As the river runs dry: Pattern of abusing the Rio Grande affects life and landscape

Like many others across the West, I breathed a sigh of relief this winter when the snow just kept coming down. After several years of record lows, it was exciting to see the snowpack reach 130% of normal levels in the Upper Rio Grande Basin. Much of the water that flows through New Mexico comes from mountain snowfall that falls over the winter. I was hopeful that the robust snowpack would turn into similarly abundant summer flows in the Rio Grande. Sadly, that hope has been dashed.

Last year, the Rio Grande ran dry through Albuquerque for the first time in 40 years. The disturbing sight of a 5-mile stretch of empty riverbed where there should have been water made national headlines. But after a century of taking more water out of the Rio Grande than it has to give, compounded by rising temperatures and unprecedented drought, the drying shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Although last year’s drying in Albuquerque was hard to miss, it’s less commonly known that parts of the Rio Grande south of the city dry up regularly for stretches that can span dozens of miles. And once again, as our snowy winter turns to summer, the river has already started to run dry south of Socorro, down into Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

This pattern of abusing the Rio Grande through dams, diversions, and ditches is to blame for dewatering the river. Such unsustainable use spells disaster for the ecosystems supported by the Rio Grande that depend on the river having water year-round and meandering along natural curves and a large floodplain.

Consider the silvery minnow, a bellwether of the Rio Grande’s health. In 1994, the Rio Grande silvery minnow was listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act. Silvery minnow once spanned 3,000 river miles stretching from northern New Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico. Today, silvery minnows occupy less than 7% of their historical range, found only in less than 200 miles of the Rio Grande from Cochiti Dam to Elephant Butte Reservoir. With the Rio Grande diminishing year to year, the silvery minnow are worse off now than they were when they were listed 20 years ago.

Stagnant poolsToday, hundreds of these endangered minnow lie dead and dying in stagnant pools along stretches of dry riverbed, conditions created by an onslaught of manmade threats. As the silvery minnow approaches the tragedy of extinction, so does the Rio Grande. The plight of this species, once one of the most populous fish in the Rio Grande, signals a system in crisis and we need to heed these alarm bells.

It’s time we stop taking advantage of the Rio Grande like it’s a sewage system, and start cherishing it like a living river. We must restore the Rio Grande’s natural flows as best we can and give the river the legal protections it needs to survive and support the countless communities of life it upholds.