Columns

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 […]

Albuquerque and UNM: Losing Their Sense of Purpose and Identity What’s going on at UNM? What’s happened to Albuquerque’s mayor? Why is the athletic department’s request to have a nearly $5 million debt “forgiven” being supported by a UNM Regent appointed by Governor Susana Martinez when the rest of the university is in penury? Why […]

Though sloth plagues us all, intellectual sloth, along with censorship in all its many forms — from the repeal of net neutrality to blatant redaction to SLAPP suits against journalists — is the enemy within as far as democracy is concerned. Without an “informed electorate,” as quaint phrasing put it in the ‘50s, democracy is […]