In your lifetime, you could go back to the place in which you were created— that taught you what the world is like, that created you— and not recognize it. As the atmosphere warms and the seasons shift, it might not feel the same as you remember. The trees you’ve come to know might be gone, their absence felt as there is nothing to greet you in a new season. The mountains in the distance that anchored your place in the world might be charred and barren. You can sit in their shadow, only to reminisce, as their silhouette reminds you of what once was.
Swelling with soot, the Rio Grande runs black as it churns through the valley. The ashes of an ecosystem lost inundate the channel. Sediment dams the river, building up between the levees constructed to tame the river’s meander and periodic flooding. Laid bare is the insignificance of human engineering when compared to the transformative forces of fire and flood.
The dense stand of cottonwoods that line the river’s bank quiver in the wind, seemingly at the sight of the funeral procession that marches before it. The smell of smoke billows from the river as it cascades from the watershed’s highlands. The Jemez Mountains stand scorched and barren after a high severity wildfire immolated nearly everything in its path. Ponderosa pine snags decorate this scene of desolation in the absence of a lush, green canopy.
“Landscape is a function of climate,” remarks Anne Tillery, a geomorphologist who has spent her career working for the US Geological Survey in the Rio Grande Valley. The black river, the scorched earth, and the boney ponderosa stands are a result of a series of land management decisions, aided by an average atmospheric warming of 2 and a half degrees over the past 40 years in the valley.
Anne has witnessed the increased scope and severity of wildfires in the Rio Grande watershed within her own lifetime. The 2011 Las Conchas Fire was one of the largest wildfires in New Mexico’s history, burning nearly 150,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest.
Among the scorched earth, there is nothing left to cling to. As monsoon rains made landfall on the newly burnt landscape, massive amounts of sediment washed away. Babbling brooks swelled with rainwater and flooded the narrow finger canyons. Charred ponderosa snags, skeletons of their former selves, were mobilized by the flooding. Log jams formed, scraping the canyon walls. “I mean, the landscape, it just unraveled,” Anne lamented. “Right after the fire, I was literally weeping. I was so upset. And I walked out to this overlook, and the sun went down, and I was just crying and crying. And then once the sun went down, you couldn't see that it was burned anymore, and it had the same exact profile that it always had. And all of a sudden I was like, ‘You know what? The mountain doesn't really care.’” Even if the mountain doesn’t care, the people who witnessed the fire’s destruction do.
Walking through the uncanny valley of a landscape you once knew turned unrecognizable, your eyes may cry. A twinge in your chest as your heart strings are weighed down suggest an irreconcilable loss has occurred. As this upwelling surfaces, you are no longer apathetic. In the midst of ecological disaster, you can grasp onto reverance for the lost. Will you lose yourself in the valley of disdain and inaction? Will your eyes glaze over as another scene of desolation washes over you? Or will you reconcile with this loss, holding it within yourself to create change?
As high severity fires burn and flames engulf forested hillsides, entire forest ecosystems will be lost. Forever maimed. You can walk through the scar of the landscape you love knowing that it’s no fault of the fire that bare twigs protrude out of the scorched earth like bones from a ribcage. Because before the scorched earth, there were decades of fire suppression. Forests grew thick and unforgiving as land management agencies put out nearly every fire that started. The forest nearly forgot the gentle embrace of a low severity wildfire gracing its understory. What will be forgotten as the landscapes we know change before our eyes? What ecological knowledge will be lost?
The destruction of forests by high severity wildfires is just one example of grief in the face of ecological loss. Within the Rio Grande watershed, this loss is prompted by poor land management decisions, climate change, and the damming of waterways.
As the smoke dissipates, and the black ashes of an immolated ecosystem wash down river towards the plains of Mexico, the river remains unrecognizable to its former self. The Rio Grande churns down a channelized corridor constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. A series of dams and levees constrict the river’s characteristic meander. Severed from the wetlands, most of which have been drained to make way for roads and housing developments, the Rio Grande can no longer engage in a cycle of periodic flooding.
As the floodplain forgot what it felt like for the Rio Grande’s silty waters to wash over it, the valley’s cottonwood trees began to disappear. A cottonwood will release tufts cradling their seed to be carried by the flood water as it spreads through the valley. As the flood recedes, the seed will plant itself in the damp soil that remains. Sprouted roots will chase the groundwater as it retreats into the river bed. A cottonwood emerges, its bark growing gnarled. The deep, interlocking wrinkles seem to reflect the wares of time and hold the history of where water has overtook the valley floor. Left without a means to repopulate, the cottonwoods are confined to the banks of a systematically managed river, void of its meander.
A network of irrigation ditches stems from the Rio Grande like veins from a beating heart, leading to a small farm in the South Valley of Albuquerque. The desert sun beats down over Chispas Farm on an unseasonably warm late October morning. Purple eggplants peek through a tangle of green vines and leaves that form rows across the farm. As the frost arrived much later than usual this year, the farmers had to adjust their harvesting schedule. Ethan, a farmer at Chispas explained, “It does hurt a little bit to pull out live plants. It is important for me to notice that persistent feeling of something being slightly off or wrong or out of sync with how things are supposed to be or how things usually are.” As climate change causes the seasons to shift, relationships to the land will as well. “That, I think, is a pretty important feeling to pay attention to. It might point me towards more climate grief or climate change action,” Ethan noted.
Where will you feel the earth’s undoing? Will your eyes weep as a landscape unravels before you? Will the sweaty sheen on your skin feel unsettling as the sun beams overhead weeks after an autumnal equinox? Will your heart ache as your hands grasp to pull out live plants, still growing green on the vine after far surpassing their growing season? When we lose landscapes, we lose a part of ourselves. Reverence is resistance to apathy in the face of ecological loss. Ruminate in your grief. Question why it hurts, why it feels off and unsettling, and why you are weeping. You may find the antidote to inaction amongst the ashes.
