I made a brief stop at a dry Rio Grande main channel this morning, around the Central Avenue Bridge, before I pointed the Space Ghost southwest into the South Valley. The Arenal Canal, which hugs the sand hills on the valley’s western edge, was flowing, but just 25 cubic feet per second. 100 cfs is typical in the Arenal at this time of year, according to the MRGCD-USBR dataset.

I had intended to ride down Foothill, a “comfort food” ride that mostly hugs the Arenal, which mostly hugs the sandhills, but it turned into a “What happens if I turn here?” kind of day instead.

I am obsessed with green these days, the vegetation kind of green, as the river and the ditches go dry in a year that, by one measure (current flow into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley at Otowi) is the driest since we started measuring the river’s flow in 1895.*

One of the best questions I got at Tuesday’s book launch talk at Bookworks (did I mention Bob Berrens and I have a new book out this week) was from a guy who asked what climate change would mean to the future of our community. My answer was annoyingly simple: Our community will be less green.

That’s what we do with water. Our indoor water is largely recycled, put back into the Rio Grande to support a riparian ecosystem and downstream users. The consumptive share of our water use is applied to landscapes to make our city green.

The map is one of my experiments in using satellite data to get a better handle on how we’re actually using water. I’m increasingly frustrated by a discourse focused on water agencies. As I put it in a thing I’m writing with some colleagues, agencies don’t use water, people do. Many Albuquerque neighborhoods on the valley floor get water from multiple sources – municipal pipes, domestic wells, and ditches. Lots of homes have access to all three.

This particular map uses data from the OpenET project, focusing on heavily vegetated pixels and calculating how much water they use. The details of the numbers are less important than the overall story it suggests: some parts of our community are a lot greener than others.

The near South Valley, the neighborhood I rode this morning, is an interesting example. Home values and median household income (US Census data yada yada) are lower than the county average. And compared to the much more affluent neighborhoods to the north (Los Ranchos de Albuquerque and the rest of Albuquerque’s North Valley), this part of the South Valley is a lot less green. But there was a lot of shade for me to ride beneath as I drained the two water bottles I carried. Lots of tree-lined ditches to ride to beat the heat.

The map tells this story. This part of the South Valley is one of the greener parts of the metro area.

big messy community conversations

Sarena Ulibarri, one of my UNM Press peeps, captured this in the quote she shared on Mastodon after the Bookworks event (sorry, I can’t figure out how to link directly to a Mastodon post, I’m not good at Internet):

Happy Book Birthday to RIBBONS OF GREEN by @jfleck, which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the complex relationships between cities and nature, the ways that collective action can help us adapt to climate change, and the “big messy community conversations” we need to have to create policies that actually work.

The quote – “big messy community conversations” – is the key bit here. There’s a bunch of regulatory apparatus and political and legal tools that needs to come into play – well metering orders, (“Please,” he pleaded to his friends at the Office of State Engineer, “domestic wells, OK?”), potential constraints on municipal pumping, AWRM (“Active Water Resource Management,” we actually say it “A-worm”), that sort of thing. Whatever we do will be driven in large part by our Rio Grande Compact obligation to our downstream neighbors, either by proactive measures before we end up in court, or by reactive measures after we get sued for stiffing our neighbors in southern New Mexico and Texas for the water we owe them. Either way, the result will be that we use less water, and stuff is less green. The question is where?

What I’m interested in, what I was thinking about and trying to talk about as I sat before that delightful audience Tuesday night at Bookworks, is the big messy community conversation we need to have about what we desire for our community’s future, how we get beyond the legal formalisms of the whole thing and find a way to talk about our desired future conditions for our community, and how we go about sharing the water.

* n.b. By another measure – total flow to date past Otowi – it’s the third driest year in history, behind 1904 and 1977.