Things change.

One of my favorite examples of old ditches threading through our community is this spot, where the Armijo Acequia (AKA the Ranchos de Atrisco Ditch) emerges from a culvert that runs beneath the batting cages on Sunset SE near the Rio Grande.

The ditch dates to the 1700s. Baseball is more recent, batting cages more recent yet. Yet the batting cages are defunct, while the ditch endures. May it ever be so.

There’s currently 187 cubic feet per second flowing down the main channel of the Rio Grande at Central, and 61 cfs coming across the river in the Atrisco Siphon to irrigate this side of the valley, this novel ecosystem, this deeply coupled human and natural system where we’ve replaced a river that once spread across this flood plain with a network of ditches spreading the water across the valley floor.

Obligation

One of the thought experiments Bob Berrens and I posited as we worked on our book Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City (summer 2026 from UNM Press) is the question of what it might look like if a modern city wanted to create from scratch a park-like network of tree-lined trails and streams with flowing water threaded through an already existing city.

I was thinking of that again this morning as I steered the Space Ghost off of Sunset (kinda no-shouldery lousy cycling) and onto the Armijo ditch bank to find my way down valley. I’m still in “old guy recovering from a covid haze” mode, my body (and mind) got pretty beat up by my latest dance with the virus, and this was my first ride down to the river in a month.

I cut through Acequia Madre Park, a bit of concrete with planters and trees where the Barelas acequia used to run (the actual acequia route there is now an alley fenced off to keep campers away); across the railroad tracks, through downtown (“New Town”), through Aldo Leopold’s old neighborhood, back up to Old Town (“Old Town”) where restored old cars, parked on the Plaza across the street from San Felipe de Neri church, compete for attention on Sunday mornings with the glory of the Lord, and across the river to what used to be the Atrisco/Armijo headings.

As Bob and I start sketching the outline of another book (we had too much fun with Ribbons of Green not to try this again), we’ve been reading, thinking, and talking a lot about the nature of moral obligations that come with the collective action of river management at scale.

Gradually, and then suddenly, we took over management of the Rio Grande over the last three-plus centuries as we took water out of the river to grow stuff; drained swamps/wetlands to build stuff; and built levees to pin the river into a narrow strip in order to build even more stuff – to build this city we call home. This creates a fascinating and challenging set of obligations from which we cannot walk away:

• to people upstream and downstream with whom we must share the river
• to non-human communities, both those in what we traditionally think of as “nature” – the ribbons of green between the levees – but also the broader riparian strip beyond the levees, full of human and natural life dependent on the ditches and the river-connected shallow aquifer
• to the past? Maybe?
• to the future? Unquestionably.

The river’s shrinking. The flow right now at Central, our canonical point of measurement, is the lowest it’s been at this point of the year since 1972. We got a delightful burst of rain last week, which pumped the river up for a few days, but it’s back on its gonna-dry-soon-here-unless-it-rains trajectory. I was delighting last week at the burst of rain, and the rewetting, when a wise friend reminded me that drying out a river and then dumping a bit of rain down the channel for a few days until it dries again is not a great way to run an ecosystem. Pity the poor fish. Understanding the nature and extent of these obligations, sorting out a decision process that respects competing and conflicting values, is hard stuff.

Because there is less water, and there will be less wet and less green. We have to decide where, we have to, as Hanif Abdurraqib put it, determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.

We’ll have to choose whether to still have the Armijo for me to ride my bike down away from the traffic and beneath the shade of ditch-fed trees: how many ditches will remain, how many trees, how much land can we still irrigate, how much can we irrigate it? What are our obligations to our neighbors downstream – our legal obligations, but more importantly our moral ones? (I am morally unsatisfied by arguments that fall back on gymnastic interpretations of what the law says to define the extent of this obligation, to defend our water against other.)  What are their obligations to us? What of the trees and birds and fish using the water along the way?

Mostly I wasn’t dwelling on this when I turned down the Armijo, I was just enjoying the shade and the sound of flowing water as each culvert dipped beneath the neighborhood streets, the joy of being back on the bike on a goofing wander after an ugly month.

It was lovely.