Drought and climate change have created a tinderbox in the American West for destructive wildfires. Water sources like the Rio Grande have become vulnerable. Last year, a bosque fire burned 113 acres in this area. . Photo © Pablo Unzueta / Circle of Blue

In New Mexico, Partners Collaborate to End Siege from Megafires

The drying American West needs all the high-quality water it can get. It also needs adequate funds to protect its forests, the wellsprings of the region’s rivers.

But massively destructive, high-intensity megafires that now burn millions of acres and inundate the West’s rivers with ash and debris are punishing the beneficial relationship between forests and watersheds.
National forests are only 19 percent of the region’s land area but they supply 46 percent of its surface water while also filtering pollutants.
Federal and state foresters now recognize what Indigenous land managers have long known: that forests in the Southwest need low-intensity fire to rejuvenate. Several generations of fire suppression, together with a warming climate, have instead produced the conditions for catastrophic combustion that harms water supply.
In January, the U.S. Forest Service acknowledged its past mistakes and charted a new course for correcting the dire circumstances its forebears helped create.

Photo © Pablo Unzueta / Circle of Blue

Voices from the Drying Rio Grande

One of the West’s iconic waterways, the Rio Grande stretches nearly 1,900 miles from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. It is also under assault from a warming climate.

The Rio Grande stopped flowing for five miles through Albuquerque in July, the first time it ran dry in that reach in four decades.

The river is New Mexico’s largest and most essential watershed. In many ways it is the soul of the state.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

What’s Up With Water — October 11, 2022
Tune into What's Up With Water for your need to know news of the world's water on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and SoundCloud.
Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at:

A prescribed burn near Butler Creek in California's western Klamath Mountains clears 5.6 hectares (14 acres) of underbrush to serve as a firebreak when the next big wildfire races through the area. Photo courtesy Adam Shumaker / This American Land

Lighting Small Fires As Cure to Catastrophic Blazes in California

There are two primary tools for clearing fuel from the West's forests. One is cutting timber, a practice that has diminished significantly in public forests since the early 1990s, when efforts under the Endangered Species Act to secure the northern spotted owl blocked logging in old growth forests, the raptor's favored habitat. Loggers cut 1.4 billion board feet of timber from the West's public forests in 2012, according to federal figures. In 1952, logging companies took 6 billion board feet from public forests.
The second tool is deliberately igniting small fires -- called "prescribed" burns -- to remove the thick brush and small trees that fuel the catastrophic fires.