people say that we’ve made our own bed. But we don’t have to lie in it. The problems we have here in this wonderful state were by and large made by people. And they can be solved by people, too. That’s what New Mexico 2050, the book from which this text is taken, is about.
A blueprint for New Mexico’s future.
A handbook for New Mexico’s leaders and public officials, present and potential.
A textbook for New Mexico’s students.
A sourcebook for New Mexico’s teachers and researchers.
A hymnbook for proud New Mexicans who want our beloved Land of Enchantment also to become the Land of Opportunity, fully and for all.
■■■■
That, I am sure, is what John Byram, the dedicated and farsighted director of the University of New Mexico Press, had in mind when he asked me to organize, produce, and edit New Mexico 2050. And that’s what I, too, had in mind when I agreed to take on the task, after adding in my own mind a theoretical subtitle for the book: What Can We Be? What Will We Be?
With a grant (for which we’re most grateful) from the McCune Foundation to assist with project expenses, I set out to find recognized New Mexico experts in each subject field.
And I found them: our contributors. All of us went to work. And it has been a labor of love.
New Mexico 2050 an honest book. I asked the contributors for each chapter, first, to