"It's like a train coming down the tracks and nobody recognizes the reality of it," Thebaut told me in an interview this morning. Thebaut is a filmmaker, and his new documentary - “The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry?” - airs next Thursday on KNME here in Albuquerque (9 p.m., channel 5)

Thebaut, who made a number of filming trips to New Mexico, highlights the suburban sprawl of the greater Albuquerque metro area and the questionable future of our water supply as one of the signal examples of a lack of foresight in thinking about our nation's water future.

We don't have a national water policy, he pointed out, we're depleting groundwater that is not being replaced, and we have poor linkages between land use policy and water supply policy.

Readers of this space will have heard those things before, but they bear repeating.