Faculty

At New Mexico State University, located in the Chihuahuan Desert, experts have been studying water issues for many years. Their job has become more urgent as more people move to the Southwest, placing increasing stress on limited water supplies. These water supplies include ground water, existing in what are called aquifers below ground, and the water in rivers such as the Rio Grande, which is heavily used for irrigation and drinking water in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.

One of these experts, Christopher Brown, an associate professor of geography, has been studying and thinking about water for a long time. In the Department of Geography, students and faculty together study the interaction of human activities with the environment. Water, therefore, receives a lot of attention from geographers, who want to understand how the water is being used as a resource, how much there is to be used and how public policies affect water resources.

This resource in the Southwest and in U.S-Mexico border areas has been of particular interest to Brown. “The next 10 to 20 years will be a very challenging time here as we seek to balance agricultural use and demand, increasing residential development with a finite nature of ground water resources,” he says.

Brown teaches about these issues at NMSU in classes about geographical information systems, map use and analysis, urban geography and world regional geography and U.S.-Mexico border development – among others – but he is also playing a key role in research in these areas. For more than 10 years he has studied bi-national water resource management issues on the U.S.-Mexico border. Working together with other researchers, he has been building an Internet-based water resource data management tool that provides water resource management data about the Rio Grande.

Also a member of the independent presidential advisory committee, the Good Neighbor Environmental Board, Brown is helping formulate “good neighbor” environmental infrastructure practices along the U.S.-Mexico border, with a focus on national security and environmental protection.

Brown’s research in his areas of involvement are brought back to the classroom, where undergraduate and graduate students alike benefit from his additional expertise, the contacts he has made in the various areas, and the sure sense that his classroom instruction is securely based on proven and practical application of knowledge.