Unsavory Solutions To A Healthy Rio Grande

Co-op Connection is normally one of my favorite and most trusted sources of information about environmental issues, especially as related to food.

However, the article by Allan Savory in the June Co-op Connection, “Water Catchments: Managing for a Healthy Rio Grande,” is an unfortunate exception to the usual high standards of this publication. Savory is more concerned with fabricating a scenario to justify grazing in the bosque than in presenting a factual analysis of the needs of the Rio Grande.

The management strategies advocated by Savory for the Rio Grande are unnecessary for flood protection and completely out of line with what is needed to restore the environmental health of our beautiful Rio Grande.

In order to understand the problems with what Savory advocates and what is needed for environmental restoration of the Rio Grande, it is necessary to understand what the Rio Grande was like in its natural, healthy state and how people have changed the river.

Before extensive human use of the Rio Grande, the river did not dry up except in the most extreme and prolonged droughts.

The river flooded annually in the spring. The Rio is one of the most sediment-laden rivers in the world. As rushing flood waters slowed and receded, the sediment carried by the river would drop out. The sediment would periodically block the flow of the river, and the river would shift its channel to lower ground.

The result was a river that moved back and forth over time in a broad floodplain consisting of a patchwork of flowing water, backwater marshes and ponds, meadows, and cottonwood/ willow forests.

As humans put the river to use and controlled its flow to meet their own needs, the river and surrounding lands changed radically. Large amounts of water were removed from the river.

The river now dries up almost every year in some reaches. Dams have controlled the flow of the river to eliminate spring flooding in much of the bosque. Flooding is necessary for cottonwood seeds to germinate and to help recycle nutrients.

Further, levees have narrowed the once expansive floodplain and bosque to a thin strip along the river. The river has been channelized so that it will stay in one location, changing the character of the river from a wide, shallow, slow-flowing river to a narrower, faster-flowing channel.

The Rio Grande silvery minnow, a federally listed endan-gered species that currently exists only between Cochiti and Elephant Butte Reservoirs, requires shallow, slow-flowing water.

Riverside drains (those canals running parallel to the river just outside of the levees) were constructed to drain the surrounding land. Biologically productive marshes and ponds, formerly common, have all but disappeared.

Moreover, three diversion dams between Cochiti and Elephant Butte Reservoirs act as barriers to fish migration.

Because of the presence of the diversion dams, almost all surviving silvery minnows have become trapped in the stretch of the river between the San Acacia diversion dam and Elephant Butte Reservoir. Unfortunately, this is precisely the area that is most vulnerable to being dried up during the irrigation season.

As a result of the alterations described above, half of our native fish species are extinct or, at least, extirpated from the middle Rio Grande; other wildlife has disappeared or suffered striking declines; and our beautiful cottonwood forests are living on borrowed time.

The solution to restoring the health of the river does not lie in creating a fast-flowing river between stable channels as advocated by Savory. Instead, to the extent possible, we need to mimic what the river was like before it was so drastically altered.

A healthy Rio Grande needs controlled flooding of the bosque inside the levees in the spring. We need to expand the floodplain in places where it is feasible to do so (obviously NOT urban areas). We need more shallow, slow-flowing water and more backwaters and wetlands.

We need to remove the diversion dams and employ alternative means of taking water out of the river so that silvery minnows and other fish can migrate freely.

Savory is simply using flooding as a scare tactic to justify his ultimate conclusion, that we need cattle in the bosque. However, cattle are notoriously destructive in riparian areas.

They trample or eat the vegetation and demolish streambanks. Cattle would be a sure recipe for yet more environmental devastation of the bosque.

Rivers are more than catchments, more than plumbing systems, more than forage-producers. They are living parts of our wondrous, green planet.

What Savory is advocating has nothing to do with environmental health, flood protection, or the facts.

Savory is simply promot ing the agenda of some cattle-growers of grazing regardless of the environment damage it causes.

Savory’s ideas should be shunned and disdained by anyone who cares about the Rio Grande.