Nullius in verba
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 […]
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 […]
“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? […]
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 […]
Mayor Tim Keller’s election victory last week in Albuquerque was, indeed, a mandate. Sixty-two percent of city voters cast their ballot for an energy-neutral city; for an immigrant-friendly city; for women’s equality; for a politician not at odds with dominant scientific opinion on climate; and for someone who believes in decent, competent law enforcement. They […]
When the Trump Administration okayed the release of a massive federal study on human-caused climate change that contradicted the core absurdity of Republican anti-climate change ideology, many Americans were left scratching their heads. Was the White House sending a signal of a fundamental policy change in the works? Was bureaucratic infighting about to see the […]
If there are any verities left in this cockamamie world of ours they might be that in New Mexico voters have never really cottoned to candidates who they see as playing dirty, and that no one ever got very far trusting the federal government to keep its promises when it comes to nuclear weapons and […]