After a year like 2017 many of us are hell bent to do better. What went wrong? How can we start to repair the wreckage of our national moral culture wrought by the sectarianism and secessionist policies of the sons and daughters of the Confederacy disguised in the hooded robes of so-called fiscal conservatism? How […]
Columns
New Year’s Poem: CHACO NIGHTS
The stars were his; he’d breathed them in. The Milky Way inside was all around him, a respiration of the night. He had seen the Otherside without idea, more beautiful behind its veils of meaning, invisibly far but known like the stone in his pocket. Who had let him in? Why now at the stub […]
Christmas Poem — FIVE THINGS TO DO WHEN THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO BE DONE
FIVE THINGS TO DO WHEN THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO BE DONE Christmas 2017 by V.B. Price For Rini this Christmas and forever. *** We have heard the children say – Gentle children, whom we love – Long ago, on Christmas Day, Came a message from above. Still, as Christmas-tide comes round, They remember it again […]
Public Lands: A Gift the American People Gave to Themselves and Often a Terrible Steal They Took From Others
When President Trump and various other marauding Republicans tore the heart out of two national monuments in Utah two weeks ago — stripping the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante of millions of acres for coal mining — and began the process of opening the coastal planes of the National Arctic Wild Life Refuge to […]
Why Frack Around Chaco Canyon? No Reason but Bloody Mindedness and Smash Mouth Politics
The New York Times (NYT) ran a piece last weekend entitled “The Treasures of Chaco Canyon Are Threatened by Drilling.” When the NYT writes about something people perk up and listen. But, of course, fracking around Chaco has been a hotly contested issue for years, and local people have been exerting all the pressure and […]
Good News: Eight Years of Fighting the Good Fight, Now it’s Time for the Brass Knuckles
“What Are We Fighting For?” That’s the inspiring question High Country News (HCN) writer Brooke Larson asked in her prize-winning essay in HCN’s November 13th edition. The piece got her readers to think about fundamentals. What are we resisting? What do we want to achieve as citizens who champion a respectful stewardship of the environment? […]
Is Albuquerque Ready for Heat-Superchanged Climate Disasters? Is New Mexico Prepared?
When the Caribbean island of Dominica, between the islands of Martinique and Guadalupe, was flattened by hurricane Maria late this September, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit was quoted as saying, “Eden is broken.” When I read that in a fine pieced called “A Perfect Storm” by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in the New York Review of Books, I […]