“At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate” by Laura Paskus, University of New Mexico Press, September 2020, 187 pages, paper $19.95, e-book $9.99
Laura Paskus is an environmental reporter, a correspondent and the producer of the “New Mexico In Focus” public radio series, “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present, and Future.” She has covered climate change issues from 2009–2019, and has condensed her years of reporting about the New Mexican environment into an urgent message for us all.
The cover of “At the Precipice” assaults us with a black, dry-brushed background for the title, which looks like a charcoal smudge encroaching on a milky colored river. All the chapter titles also have a black, smudged background like this. It does not bode well.
In the preface, Paskus tells us that this book will be disheartening to read, but she also knows that New Mexico is worth fighting for. She is hopeful that we can all come together to face the challenges of our changing climate. Here she writes: “And in many ways, New Mexico is a microcosm of what’s happening across the globe politically, economically, and certainly when it comes to the impacts of climate change. Living within a ‘hotspot’ of warming, New Mexicans are already watching how fossil-fuel extraction, ‘hot drought’, and record-breaking annual temperature records play out in terms of forest fires, water challenges, and public health impacts.”
As an example, Paskus writes about the experiences of Chris Altenbach, a farmer in Albuquerque’s South Valley, who, due to wildly fluctuating seasonal temperatures, has had to give up harvesting his fruit trees. The growth of his corn crop was slowed by a late freeze. He instead is focusing on growing annual vegetables. To mitigate the extremes in temperature, he says he will do successional plantings. “I’ll plant a couple weeks apart just to make sure I get something to come in if there’s an event that takes it out.” Changes in climate that affect our food supply are, of course, something we should all be concerned about.
Paskus puts herself directly into the New Mexican landscape, giving us boots-on-the-ground reporting that confirm the situations we have all seen locally, from hiking the dry riverbeds of the Rio Grande to observing the dropping water levels of Elephant Butte Lake, which is discussed in Chapter 11.
Antiquated state water laws and outdated federal water management tactics at Elephant Butte Dam have made coping with the changing flow and volume of river water are impossibly difficult. The author reports that, in 2018, there was no spring runoff, and Elephant Butte reservoir was at 3 percent capacity. The monsoon season was of little help. The Elephant Butte Irrigation District, whose members farm more than 90 thousand acres of irrigable land in Sierra and Doña Ana counties, has had to subject its farmers to crazy fluctuations in irrigation allotments, making them rely on pumping more and more groundwater, which is expensive, and at the same time, threatens the groundwater levels.
Paskus tells us in Chapter 4 that the 19th-century forest management practice of suppressing wildfires created the weak, overcrowded forests that contributed to the 2013 Silver Fire near Kingston in Sierra County, among the most devastating New Mexico wildfires at the time. As the result of drought, the destruction of white pines by insects and a lightning strike on a windy day in a steep area with no roads, the Silver Fire burned 138,000 acres. The timber program manager for the Gila National Forest told her: “We probably lost 80-90% of the mixed conifers up there.”
In parallel with rising temperatures, the number and size of fires has increased and fire season has lengthened by about two months in the western US, Paskus reports. Forest regeneration is also affected. “High-intensity fires cook the soils, and drier, hotter conditions can prevent trees from returning,” she explains. “In New Mexico, that means brush is replacing pinyon pine and juniper forests.”
Whether recounting the many lifted restrictions of the Trump administration, the weakening of the New Mexico Environmental Department by the then Governor Susana Martinez, or the extensive damage to the quality of our air, water and land wreaked done by the oil and gas industries, this book is a painful reminder of what we humans have allowed to happen on our watch.
Paskus documents the weaknesses and outright failures of the U.S. government to take any substantive action agreed to at global climate meetings over the course of several administrations, despite the sympathetic if sporadic rhetoric of our heads of state. People from countries all over the world have told the author that they are no longer surprised that America is not doing much by way of joining the rest of the world in various climate conventions and accords—criticism that certainly applied to the previous presidential administration. Whether the Biden administration will be able to overcome the politicization of climate change that threatens all life on the planet and implement even some elements of the proposed Green New Deal remains to be seen.
Paskus encourages each of us to change our behavior and therefore influence what happens politically in a positive way. “All delusions and excuses disappear in the face of a man whose homeland is already disappearing into the rising sea,” she insists.
At the end of the book, just before the bibliography, there is a section titled “Notes.” Here the author provides additional information related to each chapter that would have been intrusive had it been included in the text. Finding a home here are stories of interactions with people, personal feelings, details of when or where Paskus’s reporting originated, updates and recommendations for further reading.
Paskus balances her hard-edged reporting with a sense of hopefulness that, by carefully observing the physical changes in geography and weather, we can see how to become better stewards of this planet that struggles to sustain us. It is a hopefulness that comes from sleeplessness in pursuit of the facts.
We can change.