Southwestern Rivers > Rio Grande

The Rio Grande: A Once and Future Great River

Currently, the Rio Grande does not have rights to its own waters. After a decade of efforts to secure water rights for this great river, Forest Guardians is celebrating a huge success.

Due in part to Forest Guardians' work, the City of Santa Fe is implementing a program that gives community members the opportunity to restore and protect the Santa Fe River—and by extension, the Rio Grande—by contributing to the Living River Fund via their monthly water bill. Later this year or early next year, the City of Albuquerque will implement a similar program. Forest Guardians is working with other municipalities all along the Rio Grande to accomplish similar check-off programs.

View the Rio Grande Photo Essay
Check out a sample water bill with the check-off box
Read Santa Fe Mayor David Coss's statement
Visit the City of Santa Fe's web page for the Santa Fe River
View Living River posters
Give monthly contributions to the Living River Fund

History and Context

The mythical Rio Grande – which stretches nearly 2,000 miles from its headwaters in the snow-packed Rocky Mountains in Southern Colorado to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico – is the cultural and ecological lifeblood of our region. It has been the subject of great books, films, works of art and, with increasing frequency, many a battle over its limited water supplies.

Today this Great River is in dire straights, primarily because there are too many straws—agricultural, municipal and industrial—tapping its limited supplies. In addition to water diversions and ground water pumping, pollution, development and habitat destruction are threatening the Rio Grande and its Bosque. As a result, many of the more than 400 species of fish and wildlife—including the Rio Grande silvery minnow—are in danger of extinction.

The Good News

But there is hope for this Great River to thrive again. Water bill check-off programs like the one implemented in Santa Fe will soon be implemented in Albuquerque and adopted in other Rio Grande-dependent cities. These check-offs not only provide financial capital that will ensure steadier flows in the Rio Grande, they also connect community members with the river they depend upon.

The Albuquerque check-off program is the result of a February 2005 agreement between conservation organizations and the City of Albuquerque. In addition to the check-off program, this agreement committed $250,000 towards a pilot agricultural water-leasing program, which will provide important flows for the Rio Grande. While wasteful and inefficient agricultural water use is a substantial cause of the Rio Grande’s low flows, agriculture can also be part of the solution. The agreement also created space to store environmental water in the Abiquiu Reservoir. This will become one of the only reservoirs in the West with a significant amount—30,000 acres/feet—of its space allocated to the storage of water to be used exclusively for environmental purposes.

You can do your part to help the Rio Grande reclaim the rights to its own waters by advocating for a water bill check-off program in your community and telling your elected officials that you support protecting and restoring the Southwest’s Rivers.

For specific questions about our Southwest river protection efforts, contact John Horning, Executive Director.