Book Review—At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate

At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate
By Laura Paskus
University of New Mexico Press (2020)
https://unmpress.com/books/precipice/9780826359117
187 pp.

Review by Merideth Hildreth, AICP

“ELEVEN YEARS INTO a new millennium, New Mexico was warmer than it was even a decade ago. More than half of the state’s native plants and animals have already been affected by climate change: some bird populations have shifted; some flowers bloom earlier. Sand dunes spread as the vegetation dies that used to anchor soils. Conifer forests suffer die-offs due to the continuing drought and booming population of bark beetles. Day to day, we have low river flows, dry soils, and wildfires.” Published in 2020 by the University of New Mexico Press, At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate explains what New Mexicans have been seeing, feeling, smelling, breathing, and observing for the past couple of decades. 

Criss-crossing the Land of Enchantment, Laura Paskus’s journalistic prowess guides us on a reality-check journey showcasing the very real and very current climate crises impacting New Mexico’s natural, cultural, political, historic, and social landscapes. This book is not just a compilation of Paskus’ nearly 20 years of environmental reporting in New Mexico and the gleaning of information from scientific reports, climate conferences, and interviews with scientists, university researchers, state, federal, tribal, and non-profit land managers. Paskus’s work is an awaking to the devastating environmental consequences “that burning up millions of years’ worth of carbon in only a century” has already wrought on New Mexico and New Mexicans.  

At the Precipice is a harbinger of the even harsher environmental and economic future facing New Mexico and the Southwest as temperatures rise and precipitation and snowpack decrease. “Not taking action on climate change also harms New Mexico, one of the places in the United States where the impacts of rising temperatures—due to rising greenhouse-gas emissions—is most pronounced. The Southwest is among the regions in the United States that are most vulnerable to climate change. Already, warming is affecting surface and underground water supplies, increasing large wildfires, and causing large-scale tree die-offs along with other environmental, economic, and public health impacts. New Mexico is the sixth-fastest warming state in the United States, with average annual temperatures expected to rise 3.5 to 8.5°F by the year 2100, according to a 2016 report released by the Union of Concerned Scientists.” 

Interestingly, in 2014 “New Mexico came under international scrutiny” when satellite imagery revealed a “concentration” of methane gas in the Four Corners region “showing that the largest methane anomaly in the United States hovers over northwestern New Mexico.” Subsequent studies of the plume identified over 250 emitters of methane, 10 percent of which “were responsible for about half of the methane emissions in the San Juan Basin.” In this same chapter, “The Old Normal, Or Politics as Usual,” Paskus discusses the disparities (effort or lack of effort/policies/or rolling back policies) among international, federal, state, and tribal political leadership in effectively managing the complex dynamics involved in conserving natural and cultural resources, human health, economic development, extractive industries, and the warming climate. “No matter how much scientists understand and communicate about the reasons behind climate change and the impacts warming will have on ecosystems and human communities, action on climate change is left largely in the hands of politicians.”

Unprecedented wildfires have ravaged New Mexico’s forested mountain ranges. In the chapter, “Mourning a Mountain,” Paskus bears the bad news about “mountainsides full of trees that are dying” a phenomenon known as a “forest in transition.” Paskus recounts twelve of the New Mexico wildfires that occurred between 1996 and 2017. In June 2011, Las Conchas Fire raged in the Bandolier National Monument and ultimately burned 156,000 acres in the Jemez Mountains, the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history until the 2012 Whitewater-Baldy Fire burned 297,845 acres of the 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest. “In our warmer world, ponderosa pine stands don’t necessarily come back. Instead, they give way to Gambel oak and New Mexico locust. Pinon and juniper trees die off, their hard carcasses thronged by wavy leaf oak and mountain mahogany.” Thousands of acres of burn scars devoid of vegetation and charred soil no longer able to absorb water have resulted in massive flooding and watershed destruction. After the 2011 Las Conchas mega-fire, “the floods that followed the fire destroyed more buildings as well as privately owned orchards in Dixon and the Pueblo of Santa Clara’s watershed.” 

It’s no small consequence that a chapter titled “Mourning a Mountain” has a familiar ring. “Part II Sketches Here and There” in A Sand County ALMANAC written by conservationist Aldo Leopold and published in 1949 includes the essay “Thinking Like A Mountain.” Leopold recounts the pivotal story that as a young man he was “full of trigger-itch” and found himself shooting at a wolf and reaching her in time “to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” Paskus’s poetic prose passages about natural settings reflect Leopold’s nature journal entries that found their way into print in A Sand County ALMANAC. Paskus even retreated to Aldo Leopold’s cabin Mi Casita in Tres Piedras, New Mexico to compile notes, think, and write the At the Precipice manuscript.

Following Paskus on this thoroughly researched narrative journey through New Mexico’s drought-stricken mountains, aquifers, reservoirs, forests, plains, deserts, rivers, basins, tribal lands, cities, towns, oil patches, pecan orchards, and ranches, we gain a greater understanding of the interplay of factors contributing to a “hotspot” of warming. “New Mexicans are already watching how fossil-fuel extraction, “hot drought,” and record-breaking temperature records play out in terms of forest fires, water challenges, and public-health impacts.”

Because At the Precipice contains interviews and storytelling about environmental concerns, some readers may be reminded of the research and eye witness accounts in Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (published in 2006 as A Mariner Book by Houghton Mifflin Company) about the Dust Bowl that “covered one hundred million acres” of the Southern Great Plains during the 1930s. Indeed, Paskus has read Egan’s masterpiece that won the National Book Award. It is noteworthy that Egan writes about the Ogallala Aquifer’s decline due to irrigation practices “at a rate of 1.1 million acre-feet a day.” However, Egan also offers the good news that droughts in the Southern Great Plains in the 1950s, 1970s, and 2000s “made the soil drift. But overall, the earth held much better. Why no second Dust Bowl? In 2004, an extensive study of how farmers treated the land before and after the great dusters of the 1930s concluded that soil conservation districts kept the earth from blowing. There was also irrigation water from the Ogallala to compensate for drought, but it was not available in many parts of the dry farming belt. What saved the land, this study found was what Hugh Bennett had started: getting farmers to enter contracts with a soil conservation district and manage the land as a single ecological unit.” (p. 311) Hugh Bennett, who was “part of a team hired by the government to do the first comprehensive soil survey of the United States” had the tenacity to challenge “his old employer, the Department of Agriculture for misleading people. Farmers on the Great Plains were working against nature, he thundered in speeches across the country; they were asking for trouble. Even in the late 1920s, before anyone else sounded an alarm, Bennett said people had sown the seeds of an epic disaster….What people were doing was not just a crime against nature, he said, but would ultimately starve the nation.”

Almost a century later, Paskus has sounded a similar alarm. At the Precipice is an urgent call to action to change the way New Mexicans and the people of the Southwest think about and communicate about environmental planning and policies. Present-day generations are at the precipice and are sliding down the cliff face past the tipping point in turning back the clock on carbon and greenhouse gas emissions induced climate change. We can no longer proceed in a “business as usual” mentality. 

At the Precipice is a must-read for every tribal, federal, state, and local policymaker, planner, politician, rancher, farmer, educator, land manager, and water resource manager in the Land of Enchantment and neighboring states. We must understand where we stand in the current climate crises, where we are headed if we fail to act differently, and the importance of spending the necessary monetary resources on planning, policy revisions, engineering, adaptive management strategies, and “transformation ecology.” Paskus has provided the eye-opening foundational research and studies in an easy-to-read format that can serve as a guidebook to help us make better-informed decisions.  Paskus now calls on us to engage in the planning part of the journey. “Based on our understanding of how the earth and its atmosphere function, we know that the more carbon we add to the atmosphere, the warmer our planet will get. We lack good excuses to avoid planning.” While we are planning, we must acknowledge our dire situation and expedite with all haste the implementation phase of the journey for the sake of ourselves and future generations.

About the Reviewer

Merideth Hildreth, M.A., AICP is a Board Member of The New Mexico Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA-NM); Planning & Zoning Administrator for the City of Roswell, NM; New Mexico State University (NMSU) Geography Department Adjunct Instructor – Environmental Planning Course Spring 2021; and Vice President of the Friends of Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge. In 2019, Ms. Hildreth completed a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies (CAGS) in Urban Justice and Sustainability at Tufts University in the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Department. Ms. Hildreth received a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning/Urban Studies from the University of Akron in 1991, and a B.A. in History from Texas Tech University in 1987.