When I turned 86 a couple of weeks ago, it came to me that I started this column over half a century ago in 1971 at the New Mexico Independent. I’ve been writing it virtually every week since. That’s nearly two thirds of my life. I’ve seen a lot of very ugly and very beautiful things, a lot of political calamities, many, many triumphs of the spirit, and more tomfoolery than anyone could keep track of. The whole process had been invigorating until Donald Trump came along. The preposterous shenanigans and callous follies of the last ten years have left me ragged. I’m sure I’m not alone.
How do we deal rationally with a clown car of idiots and ICEY sadists careening through our towns and cities and jangling the nervous systems of the whole country? Trump republicans have made a mockery of responsible government — crazily starting a useless war and getting our soldiers killed for no good reason, harassing tribal people as if they were “ illegal aliens,” endangering the free breakfasts and lunches of New Mexico school children, threatening the irreplaceable and ancient built environment of Chaco Canyon, creating wild inflation with punitive tariffs while blowing off affordability as the problem of losers, even toying with changing the name of our state, and stalking friends and neighbors from other countries who legally immigrated here to make a better life for themselves and their families.
It just gets to be all too much sometimes. Insight starts to wither.
My column started out as an effort to treat local news with the same focus as the East Coast monopoly press treats national and international events and situations. Since the election of 2016 and the sewage of Trumpist hate speech befouling our country day after day, I’ve strayed from that original path. It was impossible not to respond to the “dictatorship of mediocrity,” the vicious cruelty, the racism and sexism of Trumpian America. I must have written nearly 400 columns on that madness and to no good purpose but catharsis.
It’s time to refocus and attend more rigorously to the impact of Trumpism’s brutal nonsense on the lives of New Mexicans.
New Mexico Attorney General Roul Torrez’s amicus brief supporting the concerns of environmentalists over federal nuclear regulatory agencies who are minimizing the dangers to public health of expanding plutonium-pit production for nuclear weapons has spotlighted a concern of a great many of us here in Northern New Mexico. Along with nuclear storage in the southern part of the state, the dangers of plutonium and other nuclear waste might well be the single most important and underreported environmental issue in our future, along with local impacts of global warming. Both deserve ongoing focused analysis.
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s efforts to minimize the emissions of greenhouse gases in our state have been undermined by the Trump administration’s funding cutbacks, tax-credit changes, and deregulation.
Among the more pressing issues to explore more deeply is Trump’s repeal of the 2009 EPA endangerment finding that characterized greenhouse gas emissions as danger to public health. That one move could jeopardize most efforts to link CO2 pollution to global warming, an insight that reverberates throughout the structure of current environmental law. Its impact on our lives and health needs to be explored in greater depth, as does Trump’s assertion that climate change itself is a “hoax.”
Questions of how much federal policy contributes to childhood poverty and other forms of social abuse in New Mexico need to be untangled, as does the pernicious misogyny working its way through the doings of the Trump administration as its influence spreads out into the states. Housing and urban design have a major impact on well over half our state’s population and yet the discourse on such matters is virtually nil.
Water in New Mexico is, in the long run, the most immediately essential public policy issue. It plays out in both the Colorado River and the Rio Grande Compacts, and in numerous other agreements and precedents. Studying the relationship between water quality and water quantity has been neglected for many years and needs to be revived. Equally important is the analysis of environmental pollution in groundwater under military installation in rural and urban settings in New Mexico and how it affects the health of children in what’s been described recently as an epidemic of noncontagious childhood diseases and impairments.
High on my list of useful matters to explore is the large body of existing environmental law in New Mexico and how it is implemented and overseen.
The Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Act of 2025 counteracts the Trump administration’s move to weaken the federal Clean Water Act by allowing deregulated discharges into surface waters like small rivers, marches and riparian environments. This legislation preserves local surface water protections that no longer have federal support.
Last year, the legislature appropriated $13.5 million for state agencies to work on sustainable-energy innovation and verify a wide range of state pollution reduction programs. The legislature also built a $210 million fund to help communities “disproportionately affected” by climate change to better cope and adapt.
The Wildfire Protection Act is designed to help homeowners shield their property from wildfires. There are laws on the books in New Mexico that create “clean-transportation-fuel standards” that are more stringent than their federal counterparts. This year, the legislature appropriated funds to help communities clean up their aquifers and support their river restoration efforts.
That’s an impressive list, but it just hints at the large body of state law already dedicated to the health of our environment. It’s my hope to explore the implementation and impact of state environmental legislation in future columns.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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