Watershed Awareness in New Mexico
Reading the New Mexico Landscape: Watershed Awareness Signs
We all live near a stream, an arroyo, a river, or perhaps a lake. These water bodies receive water from the surrounding hill slopes in the landscape. Together these slopes and stream bottoms form a watershed. We all live in a watershed!
A watershed is an area where precipitation that falls in that area collects in one stream that empties again in a larger stream or lake downstream. In this way, small watersheds are the feeders of larger watersheds, and so on, until the water flows out into the ocean. Watersheds are separated from each other by natural boundaries, called divides.
Watersheds are interesting because everything that is related to the water that flows down the land within a watershed can be managed within that watershed. Many parts of Nature, such as soils, plants, and animals are directly dependent on the water within a watershed. Many human activities on the land are determined by the quality, flow, and local or temporary amounts of water within a watershed. For example, if we want to grow more food or native plants, a watershed gives us a practical work area to manipulate the water to make plant growth happening. If we want to reduce how much water evaporates in the heat of the sun, how we can reduce flooding, or increase water supplies in shallow wells, the watershed area naturally limits the geographic region for our solutions.
“Think like a watershed!” When we know where our rivers flow, where they get their water from, and how our daily lives influence and are influenced by the flow of water, we begin to think like a watershed. Thinking like a watershed, a corollary to Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking like a Mountain,” helps us realize that we belong to a certain place and that we have a care-giving or “stewardship” responsibility to that place. The respect we accord one another is reflected in the way we treat the land and water that sustain us. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” (Aldo Leopold).
To make people aware of our streams, the watersheds that feed them, and the divides that separate our watersheds, several land and water management organizations and government agencies have teamed up to develop a unique awareness program in New Mexico. As part of this watershed awareness program, this partnership of institutions has produced a series of road-side signs that indicate stream crossings and watershed entrance points on divides.
The initiative was launched on Earth Day in 2008 when the Santa Fe Watershed Association and the City of Santa Fe placed signs at many water crossings of the Santa Fe River within the City Santa Fe. In the last year, Earth Works Institute collaborated with the New Mexico Department of Transportation and Santa Fe County to place signs at stream crossings and watershed entrance points of the Galisteo watershed.
The sign project has been adopted also by the State Energy, Minerals & Natural Resources Department’s Forestry Division. In the coming year, the agency will place signs along major Interstate highways throughout New Mexico. The project will be accompanied with web-based information about the signs and the significance of watersheds as areas for planning the use and conservation of our precious water resources in New Mexico.
Through the watershed awareness signs, project partners hope that people will gradually develop “mental maps” of the major streams and watershed boundaries of significant parts of New Mexico. This will help people learn how to “read” the landscape and understand Nature’s way of creating order by allowing water to flow one way and not another, allowing plants, animals and humans to use the water apportioned in each watershed. We wish people a happy reading of the New Mexico landscape!
We would like to thank our project partners:
- New Mexico Department of Transportation – for placing signs along State Highways in the Galisteo watershed
- Santa Fe County, Open Space & Trails Division – for placing signs along many County Roads and paying for the signs
- Santa Fe Watershed Association – for spearheading and coordinating the sign project in the last 3 years
- City of Santa Fe – for spearheading the first sign placement in 2008
- New Mexico Environment Department, Surface Water Quality Bureau – for the sign design and technical support
- Santa Fe Conservation Trust – for support and ideas regarding interpretive planning
- New Mexico Energy, Minerals & Natural Resources Department, Forestry Division – for joining in with the sign project and disseminating it further throughout New Mexico
- The Garfield Foundation and many individual donors – for contributing to watershed awareness education and our work in the past few years during the development of this project
