By KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock
I read the Los Alamos Daily Post article on PEEC’s talk on being environmentally aware (link), I wondered if Los Alamos remembers why Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wisc.) founded Earth Day.
Or, perhaps, in terms of water, we in Los Alamos, despite our science, are busily ignoring—as is everyone in the Southwest–a major elephant in the room: our exploding human numbers!
That particularly matters during the worst 20-year drought in 1,200 years, and that is outside of any worsening of the water situation via climate change, with projections that the critical Colorado River might shrink to half normal flows—and stay there – when even normal flows were long inadequate for the region’s population.
Nelson didn’t found Earth Day as some woo-woo celebration of Mother Earth. Nelson founded Earth Day to focus on population, especially the populations of the world’s three population-super-giants: China, India and the United States. The first two have populations of over a billion people, but most Americans are unaware that the third runner up is the U.S. with a staggering 330 million people. Oops, that was our population in 2020. We already approach 335 million, 92-percent immigration-driven.
Of note, in the 1990s, the National Academy of Sciences of 54 nations echoed Nelson’s warning when they issued a joint statement saying that no environmental problems—species extinction, resource shortages, climate change—can be dealt with without also addressing population. But, as even mainstream media have acknowledged potentially catastrophic drought in the American Southwest, they’ve ignored that the Southwest is the fastest growing region of ours, one of the world’s fastest growing nations.
Surely, we here in the Atomic City aren’t of the same mindset!
As we prepare to grow our town—considering its ongoing “housing shortage” (or people longage?)—perhaps we should remember Nelson’s concerns about carrying capacity. Considering that Southwest history reflects mass migrations by the Hohokum, Mimbres, Anasazi and other people during drought roughly 700 years ago, perhaps we should—if this drought becomes what droughts tend to in the Southwest, a 70-year or 80-year drought—know how much water there really is, for us and for other creatures who inhabit the Pajarito Plateau.
Los Alamos owns rights to Colorado River water via the San Juan-Chama diversion, but we, as I warned the County Council in the 1990s, will never see a drop of that water, because, in drought, it doesn’t exist. Flows, many years on the Colorado have been half of normal, meaning reservoirs from Colorado to California are at unprecedented lows, including iconic Lake Mead at Hoover Dam, the second largest reservoir in North America, which approaches a level where water can no longer be drawn from it!
Thus, it would seem obvious that Los Alamos should know exactly the status of our sole water source: the aquifer beneath our feet!
While some dismissively say, “Oh, the aquifer is fine”, I did a front-page story in the mid-1990s for the Santa Fe New Mexican—featuring strongly worded quotes by Los Alamos National Laboratory hydrologists—about how our aquifer was, even then, being “mined”, or drawn down by roughly 3-feet a year. Yet, when was the last absolutely scientific, free-of-political-influence study to ask:
- What is our aquifer’s current level?
- How has tens upon tens of thousands of acres of raging wildfire—Dome, Cerro Grande, Oso Complex, Las Conchas—at the southern end of the Jemez Mountains. affected aquifer recharge, or is more water simply flowing off the Pajarito Plateau, rather than into the aquifer?
- How has prolonged, severe drought—including winters with no snowfall–affected the aquifer?
Will we in the Atomic City work to ensure that the population we allow ourselves to become matches available water, the sort of question that responsible environmental activists must ask where the most critical resource, water, is concerned? Or, will we be like everyone else, and just pretend drought will end?
Frankly, I see no indication in the PEEC discussions of any real awareness of the extent of the water problem in the Southwest or Los Alamos’ own tenuous circumstances.
(Former New Mexican correspondent Kathleene Parker lives in White Rock and writes nationally on water, population, forestry and carrying capacity issues.)
