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Laura Paskus

About Laura Paskus

Posts by Laura Paskus:

Laura Paskus Coyote dry river 2025

Love in a Time of Climate Change: The Intersection of Reality and Hope for New Mexico’s Rivers

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Along the stretch of the Middle Rio Grande where I frequently walk, birdsong is scarce this spring, even in the early mornings. Already, more than 40 miles of the Middle Rio Grande are dry. Reservoirs are low, irrigation season will end early, and a handful of small fires have already burned in the bosque.

Soon, when river drying moves upstream into Albuquerque, I’ll witness how the fish, turtles, beavers, coyotes, porcupines, javelina, and other wildlife suffer. Insects, bats, and other pollinators will be affected. The cottonwoods that dropped leaves when their roots couldn’t reach water last summer — yet still tried leafing out this spring — won’t survive another hot, dry year. And I have a hard time thinking about what will happen in September and October when the sandhill cranes start arriving.

Coyote walking the Rio Grande, Laura Paskus 2025 photo
Coyote walking the Rio Grande, Laura Paskus 2025 photo

Of course, it’s comforting to tell ourselves that there will be good years and bad years. Or to hope for a decent monsoon or more snow next winter.

Along the stretch of the Middle Rio Grande where I frequently walk, birdsong is scarce this spring, even in the early mornings. Already, more than 40 miles of the Middle Rio Grande are dry.

But as the Earth keeps warming and the Southwest becomes increasingly arid, the bad years hit more frequently — and much, much harder. Especially when forests and rangelands and orchards are dusty and dry all four seasons and into the next water year.

And every year the Middle Rio Grande (or any once-perennial river) dries, we lose our resilience and our ability to listen — to the river and to one another.

I first started reporting on drying in the Middle Rio Grande 24 years ago this spring. At that time, officials tried to hide the fact. Other people blamed it on “drought.” Today, we all know why the Rio Grande dries: There’s less water in the system. There are too many demands. And in states like New Mexico, rivers lack rights to their own waters.

For more than 100 years, too many of us have treated New Mexico’s rivers like ditches, pipelines, and perpetual machines engineered to serve our wants and needs. Too few of us remember that rivers have power, desire, and needs of their own.  And our rivers have a lot to say — including this spring when almost all of them are extremely low.

FIGURE – New Mexico water conditions from 153 USGS monitoring stations. Downloaded on April 28, 2026.

Scientists have been warning about warming, aridification, and increased water challenges for decades. And New Mexicans everywhere see the impacts of climate change in heat- and drought-stressed forests, dry riverbeds, burning landscapes, dust storms, heat waves, and bare mountaintops. Even if a so-called Super El Niño brings rains to New Mexico this summer, it won’t solve our long-term water challenges. Indeed, it will likely lay bare our vulnerabilities to extreme rains and flooding — and not just in places recently ravaged by wildfires.

In this moment, each of us must listen and witness. We must choose to take care of one another. And in these dangerous and challenging times, we must talk about how to better protect tribal water rights, sustainable agriculture, communities — and our rivers, streams, and wetlands.

During times like these, when people worry about their own water, competition and hardship weaken our ability to cooperate or care for another — let alone the more-than-human world.

But neglecting or harming our rivers and the species we share this Earth with doesn’t make us safer or stronger. It makes us weaker and far, far lonelier in the long run.

In this moment, each of us must listen and witness. We must choose to take care of one another. And in these dangerous and challenging times, we must talk about how to better protect tribal water rights, sustainable agriculture, communities — and our rivers, streams, and wetlands.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by global and national events, while ignoring the influence we have in our own neighborhoods and communities. For example, how many of us called or wrote state legislators earlier this year, urging them to fund state agencies, protect rivers, address climate change, and take the state’s water challenges and inequities seriously?

With that in mind, there are steps anyone can take in this moment — to dispel despair and inaction. And to take part in a future that’s better for all of the state’s waters.

  • Visit (or recall) a beloved water body. Imagine a sustainable future for the river, stream, or wetland you love. Listen to what water is telling you.
  • Share your story and write to elected officials about how they can better protect the state’s waters. Explain why water is precious and meaningful to you and your community. Remember to hold elected officials accountable. Especially those you voted for or supported during election season.
  • Have an intimate conversation about what New Mexico’s rivers need and deserve with at least one other friend, neighbor, or family member. It’s okay to disagree. But keep talking.

In these dangerous and challenging times, it’s up to us to be brave, with love in our hearts, and listen to what water is telling us. Indeed, there is no real other way forward.

Source NM Paskus article lead photo

Climate change, overuse send the Middle Rio Grande into ‘dire’ situation

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This article was written for and published by Source New Mexico on March 20, 2026, and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Under this license, the article may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes with attribution to the original author and publication, without modification. All photos by the author appear with captions per the original article. Read the original article at sourcenm.com.

The Middle Rio Grande in July 2025, drying at the Montaño Bridge in Albuquerque
In July 2025, drying in the Rio Grande had reached the Montaño Bridge in Albuquerque. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)

Last summer, the Middle Rio Grande through Albuquerque dried for about 50 days. This year, the river will dry again — as early as May.

Irrigation season will be short, fire danger will be high and Albuquerque’s largest drinking water utility will again switch from diverting river water to relying exclusively on groundwater.

Long-term data reveals clear warming and drying trends, said Jason Casuga, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s chief engineer and CEO. And New Mexicans experience those changes in their daily lives.

The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District charging the irrigation system in mid-March
In mid-March, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District started “charging” the system. Irrigators should schedule water deliveries in the coming weeks. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)

“People see a river drying that they didn’t used to see dry, see mountains that are through their snowpack earlier than they’ve ever seen,” Casuga said. “Maybe some folks can debate why that’s happening, but the reality is there is less water here now.”

With an early heat wave gripping the watershed, the Middle Rio Grande might swell in the short-term, but by the end of April or early May, Casuga said, things will “look very bleak.”

Systems are breaking down right now because the hydrology of the river is “just that bad.” That calls for hard conversations, he said, about farming practices, managing invasive plant species in the bosque, complying with the Rio Grande Compact, and much more.

“Nobody has to agree, but we have to be willing to have the conversations and then push our leaders to make good decisions,” he said. “We can’t just go to sleep and hope it gets better tomorrow. We have to change, and that change needs to be flexible.”

Water security at ‘grave risk’

The dry terminus of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque in August 2025
The terminus of the state’s largest river in Albuquerque, captured in August 2025. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)

For more than two decades, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area Office leased and released water from upstream reservoirs for endangered species and to keep water flowing through Albuquerque. Supplementing the river that way “kind of masked the effects of drought, of a warmer climate,” the agency’s Water Operations Supervisor Carolyn Donnelly told Source NM.

“For many years, we’d have a bad snow year but (people) still saw in Albuquerque, the river flow. So, they could think, ‘It’s not that bad,'” said Donnelly. “But really, it was that bad.”

Now, there’s no water to spare in the watershed’s reservoirs. On the Chama River, a tributary of the Rio Grande, Abiquiu Reservoir is 61% full; El Vado, 13% full; and Heron, 7% full. That’s the lowest Heron Reservoir has been since it was filled in 1971.

The Rio Grande Basin is coming off its warmest winter on record, with the mountains suffering a major snow drought. But overconsumption was already putting water security on the Rio Grande at “grave risk,” according to a study released late last year. That study of the watershed in the U.S. and Mexico revealed that 85% of the water used in New Mexico from the Rio Grande is “fundamentally unsustainable.”

Former New Mexico Interstate Stream Commissioner Norm Gaume believes New Mexico’s overuse of water in the Middle Rio Grande “compromises the water security of the entire state.” And he thinks New Mexico is headed into another “compact battle,” like the 12-year-long U.S. Supreme Court battle on the Lower Rio Grande.

Under this year’s “dire” conditions, the state will have an even harder time complying with the Rio Grande Compact, said Gaume, president of New Mexico Water Advocates.

Already, the state is under-delivering to water users in southern New Mexico and Texas, creating additional legal restrictions for water managers. New Mexico’s current debit to Texas exceeds 132,000-acre feet of water, and it’s expected to keep growing.

And while the state might experience a healthy monsoon or robust snowpack from year to year, the long-term trend toward less water in the region’s streams, rivers and reservoirs is clear. “This is not a drought, this is aridification,” said Gaume. “Droughts are climatic, but they’re expected to end. This is not expected to end, and it’s wishful thinking to imagine it will.”

The public needs political leaders to tackle the Middle Rio Grande’s problems as an “existential threat,” he said. “As a water resources engineer, I have that training, but I also have this deep respect and love for rivers,” he said. “Water is a life force. It doesn’t just come out of a tap. It exists naturally, and we are totally failing in our stewardship responsibilities — not only to our detriment and the detriment of the natural world, but to the detriment of our progeny.”

A coyote searches for water in the dry Rio Grande channel in Albuquerque, August 2025
A coyote searches for water in the channel of the dry Rio Grande in Albuquerque in August 2025. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)

Climate change dealing a ‘bum hand’

The Middle Rio Grande includes two “types” of water in the system: water native to the Rio Grande watershed and its tributaries; and San Juan-Chama water, contributions from the Colorado River system diverted into the Rio Grande via Heron Reservoir and the Chama River.

After the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Plant came online in 2009, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo Water Utility Authority could draw that water directly from the river, the aquifer in Albuquerque “rebounded really well,” according to Mark Kelly, the utility’s water resources division manager. In certain parts of the city, groundwater levels rose by about 40 feet.

Since the utility has regularly shifted back to groundwater pumping in the summer, that upward trajectory has “flattened off.”

Climate change is “dealing us a bum hand” in terms of snowpack that makes it through the series of tunnels, diversions and siphons that moves water from the Colorado River system into the Rio Grande’s San Juan-Chama Project, said Kelly.

Already, the utility’s 100-year water resources management strategy accounts for a hotter, drier future. But the plan is being updated, Kelly said, “to make sure that some of the assumptions we’ve made in terms of climate change and demands are still aligned with our total water portfolio.”

In the meantime, the Middle Rio Grande will keep drying, often for longer expanses and durations. Fish, wildlife, and habitats will suffer. The bosque’s trees will die, dry and burn. And year after year, people will become more accustomed to seeing the dry riverbed.

“It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, where we are all guilty because nobody has taken leadership,” said Gaume. “As a society, we should know better — and we do know better — but we haven’t acted yet.”

The dry Rio Grande in Albuquerque in summer 2025, showing impacts on plants, wildlife, and water delivery
When the Rio Grande dries, as it did in Albuquerque in the summer of 2025, plants and wildlife suffer, farmers can’t receive water, and deliveries to downstream users are affected. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)