Don’t Scapegoat Environmentalists: Saving Minnows Saves Humans

A recent spate of newspaper articles about the shortage of water in New Mexico and southern Colorado has presented it as a case of people against minnows. This is nonsense.

The problem, in the short term, is one of misuse of water in a dry climate, and about the unwillingness of politicians to stop that misuse by powerful interests. In the long term, the problem will be met only by recognizing the abuses of the past, remedying those that can be remedied and setting limits on water use for other than essential human needs.

Scapegoating once meant the sacrifice of goats when we would not face problems. Now it seems we are about to sacrifice minnows. Once we looked for witches to blame. Now we look for environmentalists. Environmentalists don’t dry up rivers -- drought and overuse do that. When rivers die, fish die first ... then people go thirsty.

This is not an issue about fish. It is an issue about people. The Constitution of the United States does not protect the rights of minnows; instead, it protects the rights of people. Nobody disputes the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act. It is grounded in the fundamental truth that people will suffer unless the warnings that nature provides are heeded.

However complex in its technology, no civilization long survives unless its roots are in healthy, natural systems. No informed person disputes the truth that to be healthy, natural systems must be diverse -- they must sustain many species.

We cannot live successfully in a world in which one set of living things after another is exterminated, as a vicious circle of extermination closes in on ourselves. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piecemeal.”

The Endangered Species Act might have been written by Jefferson, or by the psalmist who rejoiced millenniums before the current sequence of extinction began: “O Lord, how manifold are thy works!” Jefferson’s was good economic judgment, and the psalmist once had cause to rejoice. But a wasteful people have inherited much of this Earth, and in their profligacy have sought for too long to get what they wanted when they wanted it. Heedless, they (we) have visited upon their (our) descendants the hideous consequences of unhealthy, impoverished, desiccated natural systems.

There is, however, wisdom yet to be received from those of the past generation who took another course and created the Endangered Species Act. They would protect minnows in rivers for the same reason they would put canaries in mines -- to warn people. When other living things suffer, people will suffer next.

In the upper Rio Grande Valley, there may be some water still left behind one dam or another, but the minnows are telling us that there is not enough to sustain current consumption -- let alone the greater demands that will come from more people moving in every day.

Wells have gone dry in many small towns, and so have long stretches of the Rio Grande itself. When that happened in the 19th century, before urban growth, the river was still able to hide patches of water in shaded puddles and bosques, and the aquifer lay just underneath.

Now we have set the river like a sluice within levees and jetty jacks, and the aquifer -- the underground water tank -- under Albuquerque has been drained beyond refilling. The big artificial ponds we have left behind dams evaporate even more water than the golf courses and cattle-feed fields consume. Only 1% of the river’s water goes to slake human thirst.

The Endangered Species Act is doing its job. It is forcing us to look at what we are doing, to set limits to wasteful uses and to make up our minds as to how a limited water supply should be allocated. All the scapegoating in the world will not restore the Albuquerque aquifer, nor will it bring back drinking water lost to golf courses and alfalfa fields.

In Albuquerque and in other cities, 30 times more water goes for turf irrigation, including golf courses, street medians and lawns, than for people to drink. As the supply of water to drink, or to use to put out fires, diminishes, the scapegoaters are prowling about looking to assign blame.

Meanwhile, the minnows are the latest victims of a process that will kill towns and then cities before it is done, unless we stop it now and get our priorities right. This is a time for statecraft, not witchcraft.