The Battle to Save New Mexico’s Last Wild River

[Judi Lynn]

The Battle to Save New Mexico’s Last Wild River

by Chris Williams / January 9th, 2016

Somehow the watercourse is to dry country what the face is to human beauty. Mutilate it and the whole is gone.
— Aldo Leopold, Conservationist in Mexico, 1937

… these subsidized water projects, they’re not really intended to serve growth, or to meet growth, they’re intended to create it.
— interview with M.H. “Dutch” Salmon, author of ¡Gila Libre!, August 2015

New Mexico’s Gila is not a big river. At least, once it has left the state, along its lower reaches, it’s not a big river anymore: Once it wends its dammed and diverted way through Arizona, it becomes a dry, sandy-bottomed reminder of a once living, powerful water course several miles wide – the epicenter of human cultures stretching back millennia. But now a new threat, closer to its source in New Mexico, has returned.

For the fourth time in as many decades, the last wild-running river in the state is threatened by the re-emergence of a giant river diversion and water storage plan. Despite intense and growing local opposition, that plan took an ominous step forward on November 23. On that day, the US Department of the Interior signed an agreement with the Central Arizona Project Entity to study options to further evaluate potential water projects related to the Gila River, one of which is the proposed diversion and storage plan. The proposed diversion project, if enacted, will radically alter the flows and pathway of New Mexico’s Gila River, threatening its rich ecological tapestry.

Resources for Empire: The Gila in Historical Context


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Nightime over the floodplain of the Gila, stupendous natural beauty. (Photo: Chris Williams)
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While the Gila may not be a large river, the fight to preserve the wildness of the Gila has intense symbolic, historical, cultural and contemporary meaning. It raises a socio-ecological question of far wider significance: How should we approach and treat the natural world and see our relationship within it? When deciding on such a giant infrastructural project, with whom should the final decision rest?

More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/01/the-battle-to-save-new-mexicos-last-wild-river/