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That's an interesting and disappointing story, but not obscure. Perhaps it's happening less than it used to. It shows that the fake shaman really didn't understand - and/or didn't want to understand - that it wasn't really a drought. He needed a reason for those people to participate (pay money) in the fake rituals. These types need to be shunned and reported. They serve no effective purpose - quite the opposite. I have an acquaintance who lost a family friend in that James Earl Ray fiasco where people died in one of his sweat lodges. The more these terrible people are reported upon and kept in the news, hopefully fewer people will be scammed into fake and deadly sweat lodges, fake spirituality and spiritual appropriation.
I may be wrong, but I don't think water is going to be that much of a problem in New Mexico. The years are ebbing and flowing, just like they always have.
My younger sister and I have been pondering this question for the last six or seven years.
We both own houses in Maine. She still lives there while I bailed for Deming, New Mexico, then Ojai, California – our hometown – following teaching jobs, and now have tenants in my Maine house.
Our retirement plan – or rather, our Third Act Employment™️ plan – is to haul horses commercially. She has been moonlighting at this while she works to keep lobstermen from shooting each other as a Maine Marine Patrol officer. Mostly retired, I have a part-time teaching job, and dabble in teaching riding and moving horses, too.
Best case scenario, we have a foot in the West and a foot in Maine. We cannot touch California's property prices on retired public servant pensions, so New Mexico, a place we both love, seems like a possibility. Maybe because we lived through fires as kids and I came back to Ojai just in time for the Thomas Fire, fire doesn't spook me nearly as much as running my well dry.
My well in Maine is reliable, and its water is delicious. While I may have just talked myself out of buying in the southwest, I have seen horse friendly places east of ABQ that look affordable, or at least comparable to my Maine property, specifically around Stanley, maybe north to Galisteo.
Any thoughts from Team NM?
Property values have sky rocketed. East mountains is difficult if you are retired, you don't have easy access to healthcare, and water might be iffy. Usually a well has to be drilled in that area 800 or more feet, very expensive. I live in Albuquerque but have property north of Cedar Crest. I lived there for 3 years but ended up having to move to Texas to get a job. I would love to live up there again but the neighbors on that area are crazy, hiding from the IRS, preppers waiting for the end of civilizaation, etc. Edgewood might be better, but still, hard to get to town and little access to health care.
There are places north of Albuquerque that would be easier, like Bernalillo and Los Ranchos (though it has gotten way too expensive).
I am far from a doomsday seeker. I can only go off of what water tables are at where I live (Las Cruces). The main issue we have here in my view is the abundance and continual growth of pecan trees. Pecans cannot grow unless there's a lot of water. At some point, there's going to have to be a hard cap in my view when it comes to harvest. But there's a problem with that: people love em! And keep eating them.
Those pecan farms are the largest in the U.S. and Stahman farms also owns the largest pecan orchards in the world in Australia. If they hadn't sold water rights to El Paso the farmers would not be in the shape they are in down there. My brother in law has been farming in that area since the 70's, when he took over his dad's farm and inherited his granmother's farm. He recently retired but still keeps an acre by his house with a very nice garden. He has a well so he wasn't affected like his neighbors, who take money from the state to leave their fields fallow.
Thanks for the responses. We’re gonna try to make a trip to NM soon to look again at the devastation of the Hermit’s Peak fire and try to figure out if we want to rebuild.
I currently live in Texas but two years ago I bought a house near Las Vegas (NM). I spent as much time as I could there and the long term plan was to move there permanently. Then the Hermit Peak fire happened and it destroyed my house. Not just that fire but in general reading about the many other fires in the southwest, the massive drought, the drying of lakes, etc., I have been wondering if I should try to rebuild in NM (which I loved before the fire charred my house and my soul) or find somewhere else to live that doesn’t have a water problem (maybe Appalachia). The governments of the southwest seem to be stuck whistling past the graveyard regarding the megadrought. What say you?
Well, in Texas no one is whistling. In the Houston metroplex area, for example, water restrictions have been put in place by city governments and one cannot water one's yard except on certain days. And one gets fined for violating the restrictions, up to $2000. This is an area where green lawns are a fact of life, the norm. and now everything is turning brown. Power companies are telling customers to cut power usage drastically and meanwhile, it's 105 degrees outside every day and has been since June.
Global warming IS HERE despite looney-tunes climate deniers, and the heat and droughts we're currently experiencing in the Southwest will only get worse. In our lifetimes anyway. New Mexico is wonderful, but don't pick a house within shouting distance of a forest. Sooner or later, it WILL catch on fire.
Texas is experiencing the worst drought in decades and temperatures have been the hottest since 1880. Where I am, there has been no appreciable rain in three months. Friends in New Mexico tell me they have not had their normal rain either. In Houston, an area that for the last hundred years has consistently been hit by hurricanes this time of the year, the drought is extreme and there's been no sign of a hurricane in the western Gulf of Mexico in the last two summers, while my friends in Naples, Florida, on the west coast, who never had hurricanes in the past, have been hit by hurricanes several times in recent years.
So - everything is changing. The global warming pattern is giving us hotter summers and colder winters. Houston has had winter temperatures down around nine or ten degrees a couple of times in the last five years, the coldest since 1930. People lost power all over town, for as long as a week. Hurricane Harvey was six years ago and dumped 11 inches of rain on Houston. Almost no rain this year.
None of this is going to change soon. Google "drought in New Mexico" or in whatever place you're interested in and that will take you to drought.gov, which will show you maps and give information regarding current drought conditions pretty much anywhere in the States.
So if you have the option to choose a new place, go for the mountains of North Carolina or maybe Georgia. Very pretty there. Appalachia may be promising. And I hear Oregon is nice.
Well, in Texas no one is whistling. In the Houston metroplex area, for example, water restrictions have been put in place by city governments and one cannot water one's yard except on certain days. And one gets fined for violating the restrictions, up to $2000. This is an area where green lawns are a fact of life, the norm. and now everything is turning brown. Power companies are telling customers to cut power usage drastically and meanwhile, it's 105 degrees outside every day and has been since June.
Global warming IS HERE despite looney-tunes climate deniers, and the heat and droughts we're currently experiencing in the Southwest will only get worse. In our lifetimes anyway. New Mexico is wonderful, but don't pick a house within shouting distance of a forest. Sooner or later, it WILL catch on fire.
Texas is experiencing the worst drought in decades and temperatures have been the hottest since 1880. Where I am, there has been no appreciable rain in three months. Friends in New Mexico tell me they have not had their normal rain either. In Houston, an area that for the last hundred years has consistently been hit by hurricanes this time of the year, the drought is extreme and there's been no sign of a hurricane in the western Gulf of Mexico in the last two summers, while my friends in Naples, Florida, on the west coast, who never had hurricanes in the past, have been hit by hurricanes several times in recent years.
So - everything is changing. The global warming pattern is giving us hotter summers and colder winters. Houston has had winter temperatures down around nine or ten degrees a couple of times in the last five years, the coldest since 1930. People lost power all over town, for as long as a week. Hurricane Harvey was six years ago and dumped 11 inches of rain on Houston. Almost no rain this year.
None of this is going to change soon. Google "drought in New Mexico" or in whatever place you're interested in and that will take you to drought.gov, which will show you maps and give information regarding current drought conditions pretty much anywhere in the States.
So if you have the option to choose a new place, go for the mountains of North Carolina or maybe Georgia. Very pretty there. Appalachia may be promising. And I hear Oregon is nice.
We should be doing the exact opposite - abandon development in the Southeast and build the Southwest. Humans can easily adapt to anything climate change throws outside of sea level rise. Plants aren't so adaptable. Some of the most stressed habitats in the US are the Carolinas and Georgia - the level of undisturbed habitat there is nowhere where it needs to be, and this habitat can rapidly grow if given the opportunity. Thankfully Atlanta's shot down a 2nd ring of highway to kill development further north, to keep some of this from turning into mass suburbia. New Mexico doesn't have the same endangered or nearly as biodiverse habitat, this is where we need to throw up houses.
Same thing with Oregon, also a biodiversity hotspot. Keep that wild.
Is fire risk going up? Yes, some, though not tons because plants are more drought tolerant and moist with more CO2 in the air despite hotter conditions. They are mitigating WAY more than they used to, all across the entire west. They've cleared thousands of acres in my local area this summer alone, primarily around development. The risk today is lower than it was 10 years ago. This summer had no major fires between CO and NM, which is an anomaly in the good direction. While the climate setting makes some risks more prominent, land use makes the actual fire risk go down.
Colder winters are an anomaly of the jet stream wobble, if it was colder in TX, it was much warmer in Canada where that cold air came from. Winter is by far the fastest warming season on whole.
All those homes would need water, we don't have any to spare.
Ha! clearly you don't see all these acequias flood irrigating acreage for grazing cows. You can put a lot of homes up with the acre feet of water they dump out on pasture. There's plenty to go around. Cows aren't necessarily for life, that's just someones cash industry.
Having lived in the plains of Northern New Mexico (near the Sangre de Cristos) I can attest that the local cattle people control the water, and it flows whenever they want it to, and in my area it came from Santa Fe. The whole area gets its water from Santa Fe. I lived directly next to an irrigation ditch built in the mid-1800's. It flows when they want it to flow, and it doesn't when they don't. (Local "water board")
Do you think the cattle people are going to support water going to new homes instead of their cattle land? They control the water.
The idea that New Mexico and the rest of the Southwest should be built out is absurd and dangerous. And where do you get the idea that the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia are "stressed?"
Having lived in the plains of Northern New Mexico (near the Sangre de Cristos) I can attest that the local cattle people control the water, and it flows whenever they want it to, and in my area it came from Santa Fe. The whole area gets its water from Santa Fe. I lived directly next to an irrigation ditch built in the mid-1800's. It flows when they want it to flow, and it doesn't when they don't. (Local "water board")
Do you think the cattle people are going to support water going to new homes instead of their cattle land? They control the water.
The idea that New Mexico and the rest of the Southwest should be built out is absurd and dangerous. And where do you get the idea that the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia are "stressed?"
The cattle people are over 60 and low on funds too. In the end it goes to development cause the $$$ for the water is way more than any farmer or rancher has. Boulder / Longmont CO used to be a big ranching and grazing area, look at it now.
There's a lot of water flowing through those ditches and the whole state. The San Luis Valley is one giant aquifer. The water crisis is a complete fabrication used to hold up inefficient ranching and ag. Look at Iraq, 43 million people in a more arid area that's a little bit larger than NM, you're gonna tell me New Mexico is tapped at 2 million and no more? Absolutely not, 10 million easy could live here, there's nothing dangerous about that...
Have you been over to that side of the country? They have basically 0 virgin forest and pretty small percentages of public land, it's sliced to pieces by roads, and they don't have much at all in terms of the large animal herds we have here in places like the Tusas mountains. Just because they've been decimated by Americans since the 1600s doesn't mean it needs to stay that way. Both areas, Appalachia and the longleaf pine forests are 2 of the most productive ecosystems in the entire US. If anything needs to be protected, it's that.
You're going to tell me it's better to slice up that and put houses there than the sagebrush pinon lands of NM???
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