| December
7, 2007
Draining
New Mexico
Mining
Water in the Desert
By ARTHUR
VERSLUIS
It
began with a non-descript legal notice in the local paper, the kind
of thing most people don't ever really look at. The notice said
that in Catron County, New Mexico, Augustin Plains Ranch LLC intends
to drill thirty-seven twenty-inch water wells, down to a depth of
2,000 feet, to withdraw 54,000 acre-feet of water a year from the
high desert aquifer. In case you're not up on how much water that
is: an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, so the proposal is to pump
out over 17.5 billion gallons of water a year from these wells in
the high desert country of New Mexico.
You
might wonder what they intend to do with 17.5 billion gallons of
water a year. The applicant, according to the legal notice available
from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer,
"proposes
to divert and consumptively use 54,000 acre-feet of ground water
per annum for domestic, livestock, irrigation, municipal, industrial,
and commercial purposes of use, to include "providing water
to the State of New Mexico to augment its capacity to meet [Rio
Grande Compact] deliveries to the State of Texas … at Elephant
Butte dam," and "[offsetting] effects of ground water
pumping on the Rio Grande in lieu of retirement of agriculture"
via a pipeline to the Rio Grande."
As
far as I know, to date not a single newspaper has run an article
on this proposal, let alone investigated it, nor did the state hold
any local hearings concerning it. What you are reading is exclusive
to this website. Why? How is it that a proposal to deplete an aquifer
in the high desert can go forward with only a small legal notice
in the local paper? Who is responsible? Is there some backscratching
deal with the state, so public rights become private profit once
again? One hardly needs to ask the last question, of course. I guess
it was rhetorical.
The
state engineer will accept public responses if submitted by 16 December,
2007, but responses must meet certain conditions. The legal notice
is somewhat limiting as to who can offer a response:
"Any
person or other entity shall have standing to file an objection
or protest if they object that the granting of the application
will:
(1)
Be detrimental to the objector's water right; or
(2)
Be contrary to the conservation of water within the state or detrimental
to the public welfare of the state, provided that the objector
shows how they will be substantially and specifically affected
by the granting of the application."
Let's
think about this, because almost exactly the same mentality governs
this notice as governed a recent Michigan Supreme Court decision
on a water mining case there. Note the provision here: that the
"objector" has to show how they [he or she] wll be "specifically
affected." In Michigan, the Supreme Court - which has been
ruled by a clot of Republican justices for some years now - decided
in August, 2007, that the 1970 Michigan Environmental Protection
Act, which allows "any person" to bring suit for environmental
protection, nonetheless does not apply to "any person."
Rather, the Republican majority on the Court determined (following
their own earlier decision of 2004, the clear wording of the Act
itself notwithstanding) that individuals had to show concrete, particular
injury to themselves in order to have legal standing. In other words,
the law now extends only to property owners in the immediate area
of a water mining project, for instance, and then only when they
can show direct injury, which in practice means after the fact.
That is, after the water is gone.
The
moderate Republican Gov. William Milliken, who signed the Michigan
Environmental Protection Act into law back in 1970, said that the
2007 Michigan Supreme Court decision went directly against the clear
intent and wording of the law, which empowers citizens of the state.
He should know. In effect, the Republican Supreme Court Justices
unilaterally abrogated a key provision of the Michigan Environmental
Protection Act so that a foreign corporation, Nestle, could mine
water for profit from an aquifer in the state's central lower peninsula.
This, my friends, is Republican judicial activism in action.
I
mention this Michigan Supreme Court decision because a similar limitation
applies in the legal notice for the proposed massive water mining
project in New Mexico: to object, one has to show that one's own
water right will be affected. The only leg for the concerned citizen
to stand on here is the provision that one show the proposal is
"contrary to the conservation of water within the state."
So
let's investigate the idea of conserving water.
Under
the San Augustin plains in this high desert country is an aquifer,
what remains of a Pleistocene lake. The proposal is to extract billions
of gallons of water and pump it through dozens of miles of pipeline
to the Rio Grande River, where what doesn't evaporate can be channeled
into unsustainable agribusiness or other uses, what's left trickling
on down to Texas. As the aquifer is depleted by water mining, one
can foresee that wells will fail for towns like Datil, and for the
ranches in the vicinity, until eventually perhaps it will all become
uninhabitable, a ghost region.
Obviously,
this water mining project - probably greased with the usual sorts
of unsavory government-corporate connivances - will not conserve
water in this arid region. Even an imbecile could see that at a
glance. Indeed, the project would pump out billions of gallons of
ancient underground water and dump them into the shallows of the
Rio Grande - until when? Until the aquifer is depleted? The whole
profligate project is the very epitome of squanderville, so absurdly
anti-conservationist that one can scarcely believe it has been proposed,
let alone seriously considered.
From
what I've heard, bellicose local ranchers and townspeople oppose
the project, and perhaps they will prevail in derailing this particular
water mining project. I hope they do. But their success in this
instance, if it comes, will not change the American mining mentality,
the inclination to deplete whatever can be depleted until there
is nothing left.
This
mining mentality explains a great deal about American attitudes
toward the land more generally. I asked a group of university students
recently what they thought would happen if this New Mexico water
mining plan was approved. Would the water miners eventually stop?
Or would they deplete the aquifer down to the very last drop if
they could, and then kick a stone into the dry hole? I was curious
to hear what the students would say.
They'd
use it up, the students replied. Right down to their neighbors'
last drop.
Arthur
Versluis teaches American Studies at Michigan State University,
and is author of various books, including Island Farm and The New
Inquisitions. He can be reached via his website, www.arthurversluis.com
©Copyright
Arthur Versluis
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