Shortly after I relocated to Las Cruces in 2007, I attended a public meeting led by the newly elected mayor and my councilor Gil Jones. The point of the meeting was to solicit opinions about what residents wanted, important things like more shaded bus stops and bicycle lanes. Afterwards, I asked Gil whether the city had a plan for water usage in view of scientists’ projections of severe drought in the Southwest. His answer was blunt: no.
If the city has such a plan now, it may be a secret for one of two reasons: (1) it is not a plan at all but a potpourri of vague platitudes about conserving, but not rationing, water; or (2) it is a plan which calls for radical (meaning “root”) changes in the economy and lifestyle. My money is on (1); to my knowledge, the Las Cruces City Council has not been capable of addressing difficult issues or making difficult, as opposed to merely controversial, decisions.
The latest news is that the current drought is the worst in 1200 years and shows no sign of ebbing or ending. The drought will proceed inexorably, more slowly and less dramatically than that which preceded and persisted throughout the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s. Its effects were aggravated by greed-based decisions which ignored ecological conditions and by virtually non-existent environmental practices. (If you want to see drought-produced devastation and tough, gritty American farmers struggling to survive and maintain their way of life, watch Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl.)
Las Cruces faces a more complex and difficult set of problems. With limited water allotments and availability, the city can introduce measures to cap or reduce water usage. It already rotates days for residential watering. Even if this step saves water, savings enable new construction. If builders continue to push for more construction, and the city continues current policies and practices, it will over-build its water supply.
If the city recognizes and resolves to address the problem, it will reluctantly, incrementally, and slowly introduce other water-reduction measures. Progressively, these may include requiring restaurants to provide water only on request (big savings—not; symbolic effects—minor); banning new lawns, then all lawns, then golf courses; and metering water and controlling residential, commercial, and institutional water allotments on a per-capita basis. Finally, it will have to impose the ultimate water reduction measure: a building moratorium, likely a permanent one.
Adopting and implementing these and other measures will have dire consequences. As inconveniences proliferate, the city’s appeal as a retirement destination will likely lose its luster, the housing market will weaken, housing values will decline, and slowing sales will put a brake on housing construction. Either the market or a moratorium will ruin the only industry which sustains the local economy. There are not enough movies being filmed in town or enough government agencies and educational institutions to provide work-fare for employable residents. As befits a drought, the city will shrivel up.
I do not know all water-saving possibilities. I assume that local environmentalists will have suggestions for conserving water. But they will not be able to address the issues arising from an irreversibly diminishing supply of water: fairness in prioritizing users, reasonable policies for equitable distribution, and impartially and rigorously enforced regulations—the tough political issues with which the best city councils would struggle.
Of course, Las Cruces cannot solve all of its impending water-shortage problems. It will get the worst of over-planting as well as over-building. Dona Ana and other counties will continue to tap into the Rio Grande and underlying aquifers to provide for water-intensive pecan and pistachio as well as other farms. The city will require the help of state government to deal with water-defined constituencies: residences, businesses, institutions, extractive industries, and agriculture. Without advance planning, we can expect the modern equivalent of range wars.
Who are such forward-thinking people? Las Cruces might look to its well-known environmentalist Senator Jeff Steinborn. But instead of focusing his legislative efforts to prepare for impending perils to the state’s fragile environment, its economy, and the livelihoods and lifestyles of its residents, Steinborn is misdirecting his energy to wage war against a virtually non-existent threat to the state or its residents.
Whatever his motives, he is adopting fact-free scare tactics to raise the specter of risks to safety, health, and the environment from a proposed nuclear-waste facility isolated in barren, remote land near Carlsbad and Hobbs. Asked to state and support his “concerns,” a wimpy, evasive word, he refused by not answering. The scare-free fact about on-route transportation and off-site storage of nuclear waste is their unblemished record of no civilian deaths, no civilian illness, and no damage to nature. If it comes to risks, the sun annually causes more cancers in New Mexicans than the worst imaginable transport accident or container leak involving nuclear waste can cause. Steinborn is doing nothing to mitigate, not “concerns” or risks, but actual disease and deaths from cancer solar-induced by sunshine.
Of course, I jest. But Steinborn, a close-minded, short-sighted ideologue, cannot, despite—perhaps because of—his environmentalist reputation, recognize or confront the biggest local and state-wide variant of the problem of climate change in our and our children’s and grandchildren’s time. By spending his legislative energy on his and his base’s cultural and political antipathy to nuclear power, he is squandering the diminishing resource of time to address the diminishing resource of water and doing nothing to prevent catastrophic consequences for the state’s economy, its ecology, and its environment.
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