Book Review
Tom Barry
Abandoned farmland in Ascensión/Tom Barry
While at a party in Washington, DC two weeks ago I found myself blurting out that I thought that the water crisis in northern Mexico and across the border into the U.S. Southwest had far more serious social and economic repercussions than the Mexico Drug War.
But could I back up that assertion? Should or could the two
crises even be rightly compared?
Having since read A
Great Aridness by William deBuys, I come to conversation about climate
change and the particularly devastating impact it is having on this region
better informed and more alarmed.
Certainly there’s nothing to compare with the horror of the
drug war. How do you compare the nine tortured bodies hanging from a Nuevo
Laredo bridge and the fourteen decapitated bodies found elsewhere in the city a
couple of days ago with dusty overgrazed ranchlands and precipitously dropping
groundwater levels?
I will be traveling this week to the Chihuahuan borderland
region that stretches from Ciudad Juárez to the Sierra Madre Occidental. No one
there makes the comparison. Nor should I.
The fear, sense of personal insecurity, images of drug-war
related violence are personal, immediate, and nightmarish. In contrast, no one
is being tortured to death by the water crisis, or even dying. Tens of
thousands of Mexicans have fled this war-scarred region for the safety and
relative wealth of El Paso. The land is cracked and eroded, the wells are
drying up, and the cattle are starving. At least not yet, however is there a
stream of drought refugees fleeing the great Chihuahua dust bowl.
From Juárez to Janos, Chihuahua city to Casas Grandes,
Chihuahuenses are starting to talk openly about their collective fear that the
past is not the future. The period of cyclical droughts is being overtaken by
an era of endless climate-induced drought and relentless summer heat. Dying
trees, dying cattle, and dry arroyos that someday soon may again carry the
runoff from the hills.
Although it may be still years distant, the Mexican Drug War
will eventually end, as drug corridors shift and drug policies change. What
will not change, however, is the warming climate change that is quickly reconfiguring
the landscape and society of crossborder region that spreads north from the
Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts to the Colorado Plateau.
Alarmism is a political tool aimed at boosting political
campaigns and attracting federal pork in the form of border security funds.
Drug-war related violence stops, with rare exceptions, at Mexico’s northern
border. But there’s “A Great Aridness”
that knows no boundaries and merits the concern – and yes, alarm – of the
residents of what deBuys describes as the arid but increasingly water-hungry
region he calls the “North American Southwest.”
Ranchers of Ascensión lament the region's water crisis.
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If you love this land “fabled for its beauty, severity, and geological nakedness,” you will that deBuys shares this profound connection with the Southwest of Georgia O’Keefe and Aldo Leopold. And these ties to the mesas, grasslands and montane forests of Southwest make A Great Aridness more than a doomsday vision – which is surely is – than a heartbreaking call for us to wake to the signs of a climate change that will inalterably destroy our homelands.
DeBuys, relying on extensive research, interviews, and
landscape readings, makes that case that we are experiencing a “global-type
drought.” As one scientist he interviews reports, “What’s going to happen to
the West can be summoned up in three things: fire, dead trees, and dust.” The
author adds a fourth – “thirst,” pointing to the rapidly dropping water tables
in places like Janos, Chihuahua and the dramatic decline in water levels in
Lake Mead. A combination of factors, led by climate change and population
growth, is creating a vicious feedback loop that is changing landscapes beyond
the “range of natural variability” and rocketing us forward into grim ecological
future.
In the book’s introduction, de Buys warns that
“southwesterners and their oasis-based, aridland, hydraulic society will have
to reinvent themselves in new and undoubtedly painful ways.”
By the book’s end, after taking us through the riders of the
coming ecological and social apocalypse (“Drought, Fire, Pestilence, and
Discord”), this glooming initial assessment of the future seems an
understatement.
Readers will be grateful to the author for both his great
love of the North American Southwest and for his persuasively documented alarm
as to its – our –fate.
A Great Aridness:
Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest
William deBuys
Oxford University Press, 2011