  We’ve been driving all this week through New Mexico’s amazing landscape and one theme has remained constant: water, or the lack of it, is shaping the current terrain. As we entered the state, we drove from Tucumcari to Las Vegas, via Conchas Lake, which is down forty feet, and up Trujillo hill, a breathtaking pass that begins on the Llano and ends on the highland plateau that flows off the Rockies.
From Las Vegas, we drove by Story Lake, which was never a big lake, but is now little more than a marsh, on through Mora, and finally into Taos Valley. The Rio Grande cuts a deep slice through the highland plateau that slopes off the base of the nearly 13,000 feet mountains that tower above Taos, creating a gorge that for all of human history until fifty years ago, separated the living cultures of eastern and western Northern New Mexico. Today, the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge spans over 600 feet above the river, and connects the town of Taos to our Earthship community, which is situated just across the Gorge on the road to Tres Piedras. The perfect flat, soft spot where the balloons launched this morning on the Santa Fe side of Albuquerque was created by the regular flooding of the Rio Grande that is now made impossible by the many dams along the river.
Now, we’re driving along the Rio from Albuquerque to El Paso. As we passed Elephant Butte, a reservoir created by damming the Rio, it is clear that the water crisis did not miss the sleepy New Mexican town of Truth or Consequences. Here, too, the giant white stripe along the shoreline indicates where the water level remained for so many years that it bleached all the minerals that would otherwise color that sand and rock.
The Butte’s sister lake, Caballo, lies just to the south, only now instead of a lake, there’s a wide, green field next to a pond that’s maybe a mile long and a half mile wide. Nature never intended a lake here, so it feels strangely sanguine to see the empty hole that looks perfectly fertile for chiles, or the new crops of grapes that some say will make Southern New Mexico the next Napa. It’s amazing to think that this little, winding flow of water has shaped the destinies of lives in this area for hundreds upon hundreds of years.
In Hatch, it still fertilizes and quenches the chile crop. On the other side of Las Cruces, the Mesilla Valley is surrounded by pecan orchards, which irrigation lines allow the river to flood annually just as tradition intended. But just down the road, in the giant metropolis of at least 3 million people that is called El Paso in the US and Juarez in Mexico, the geographic location of a birth on one side of the river or the other determines that child’s propensity for malnutrition from poverty or obesity from affluence. One of the most populated regions of Juarez is what appears from I-10 in El Paso to be a shantytown made of cardboard and cinderblocks. From this barrio, residents can look out their doors and see a giant shopping mall to the Northeast and the University of Texas at El Paso to the Southeast.
No border patrol agent or immigration policy on Earth could stop the swell of heart a parent must feel when they hope they can allow their children to access these two institutions of capitol. It’s not that they like America more than Mexico, in fact, the affluence towering over them often breeds contempt. But every year the Rio Grande or the elements along it claim the lives of hundreds and thousands who try to cross simply so the hunger pains that plague their own bodies will not be felt by their children. Last year, for the first year in recorded history, the Rio Grande did not flow into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s life-giving waters were simply tapped too many times from its source to its mouth, and the cycle that is water’s journey from mountain stream to ocean swell to cloud was not completed.
Native Americans have long said the droughts we suffer now are caused in large part because the dams keep the offerings of the people from reaching the God of the ocean who replenishes water through rain. Any way one looks at the semantics, the chi or the energy of the water is halted by the efforts of man upstream. Ironically, the lakes formed by the dams are hindering even the purposes for which they were built. More water is lost through evaporation than could be saved by the constant access of a reservoir. Because the floods that used to fertilize and renew the fields along the river are halted, the silt they would scatter now clogs the bottom of the reservoirs. Along with the silt, dangerously consentrated poisons from runoff of fields treated with chemicals, highway construction materials, and airborn pollutants lie in wait for some future generation to right this wrong. 
