As we move into another dry, warm winter here in the high desert Southwest, it’s sometimes hard to believe that this may be what we are going to experience for the indefinite future: warmth, little snow, the drying up of the Colorado River and the desertification of this enormous area. It seems odd to me that the warmth should be so welcome, the need to wear heavy outdoor clothes reduced, as though this deadly change is really all for our comfort and convenience. I go on watering, availing myself of an irrigation system, and trying not to think what I will do when the aquifer, which is steadily retreating, becomes unreachable.
We are late catching up with the reality of global warming here. I had a big pond, dug twenty years ago, which has been a delight for me and others, but is it really stainable? We are almost certain to get a big fire sooner rather than later, and my pond is the only source of water that a fire engine could use; we don’t have city water here and the wells we all use would not be sufficient for a big fire, and would be very difficult to access. This is typical of the Southwest, houses build years ago and also recently at the edge of the national and state forests—our gems—on mountainous land that should never have been used for building.
But in this life everything is transitory. Small comfort, but to my mind, reality is comforting as well as alarming.
And this community does pull together. Fifteen years ago, we had subzero winter temperatures—this was before the full effect of global warming—and two homeless men froze to death. All the churches here, of every denomination, came together to create a shelter, raised the three million dollars needed, and managed to acquire permits from the city as long as the shelter was not near the plaza or a mall and was on a bus line. So The Interfaith Community Shelter, in a former pet store called Peter’s Place, thrives due to the work of hundreds of volunteers from the churches and the community at large, and no one has frozen to death in Santa Fe since it opened, which has a special meaning for me.
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