Fwd: Megadrought
Molly Molloy
From: Vanessa Johnson from Notes from the Beautiful Periphery <vjel...@substack.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 12:24 AM
Subject: Megadrought
This past week we witnessed the full strawberry moon, and this coming Friday we’ll celebrate the summer solstice, when we have the most light-filled day of the year. For the ancient peoples of this region, the sky and sun spoke to them, and the solstice was a time to listen, to rebalance, to celebrate. In the Southwest, it was a time to usher in the rainy season and the growth of corn. We had our first heavy rain last week, and it washed the dust and pollution from the sky. The next morning when I hiked the mountain, I saw some bright fuchsia flowers peeking out, perhaps for just one day, winking in gratitude to the skies.
Or as my friend John Philip Newell wrote this week, “We are made to live in the flow of life unfolding, not in opposition.” When I expressed an interest in environmental issues as a pre-teen, my dad gave me a copy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, which I still have on my shelf. While his knowledge on the topic was limited, he knew enough to ask questions about living in the desert and he sought an architect in the early 1980s who would build a passive solar adobe house. It was oriented with the south-facing windows, and included solar panels for heating water, which was rare at the time. Furthermore, his love of plants led to the nurturing of a xeriscaped yard (behind the field of grass in raised beds), a biodiverse feast of color that was featured in national magazines at the time. As a child who loved to play outside, I became very familiar with the plants, trees, and cacti, my skin a dark brown by the end of each summer. After we grew up and stopped playing ball in the backyard, my parents removed the grass and replaced it with gravel and a rock garden. On summer weekends, I grew up visiting Elephant Butte Lake (a reservoir on the Rio Grande) with extended family. When that dam was built in 1916, it was the largest dam in the United States, and the second-largest in the world after the Aswan Dam in Egypt. With more than 2 million acre-feet of water, we could jump from Helen and Doc’s backyard right into the lake; today it’s at least another half a mile descent to reach the shoreline. Looking back on my writing from years ago, the first time I wrote about drought was in 2011, when I was pregnant with my oldest son. I wrote, “This past summer, wildfires scorched much of the land. Blackened grasses, scrub mesquite and creosote remain as evidence of one of the region’s more severe droughts. The days without rain stretched well past 100, with wildlife and plants alike showing signs of extreme stress.” We were on a road trip through West Texas to Ojinaga, and I was writing primarily about brush fires that charred areas next to the highway black. I was still teaching skiing in the winters in Southern New Mexico, despite dwindling snowfall each year; the good years being fewer and farther between… Now a teenager, that son has never seen the lake more than 15 percent full, with bathtub rings of white around the canyons, has never seen the mountains with snow still melting in June.
The Southwestern United States, including El Paso, New Mexico, Arizona, has been in a period of megadrought since about the year 2000. This study published in Nature Climate Change looked at tree-ring data to confirm that the period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest span in at least 1,200 years. The impact of this megadrought has been felt in higher temperatures, lower water reservoirs, lack of precipitation, and stress on plants and whole ecosystems. This means that in order to find comparable examples of multi-decade droughts that affected societies, we have to go back even past the Ancestral Pueblo peoples of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, who abandoned their sites in the 13th century. Perhaps they moved towards the Rio Grande or other wetter sites, joined other groups, or simply perished. Yet all stories that tackle the human condition are in some ways stories of loss and disintegration. All the baubles we build and campaigns we undertake will eventually come to an end, and there is also some comfort to that. I remember reading a book called “The World Without Us”, about what would happen if humanity disappeared overnight, and how quickly nature would come into balance. There was a lot about construction, and the ways that water and plants quickly destroy solid buildings.
In Alaska, I lived on Baranof Island, which only had a sprinkling of buildings, but was once the largest White settlement in Alaska. The temperate rainforest had taken over the buildings, which were built in the 1900s. A mere century later, they had become only a collection of empty concrete frames with trees growing within and coming out the windows. In the afternoons, I’d go running on trails that wound through this ghost city, appreciating the cyclical. Alaska, with other northerly regions of the globe, is experiencing the effects of climate change at a faster pace than other parts of the US, due to what is known as Arctic amplification, which makes the extremes more pronounced nearer to the poles. Thawing permafrost wreaks havoc on buildings and roads. Temperatures are reaching greater extremes, and weather events are stronger. Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau set two records of glacial outburst flooding in the years 2023 and 2024, something not possible without climate change. Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is seen as a major contributing factor to our current megadrought. Because it is often described as an “existential” problem, as well as too large for one possible human being to consider having an impact, we tend to think of it happening over the longer term. But that’s no longer the reality. Our climate is rapidly changing, and the threat is indeed existential to the human race (as well as other species); not really to the earth, which will recover. It is clear that we are not in balance with our natural environment. There is no equilibrium. We like to pretend that we live apart from our climate. The Dustbowl migration is seen as ancient history in our future-oriented minds. Our lifestyles encourage waste with air-conditioning, water that turns on with a faucet as if by magic, and an obsession with driving everywhere all the time. The international asylum framework doesn't take into account the growing number of climate refugees. El Paso’s short-term history may be promising for speculators, but we will remain a blip on the historical chronology of this area. This region is home to the creatures who use little water and have evolved over millennia to do without and suffer extremes; the cactus species that thrive in the Chihuahuan desert, the rattlesnakes and lizards, and the predatory birds that are reminiscent of the dinosaurs who once roamed. Life that is smaller and more efficient than we are.
When I was studying German a few years ago, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Rilke’s “Book of Hours”, with both the German and English, and I kept returning to this particular poem. I love that it envisions a new season, even if not in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime. And it shows that we are essentially part of the earth and the cosmos. So I’ll end this post with it.
Notes from the Beautiful Periphery is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Notes from the Beautiful Periphery that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
© 2025 Vanessa Johnson
|
