Columns

Seemingly right out of the blue, New Mexicans are facing the chilling possibility that despite their protestations, as much as half of the nation’s highly dangerous spent nuclear fuel rods might be “temporarily” stored (for many decades) at a site somewhere between Carlsbad and Hobbs, operated by the New Jersey firm Holtec International. And in […]

[For Young Writers and Artists Trying to Keep Afloat]   SQUANDERING It’s the fulfillment of whims, the robotic gushing of money, of time spurting out, cascading, vanishing for nothing as if you will always have enough of everything—you’re just a programmed culprit of what you abhor, a modified spigot that won’t turn off, trained by […]

I’m always interested to get in the mail the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s “Water Quality Report” brochure. But I’m also usually disappointed by what I read and what I don’t read. And this time I’m particularly irked by the rosy nature of the report. It just doesn’t meet what author Jared Diamond might […]

The University of New Mexico is one of Albuquerque’s and the state’s greatest assets. And it’s not because of the football and basketball programs, which don’t need to be de-emphasized but put in their place as tiny parts of UNM’s overall impact. In most practical ways, UNM’s importance to the Middle Rio Grande Valley and […]

It took us a long time in America before we realized that we were ruining our environment, the habitat we depend on, with waste from the things we make and use. But it took the Republican Party less than a decade to realize that giving birth to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by one […]

Yesterday was the 48th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970. Back then, April 22nd was a turning-point day, what anthropologists call a liminal moment, a threshold, in American political history. Pages upon pages of environmental legislation have been signed into law since that great populist moment. And economic elites have risen up to […]

In the face of chronic drought, entrenched ethnic tensions and a brand of racism that neo-fascists thrive on, it’s not untoward to ask ourselves, “Are Southwestern cities and state economies fit to survive? Or are many of them just hopelessly clumsy at adapting to new conditions, unable to join the winners’ side of the survival […]