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After two world wars in which fearful tyrannies were defeated by the combined power of very different countries pursuing shared ideals of freedom and self-determination, we all know the potential power of alliances. But it’s easy to forget the struggles involved in bringing alliances together, and above all in co-ordinating and making them work. The wartime analogy may seem far-fetched for describing an environmental coalition, but even here terms like 'campaign' and 'strategy' are useful metaphors for the essential task of organizing diverse groups effectively and on a broad front.

History of the Alliance for the Río Grande Heritage
For over two years Amigos Bravos has been part of the Alliance for the Río Grande Heritage – a coalition with all the promise and corresponding challenge of any such strategic association.

It has been evident for over a decade that the Middle Río Grande (MRG) ecosystem is in serious decline – a decline reflected at the species level by the listing of the Río Grande silvery minnow as endangered (thirteenth of the river’s 24 native fish species to be threatened with extirpation or extinction), and at the biological community level by a cottonwood bosque which is ageing or ‘senescent’ (the lack of recruitment of new cottonwoods caused by termination of life-giving floods following the closure of Cochiti Dam in the 1970s).

Government task-forces were set up in the early 1990s to address both problems, but neither made much headway because they lacked the considerable political influence needed to reform long-standing river engineering practices and to take on vested interests in water allocation.

The tension over water allocation in the MRG – who has rights to what under different state and federal laws – has now deepened as Albuquerque’s rapid growth demands that it tap new water sources, primarily the Río Grande and the city’s leased supply of ‘San Juan-Chama’ water. This development promises to have major knock-on effects throughout the upper catchment (as water storage and management are altered to allow better access to the San Juan-Chama water), and significant impacts downstream, where irrigators, municipalities and the ecosystem are threatened with losing any previous ‘surplus’ from the river. If things were tense before, they look set to get really heated now.

The Alliance for the Río Grande Heritage was formed in 1998 to provide a ‘voice for the river’ – both to help reverse the ecological decline and to defend against threats to what remains. Its members included Defenders of Wildlife, Forest Guardians, the Land & Water Fund of the Rockies, Rio Grande Restoration, the Sierra Club, Southwest Environmental Center, and Amigos Bravos. The plan was to use the Endangered Species Act and environmentalists’ standing as water stakeholders in a negotiation strategy, patiently working for changes on a wide front which would respect the legitimate, though entangled nature of the many uses and controls of Río Grande water.

The alliance needed to provide a diversity of expertise and political representation to achieve its complex and ambitious goals. After some early success, becoming a respected voice at the table during stakeholder negotiations under the Endangered Species Act and effectively blocking some ecologically harmful engineering projects, the alliance decided to adopt a more formal strategic approach in late 1999.

Strategic planning
By the end of 1999 alliance members realized that they needed to put together a formal strategic plan in order to step up a gear and take on more far-reaching goals. Adopting a common strategic plan would improve the overall efficiency of the environmental groups already focusing on the Río Grande, by preventing overlaps and duplication of effort; it would provide the diversity needed to take on such a complex task; and it would prevent divisive competition between groups, in particular for limited resources.

A way to overcome this last problem was envisioned by four foundations, McCune, Thaw, W.C. Kenney, and General Service, who in fall 1999 committed to supporting the alliance’s formal strategic planning process and to providing financial resources for the shared plan – funding which would be over and above resources committed to the individual alliance member organizations. The philosophy was that reducing duplication and competition between the groups would streamline the overall Río Grande work, thereby freeing up extra resources, and at the same time the overall effort would become more united and effective. A formal, functioning alliance between statewide river groups would be unprecedented in New Mexico.

Conservation Impact, facilitators and non-profit planning experts, were hired to take the alliance through a major strategy meeting with eight foundations (the original four plus Beldon, Turner, Wilburforce and Wyss) in February 2000. This led to an agreement that the foundations, as a group, would support the alliance according to the strategic plan finalized at the meeting, on the model of the Krautkramer Memorial Fund and the Bay Delta environmental alliance from California: resources would be pooled, then shared out to the groups according to a specific business plan, with a respected local conservation figure (Bill deBuys) providing the link between the foundations and the groups.

Plans detailing the precise task, schedule and resourcing needs for each alliance group were finalized by summer 2000, along with a Charter for organizational issues including formal interactions with the foundations. The arrangements now provide resourcing for the wide range of tasks selected by the alliance, minimizing duplication and building in accountability. Thanks to the six-month-long strategic planning negotiations, the Alliance has a realistic, shared budget, a workplan to guide its progress, and a clear, though lean, organizational structure.

Amigos Bravos’ role
Amigos Bravos has been involved throughout this strategic process. We have been a consistent presence on the alliance Steering Committee, the group’s decision making body, and central in all the aspects of alliance development – from organizational set-up to budgeting, fundraising and workplan. We believe we have been able to make a strong contribution based on years of experience in bringing together alliances and strategic planning.

Amigos Bravos’ main role within the Alliance, beyond the essential task of internal organization, has been to conduct outreach to other potential allies in central New Mexico. The Bay Delta environmental alliance, similarly devoted to protecting a regional-scale resource (the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River delta), made the significant political breakthrough of gaining legislative support only when it expanded beyond environmental groups and recruited economic and labor interests such as California’s commercial fishermen’s union. With the opening of our new office in Albuquerque, Amigos Bravos has already laid the groundwork for such diversification: through our Clean Water Act workshop and Somos Vecinos project we are establishing good working relationships with the Pueblos, acequia representatives and others whose voice is so critical in Middle Río Grande water management decisions.

As well as working to expand the constituency for a healthy Río Grande, Amigos Bravos is taking the initiative in an area that has been almost overlooked so far: water quality. Because we all depend on clean water in some way or another, especially in an arid climate – for drinking and for irrigation of crops in particular – water quality is both a vital social and environmental issue and one likely to gain widespread support. The restoration of clean water provides a tremendous organizing tool that goes beyond ideological boundaries, and it has great significance for human health and environmental justice which means it is likely to gain strong support from beyond the environmental community narrowly defined.

Over the next year Amigos Bravos hopes to be working with Albuquerque-area Pueblos, who have water quality standard-setting authority as sovereign nations, and with government agencies presently upgrading wastewater and stormwater controls. With the city’s drinking water project due to come on-line in the next few years, meaning a switch from high quality aquifer water to river water with potentially high levels of contaminants, we believe the public as a whole is ready to pay attention to this issue. And therefore to pay some much-needed attention to the health of the Río Grande, the uniting idea behind the Alliance for the Río Grande Heritage.