A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William deBuys (review)

If, as some cheerful souls like to say, there are winners and losers in the accelerating warming of our planet, then the American Southwest is clearly a loser. Midway in his timely and important book William deBuys compares the problems confronting this region to river rafting through the Grand Canyon, using his explosive plunge down Lava Falls Rapid, rated ten in difficulty on a scale of ten, as a central image. De Buys describes how members of his paddleboat contemplated the churning, rock-strewn stretch of white water minutes before the descent: “The new folks turned a shade paler under their sunburns,” while the old hands had the “set-jaw look of a rider about to mount a horse known for nasty habits” (130).

Spoiler alert: the author’s boat has a perfect run. The larger point, however, is that the equivalent of Lava Falls Rapid lies ahead for those of us living comfortably in the desert cities and pretty rural places of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and parts of surrounding states. We are drifting in the flat water now just above those rapids, relatively unalarmed by some of the early effects of climate change. Importantly, our own imminent plunge will be without a guide. No one has scouted these hazards before. No one can tell us when to paddle fast and which rocks to avoid.

To some extent, however, the scientists and policy makers deBuys interviews for A Great Aridness are trying to fill that role; looking downstream, they hope to calculate what is going to happen next. Their answers—another spoiler alert—are neither comprehensive nor optimistic. But for the moment this is the best forecast we have.

Most obviously, increasing temperatures will mean more evaporation and general aridity. In a land already characterized by little rain, there will likely be less of that and certainly less snow. Runoff from winter snowpack will come earlier and more often as flash floods. We’ll see more dust in the air, less moisture in the trees, more tree-devouring insects, and many more forests burning down. Ecosystems will shift, ponderosa pine to scrubby oak, grassland to mesquite and shrub.

People will need to make changes as well. Growth-oriented cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas will have to adopt new strategies. Politicians must learn how to put aside regional agendas in order to create a long-term, big-picture plan for the diminishing Colorado River, on whose water some thirty million people now depend. We will all have to rethink what is already one of the world’s most dangerous and violent borders—the line between the United States and Mexico.

Across the board global warming in the Southwest will challenge us morally, artistically, economically, politically, and socially. De-Buys’s triumph is to summarize, in clear and elegant prose, those challenges as they appear today. Our triumph will be to meet them.