New Mexico's Acequias: Irrigation and Social Organization

©EOP

Social stability is the last but perhaps the most important of irrigation's "3s", for without adequate social organization and long term stability, irrigation is impossible. In the United States a variety of cooperative, local, state and federal agencies act to provide the necessary social organization for water management, with the Federal Bureau of Reclamation the best known and largest entity. That federal agency has been responsible for the development and maintenance of a series of huge projects in the western United States including the Colorado River projects, the Columbia Basin Project and parts of California's complicated water management system. All of those systems have venerable ancestries. Immense irrigation projects under centralized control were known to the ancient societies of Mesopotamia, while small and locally controlled irrigation projects date to long before the beginnings of recorded history in all arid and semi-arid parts of the world where agriculture has been practiced.

The state of New Mexico, one of the longest European settled parts of the United States, has a tradition of irrigated agriculture stretching back well before the first European contact. With parts of the Colorado River projects and large ones along the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo del Norte) New Mexico is something of a microcosm of virtually all of the types of irrigation water control known in the western United States. It also has some of the more complicated water laws, for it is a mostly arid state but also has high mountains where melting winter snows are the sources of exotic rivers, most notably the Rio Grande and its largest tributary the Pecos. Allocation of that water is a complicated task, a task made increasingly difficult by drought years when mountain show is scarce. In addition to dividing water between users who live within its boundaries, New Mexico is obligated to send water to downstream users on the Rio Grande, the Pecos and several smaller streams into Texas and Mexico (and in a less complicated set of relations to downstream users on the Colorado - New Mexican users of water destined for the Colorado are few in number).

Snow in New Mexico, 16 March 2005

source: NASA Earth Observatory

Acequias in New Mexico (with a few also in Colorado) are numerous, almost 1,000 of the gravity driven channels bring water from highland areas for use in towns and agricultural plots. They are also very old, brought to the area by settlers from Mexico and Spain who were familiar with community operated irrigation first in Spain and later in New Spain (Mexico). Some of the canals themselves may actually date to pre-contact groups, for acequias use an ancient technology widespread where snowmelt in nearby mountains allows agriculture on downhill sites. The social organization in pre-contact groups is for the most part unknown, and some of the current aspects of acequia management may have roots there, but the acequia associations are quite similar in character to much older ones in México and in Spain.

While ancien regime Spain and its colonies were not in the remotest sense of the term democratic in almost all aspects of governance, acequia associations were participatory democracy in its most pristine form. Yearly or more often those who had a share in the water delivered by an acequia met, a mayordomo (ditch boss) or leader was chosen, and both the allocation of water and of tasks necessary to keep the channels open, free of silt and debris, were made by common consent. A kind of corvée was in effect, for peasants were compelled to spend time working on the channels, but instead of working for benefit of the state or the nobility as in other corvée, they were working for the common good of their local community and for personal benefit.

The acequia associations of contemporary New Mexico share that characteristic of participatory democracy (no, New England town meetings are not the only example of direct democracy in the United States). For the past several decades the associations have become legal entities and an integral element in the management of water in New Mexico. Beneficiaries of the water are compelled to participate in the maintenance of the ditches, and in years of drought they must make the difficult decisions on how to allocate the scarce resource.

Folr a fascinating look at acequias and the experience of being a ditch boss in New Mexico, see Stanley Crawford's Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico.

Drought I

2006 Drought, Union County, New Mexico

© EOP

Today the Los Angeles Times stated "California's drought may be over, but no one's rushing to lift restrictions."  Meanwhile, in a story posted on Huffington Post.com  the former BBC reporter and current Oxfam representative Caroline Gluck wrote "Millions face severe hunger in Niger." Both the southwestern quadrant of the United States and the Sahel region of Africa have been through prolonged dry spells, drought that put severe strains on water supplies. In Southern California that means a little less water for the garden and restrictions on using water to wash cars and sidewalks. In Niger it may well mean mass hunger or even famine. The el Niño conditions of the past autumn and winter brought rainfall to the southwestern region of the US, and for the first time in several years runoff and stream flow have allowed reservoirs to be filled and discussion of lifting restrictions on water use. No such relief is in sight for the Sahel, and while food is available in the markets of towns and cities, subsistence farmers face starvation because they lack the means to purchase food and their fields are unproductive.

Drought is one of the most difficult of natural conditions to predict and even to define. Most climates are characterized by annual dry spells. Mediterranean climates like that of California have dry summers with most of the precipitation falling in the cooler months of autumn and winter. Monsoonal climates, the climate of south Asia, are characterized by a dry cool season and heavy rain during the summer months. Adaptation to annual variation is not too difficult if there is adequate precipitation in the rainy season. In a drought wet season precipitation is inadequate to meet dry season demands. If that absence of precipitation should extend over a number of years, the drought is considered severe.

The most famous drought in the United States was that of the 1930s when "dust bowl" conditions prevailed over a large swath of land extending south from the Dakotas to Texas on the High Plains, the western margins of the Great Plains. The Seattle writer Tim Egan tells the story of the drought in the region where Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas adjoin (including Union County, NM pictured above) in his harrowing The Worst Hard Time. While dust storms and similar conditions have not returned, that same region has been under severe water stress over the past 5 years, a drought that has cut agricultural production and led to some economic dislocations. Only widespread use of ground water from the Oglalla aquifer has allowed field crops to thrive in the region.

In future postings we shall examine both drought and groundwater resources in more detail.

Water Law and Water Rights

Water rights are among the more complicated issues in civil (as opposed to criminal) law in the United States as well as in in many other countries divided between humid and arid zones and in all countries where groundwater is a major source of drinking, agricultural, or industrial water. As I am not a lawyer, I cannot pretend to understand all of the legal ramifications, but water law and the rights to the use of water which the law establishes are crucial matters in national and especially in state and local politics in the United States and many other countries, including the larger English-speaking countries Australia and Canada.

The rights to use water in the western United States are appropriative and relate to the actual use of the water and the length of time that use has been ongoing. Large areas of land west of the 100th Meridian (pace John Wesley Powell, Wallace Stegner, and Walter Prescott Webb) are essentially useless, for no perennial streams cross them and the rainfall is inadequate for crops, and in some instances even for occasional grazing. Only with access to water is the land useful, and governance of that water has been a key theme in the development of states of the western Great Plains and in the intermontane west. As a general rule, the first users to claim water from a stream had long term rights to the use of that water. Under this appropriative doctrine common in states of the western United States, water rights continue to be granted until rights to all of the water in a stream have been granted. Those rights presuppose the actual consumption of the water so that it is not returned to the stream. Even landowners next to a river or smaller stream may have no rights to use it if all of the water has been appropriated, a situation quite different from that in eastern states where riparian rights prevail and anyone owning land along a stream has rights to the use of the water in the stream. In humid areas the use is assumed generally not to be consumptive, and water used is returned to the stream so the downstream flow is undiminished. Of course, the situation in reality is never quite as simple as the law might suggest, and disputes over water rights are common on the dockets of the Federal courts and those of civil courts in the various states.

New Mexico provides a good example of the complexities of water law in a western state, one where appropriative rights are paramount. Water rights are a crucial matter when agricultural land is sold, and there is fierce competition for available water supplies by urban areas. The election for a new governor in November has brought water issues to the fore in a state where drought and population expansion have increased water demands as supply is diminishing. The almost always fascinating blog from Aqua Doc has a good piece on this issue.