On the first day of March, I peered from an overlook in the direction of Lake Powell, toward the sluggish waters of the Colorado River.
Boats clung to the floating dock at Wahweap Marina, the lake a tiny shock of blue surrounded by red and brown fingers of emergent lands. I screwed a zoom lens onto the body of my camera and spotted a distant reflection upstream — a sliver, a snake, a seep of water.
As seven U.S. states continue scrambling over water negotiations, in early March, Lake Powell was 25% full. Downstream: Lake Mead, 33%full. In New Mexico, conditions on the Rio Grande are even drier: Elephant Butte Reservoir is 12% full; Caballo, 7. With low snowpack in both watersheds, those numbers aren’t likely to improve.
The signs of climate change are undeniable across the globe, including here in the U.S. Southwest, and the fingerprints of colonialism, violence and greed smudge every snow-bare mountain; drying reservoir or river; and charred or gasping forest.
The Rio Grande is my home river, but the Colorado River watershed also feeds places like Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Four years ago, while reporting on the Colorado’s declining flows, I interviewed Andrew Curley, a Diné geographer and professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Geography, Development & Environment.
The Colorado River’s crisis far predates climate change, Curley said: For Indigenous people, the crisis occurred when Anglo settlers and farmers colonized the lands and staked claim to the river. The crisis happened when the U.S. government and states divided the waters of the Colorado amongst themselves, building the infrastructure we see today, like dams, concrete canals, tunnels and (drying) reservoirs.
It’s impossible to divorce colonialist infrastructure from climate change
“If you take it from an Indigenous perspective, if you take it from the Navajo perspective, the Diné perspective or Hopi perspective, you’re going to see that the [Colorado] River has been in crisis for quite some time, going back to these first incursions into the region, going back to the construction of the Roosevelt Dam along the Salt River,” Curley said. “Once the colonialists came in and started to dam the river and change the ecology, that’s when the river started to go into crisis.”
And it’s impossible to divorce colonialist infrastructure from climate change: “The river was never meant to sit the way it does behind the walls of these dams,” Curley said.
Flanked by tourists snapping selfies and smoking cigarettes earlier this month, I looked down at Lake Powell. The U.S. and Israel had just begun bombing Iran.
“Even being moved physically off of our land at the end of a bayonet onto Hwéeldi, into Bosque Redondo on the eastern end of New Mexico — that’s between 1862 and 1868. That is an apocalypse moment for us, and we survived that, and we overcame that, and we made a new world in the Navajo Nation after that,” Curley said during that 2022 conversation. “There’s a lot to learn from Indigenous people’s ability to respond to these catastrophes.”
Consider the values of a society that survived crisis and catastrophe, he said — and compare them with the culture causing the catastrophes.
Scientists first briefed the White House and Congress on climate change in 1965. Rather than cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the American empire grew more ravenous, expanding the use of toxic chemicals and collaborating with private industry to create more petroleum-hungry weapons of war. Meanwhile, U.S. leaders consistently opposed and thwarted international climate efforts — the Trump administration’s record on climate change is abhorrent, but the U.S. Senate never even ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, that first international treaty to reduce emissions.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military grew into the “single largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” according to research by Brown University’s Neta C. Crawford.
Today, it’s clear that water- and energy intensive AI data centers — with all their manufactured urgency — are another tool of the U.S. government’s military-techno-industrial complex.
Yes, developers clamor for us to employ AI across our phones and computers, something we can each resist. But the military requires more computing power than any grandma liking Facebook memes or high school student fudging an assignment with Claude or ChatGPT.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries use AI in their bombing operations to “shorten the kill chain” and bomb targets “quicker than the speed of thought.” Last week, Los Alamos National Laboratory hosted an AI for Operations Symposium for almost 200 U.S. Department of Energy representatives in Santa Fe. This week, the head of U.S. Central Command said advanced AI tools “help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds.”
Meanwhile, seas rise, ice sheets and glaciers melt, and in places like the U.S. Southwest, increased warming sucks more moisture from the air, soil and waters. Globally, warming spurs the spread of certain diseases and leads to crop failures, migrations and conflicts. And a study released last week shows that warming has “accelerated significantly” in the past 10 years.
The science on climate change is clear. And so is the need for a moral reckoning.
There’s no better moment for urgent action and new alliances. No better moment to protect communities — near and far — from the accelerating impacts of climate change. No better moment to work for peace, justice and equity.
There’s no better moment to reckon with America’s catastrophic legacy of violence and to decide whose values we share — because for millions of people, not to mention more-than-human species and ecosystems, there’s little time left.