William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico.
The city is at the crossroads of climate change—and, for a host of reasons, an unsustainable future.
This is not a “perfect storm” but the new normal in the American west.
If you live just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst.