Rio Grande No Longer 'Grande,' says USU Researcher

In the incessant din from international discussion of tangled issues surrounding U.S.-Mexico relations — border security, illegal immigration, NAFTA, human and drug trafficking, proposed fences (virtual or otherwise) — little attention is focused on environmental concerns impacting the nearly 2,000-mile border the two countries share.

Yet small groups of concerned citizens, landowners, government officials and scientists soldier on with environmental analysis of border regions and recommendations for intervention and infrastructure needs. Among these groups is the Good Neighbor Environmental Board, a federal advisory committee administered by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Cooperative Environmental Management.

 

The board, which provides border region environmental recommendations to the Bush Administration and U.S. Congress, recently invited Utah State University hydrologist Jack Schmidt to share his expertise about the state of the Rio Grande River. Known as “Río Bravo del Norte” in Mexico, the river originates in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and courses southeast some 1,800 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1845, the river has marked the political boundary between Mexico and the United States from the twin cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, eastward to the gulf. 

 

“I told a very depressing story,” says Schmidt, professor in USU’s Department of Watershed Sciences in the College of Natural Resources. “Essentially, the Rio Grande, one of North America’s longest rivers, has been severed in half.”

 

Once a wide, sandy river, vast stretches of the waterway dividing the border now resemble an irrigation ditch and are choked with invasive vegetation, he says. Not much water makes it beyond the thirsty, burgeoning cities of Juárez and El Paso and their northern neighbor, Albuquerque, New Mexico. At Big Bend National Park, where the river cuts through the Chihuahuan Desert about 250 miles southeast of El Paso, the Rio Grande is entirely dependent on water flowing from the Rio Conchos, its Mexican tributary, says Schmidt.

 

Prolonged drought and growing water usage in the already arid Rio Conchos basin have made water distribution between the United States and Mexico a politically contentious issue, he says. “NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) has sparked tremendous migration to the U.S.-Mexico border.”

 

As a result, increasingly scarce water from the Rio Conchos is supplying growing agricultural, industrial and residential demands of the Mexican border states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, along with similar demands from Texas to the north.

 

“It’s an almost hopeless and intractable situation,” says Schmidt, who is currently working on a federally funded research project focused on evaluation of the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. The project also involves determination of a realistic set of targets for the river’s rehabilitation and restoration.

 

Though the border population has surged in recent years, siphoning of the Rio Grande for irrigation and other uses been taking place since the first widespread, permanent settlements of region more than a century ago. Humorist Will Rogers, who died in 1935, made the wry observation, “The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.”

 

“Choices made by society decades ago have created the current situation,” says Schmidt. “To restore a river, you have to have water. People must agree to make an intentional effort to reverse the damage from past choices.”

 

As for where to go from here, Schmidt and colleagues face the daunting task of determining feasible remedies for the diminishing river channel. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘Is it possible to return the river to its past condition or do we just try to maintain what’s left?’”

 

Schmidt directs the new USU-based Intermountain Center for River Rehabilitation and Restoration, which was started with funds provided by federal appropriation in 2006. The center conducts annual short courses in stream restoration science and practice and provides outreach expertise to government agencies and the public.

 

“ICRRR was established within the Department of Watershed Sciences and guided by the vision of department head Chris Luecke,” he says. “Its central goal is to improve the scientific foundation of the practices of small stream restoration and large river management.”

 

As for the Rio Grande, Schmidt says the river’s management may be among the most difficult environmental challenges our nation faces. “The (river’s) underlying problems are not unique,” he says. “We face these challenges on the Colorado and Columbia Rivers and at a smaller scale among the rivers that drain to the Great Salt Lake here in Utah. We have a great challenge to fulfill the water needs of society and recover threatened species and valued ecosystems.”

 

 

 

Contact: John C. “Jack” Schmidt, 435-797-1791