I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As economic conditions become more torturous and the economies of Western cities based on the fantasy of endless expansion begin to wither and recede, powerful urban lobbies are bound to ramp pressures on their rural neighbors to sacrifice agricultural water so cities can continue to grow and fuel their construction-based work force.
The rural/urban guerrilla war that rumbles beneath the workings of most state legislatures in Western America, and certainly in New Mexico, probably will flare into open warfare over water-starved cities raiding farms and ranches that will, because of inevitable rising gas prices, be called upon to supply more and more local edibles in cities and the countryside.
Rural/urban warfare is, by its nature, unproductive and wasteful.
Cities have been picking fights with farmers to extend their artificial growth. None of this would be necessary if cities had been living within their actual water limitations.
The stark reality is that in a full-fledged struggle between failing cities and the growth potential of local farms and ranches, it is agriculture and husbandry that must be allowed to expand to meet market demand and cities that must contract and conserve if they are to be even marginally livable.
No one really wants to talk about an urban/rural split in the West. It’s so unseemly, and really one-sided. Farmers and ranchers are just trying to live and let live and grow their businesses. They aren’t trying to appropriate the life blood of cities. But cities are doing their best to dry up farmland, buying out water rights just when they are needed to fuel farm growth the most.
The struggle has started in earnest this year in the New Mexico Legislature. The major focus is an attempt to overturn a 1995 amendment to an obscure state statute that allows municipalities vast powers to condemn water beyond their boundaries. The bill to abolish those powers passed the state House unanimously and is wending its way through the state Senate as I write.
Nothing is potentially more dangerous to rural land-based businesses and ways of life than the power of cities to condemn water.
Lisa Robert, the longtime editor and author of the APA Watermark, among the state’s most important and intelligent water information publications, wrote recently that it dawned on private property owners and regional planners alike in 2007 “that the wealthiest urban centers could, if they wished, simply confiscate all water rights for hundreds of miles.”
An attempt to abolish such power failed by a narrow margin in 2007. This year an anti-condemnation coalition has “an impressive list of supporters that includes N.M. Conservation Voters, Farm Bureau, Sierra Club, Cattlegrowers, N.M. Wildlife Federation, N.M. Acequia Association, Rio Grade Restoration, Farm-to-Table, La Montanita Co-op, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD).” The anti-condemnation legislation is opposed only by the powerful Municipal League.
The APA Watermark is the publication of the Assessment Payers Association of the MRGCD. It has a unique rural perspective, but one that is not parochial. The Watermark has always stood for fairness and an inclusive perspective on the rural/urban conflicts.
Perhaps the subtlest conflict between urban and rural businesses has to do with fueling urban growth on the mere promise of water, but not the actual wet stuff in hand. Such promises are known as “dedications.”
Lisa Robert writes, “The Albuquerque basin has a hydrologic deficit of at least 70,000 acre feet a year, and that figure does not include thirty years worth of dedications, those state-issued permits that allowed groundwater appropriators to postpone the purchase of offset rights. Countless developments, including behemoths such as Tierra Grande, Mesa del Sol, Mariposa, Sun-Cal, and Quail Ranch have all been promoted on the assumption that sufficient agricultural water will be available for transfer when the times comes to repay the river/aquifer system.”
But, Robert concludes, dedications “add up to more water than can credibly be wrung from retired farmland.”
Former State Engineer Tom Turney estimates that to fulfill those pledges, “90% of the remaining agricultural lands” in the Middle Rio Grande Valley will have to be dried up, including what belongs to six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos.
Outrageous as that seems,” Robert writes, “private assets have been committed without the approval — or even the knowledge — of the relevant owners.”
If that doesn’t set the conditions for a full-fledged rural/urban war sometime in the near future, I don’t know what does. And it will be a nasty, life-and-death battle. How did we get ourselves into such a mess?
There’s only one obvious, if incomplete, answer: the failed myth of inevitable growth — not quality growth of income and infrastructure, but fantasy growth of sprawl based on fantasy water, a soon-to-be-stolen resource.
Because high-profile news outlets are all big city based, most urban New Mexicans know little about the immense and growing importance of rural life in their state. But rural New Mexicans are more than up on their areas, thanks to excellent small papers like the Independent of Edgewood, the Raton Range, Clovis New Journal, De Baca Country News of Fort Sumner, the Portales News Tribune, the Mountain Mail of Soccoro, the Silver City Sun News, and dozens of others, presuming they survive the current economy.
The Santa Fe New Mexican brought to its large readership a crucial rural issue last week that’s of intense interest to anyone farming in New Mexico. A bill, sponsored by state Sen. Cisco McSorley, an Albuquerque Democrat, would have protected state farmers from lawsuits by agribusiness if their fields were accidentally cross-pollinated with patented, genetically modified seeds. Although the bill went nowhere this session, the New Mexican reported, the “coalition of farmers, ranchers, seed owners and acequia groups” will continue to press the issue at future sessions.
Seed freedom is an issue that’s potentially much more contentious than it seems. I think of it as an urban/rural contest too, one pitting big-city, stock-market agribusiness and monopolistic seed companies against small local farmers who could lose their home-based businesses in expensive patent rights lawsuits and SLAPP suits [strategic lawsuits against public participation] with their corporate competitors.
We’ll continue to hear lots of statistically twisted nonsense from developers and their lobbyists about how much water is wasted in agriculture. Of course, in an unlined ditch system like we have in the Rio Grande Valley, much ditch water that doesn’t end up in fields ends up re-charging the aquifer; I don’t think you can say that about lawn water.
Cities can’t live without an economically healthy countryside. And that will become clearer as we rely more on local farmers to produce our food.
