Water is problematic; Do you have enough to grow crops? Do you have enough to last through an extended drought and so own. Water in many parts of is neither plentiful or easy to get to. And in a shtf scenario you can even count on the present systems of damns to provide what they do now.
If it wasn’t for the systems of damns and for electricity NM would be far and away more sparsely occupied than it is today.
What does that have to do with us on this thread, we are only interested in water of our own or the community we live in or would live in, not in comparing New Mexico to Illinois or whatever, or even to Southern California and it’s imported water.