In the case of the Rio Grande, which stretches from Colorado to the Gulf, this isn’t just some idle riddle. This river is one of the most threatened in the country and its fate is very much tied to the future of the Lone Star State.
Texas Monthly contributor Jack Herrera said each year less than 15% of the natural flow of the Rio Grande makes it to the delta.
“In huge stretches, hundreds of miles of stretches along this river, it’s already running dry. And this is a huge problem because over 15 million people depend on the Rio Grande for their drinking water,” Herrera said. “The worst estimates see millions of these people running out of their drinking water, potentially within the next year. This is not a problem that’s a decade off. This is happening right now.”
Herrera spent the last year traveling the entire length of the river, starting at the headwaters in the mountains in Colorado.
“I traveled along the river following that water all the way down through Colorado, through New Mexico to El Paso. And when you get about 70 miles south of El Paso, the Rio Grande goes away. Most of the year it runs dry through a stretch that locals call ‘the forgotten reach’,” he said. “But there’s something like three million Texans who depend on it for their drinking water downstream. So, where’s that water coming from?”
The answer comes down stream, Herrera said, and has international implications.
“If you keep following the Rio Grande, you get to Presidio, Texas, just outside of Big Bend National Park. And there, another river from Mexico called the Rio Conchos hits the Rio Grande and rejuvenates the river,” he said. “For the last few decades, really the last hundred years, most of the water we’re talking about, almost all the water we’re taking about in South Texas, where so many people rely on this river for their drinking water, is coming from the Rio Conchos. And so today, Mexico controls the spigot of the water that Texas relies on.”
Herrera said there are several factors causing the Rio Grande to run dry, but that some researchers have stopped referring to this as a drought. Instead, they use the word “aridification.”
“There are a lot of researchers who argue that this isn’t a temporary drought,” he said. “This is a fundamental shift in the climate where this part of the world is getting drier and we can expect less rain and less snow.”
But even if we do use the word “drought,” it’s been centuries since the Rio Grande saw conditions like these.
“It’s one of the worst droughts in the record. The last time North America was being affected by a drought of this scale was back in the year 800,” Herrera said. “But the thing that’s shocking is that that is not the greatest threat to the Rio Grande. The real engine of this crisis is overuse downstream.”
Herrera said that given the state of the Rio Grande, at this point it’s better to think of it as two rivers.
“There’s the upper Rio Grande and then it runs dry and then becomes a lower Rio Grande. And now you see both of those rivers also beginning to collapse,” he said. “The Rio Grande doesn’t run in El Paso for many months of the year. It doesn’t reach the Gulf for months at a time. And so you see this river really in a state of complete collapse. We’re not just talking about it dying in the future. It’s essentially dead, and we’re waiting for the remaining supplies to dry up.”
This leads to complicated questions about what to do next, Herrera said, especially because the vast majority of the water from reservoirs along the river go to agriculture.
“A lot of people who don’t live in farmland look at this issue and they see 87% (of the water) is going to agriculture and they say ‘we can solve the problem.’ We get rid of agriculture, then there’ll be enough water to keep the river healthy and enough water,” he said. “But obviously it’s such a much more complicated issue where these farmers didn’t create the system of overuse — they live within it.”
But regardless of the policy approach, Herrera said it’s clear that something has to change.
“The only solution to this problem is finding out a way that we can use less water, specifically in agriculture, but other industries as well,” he said. “There’s no future of the Rio Grande where we can continue using water at the rate we’re currently using it.”
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