A year ago in April, a coalition of 20 organizations led by the Southwest Environmental Center unveiled a plan to save the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico and West Texas. But so far progress of the plan, along with SWEC's proposal to establish a Mesilla Valley Bosque Park along three miles of the river, is flowing as slow as the Rio Grande's murky, brown water on a cold New Mexico winter day. Taking little steps is the name of the game in this business. Until the project can obtain water from farmers in Texas and New Mexico, the first point of this plan is going to be on the back burner because we can't come up with the amount of water needed to sustain the project. And taking water out of the Mesilla Basin and treating it is very expensive.
Water is very expensive.
So, until we have water and money, this is going to be a slow process. The Rio Grande in southern New Mexico and West Texas has been highly modified over the past century to harness the river for irrigation and provide protection against flooding. The river's flows were dammed at Elephant Butte in 1916, and later at Caballo, putting an end to spring floods and winter flows needed to sustain the river ecosystem. The river was straightened and confined within levees in the 1920s and 1930s, thereby cutting the river off from its flood plain and severing the important link between aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Environmentalists say they now see that decades of annual mowing of the river's banks and frequent dredging of its channel helped speed the process of ecological unraveling.