Lynn Montgomery, one of the best advocates for New Mexico's acequia community and water planning in general, devised this 'vision' for the Middle Rio Grande Basin (greater Albuquerque area) and sent it around on the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly list.
He granted me permission to post this, as long as I stipulated that this view is his alone and is not part of the MRGB Futures Project. The graphic uses an unpopulated template by Jack Jekowski.
You can click on the diagram to enlarge it, and I posted Montgomery's original Power Point below it.
Here is the message he sent with his original post to the list:
This is a personal exercise I did awhile back for my own amusement. It is not a formal part of our Futures Project. My imagination couldn't confine itself to 2025 and the natural impulse of participants to embed the present into the future and avoid changes that to me, are inevitable. The template has "planning" and "collapse" as the axis. The main purpose is to show that if we don't have some kind of dramatic event, it doesn't matter how much we try and plan, as we will remain in our comfortable present (which is that proverbial pot of slowly heating water with some quite ignorant on purpose frogs in it). I chose the best case scenario of the four possible stories. I admit that it is somewhat pollyanaish and would make a good screenplay for a hollywood movie. The only thing I adhered to was "what if".
Apologies to Ed Merta for using him as my protagonist. I would be 100 in 2048, so I couldn't use myself.
The 2019 Doldrums have some appearance in climate models and although not very likely, this could actually happen on the East Coast.
And here is the collapse scenario he wrote to accompany the graphic:
Download Collapse scenario_MRGB_2048
I was inexorably drawn to his stark vision, much as I was drawn to James Powell's description of a not-too-distant Phoenix in Dead Pool and the future of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
The fact that it was sent on 4 July is not lost on me. It's a day to ponder our country's past and speculate upon its future.
It would be too depressing to say that I wish I could be as optimistic as Montgomery, so I won't.
"Water is recycled incessantly. Anybody remember flush toilets? One of the things that I was most bothered by was our latrine systems, but I got used to it quickly and now actually prefer it this way." - Lynn Montgomery, from the 2048 collapse scenario
"No policy without a calamity." - Dutch proverb
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