Border Farmers’ Market a Year-Round Hit
Estela Flores is an earth artist. On Saturday mornings, you can find her work, courtesy of Mother Earth, on display at Ardovino’s Desert Crossing Farmers’ Market in Sunland Park, New Mexico.
Flores’ stand offers an inspiring inventory of garden art and potted plants ready for the backyard or front porch. Visitors behold herbs, native landscape plants, organic vegetables, succulents, and a garden dragon fly fashioned from wrought iron and embodied with peat moss and soil...
Get some air
Go outside. Get some air. This used to be something mothers routinely urged our children to do. Most adults who are able enjoy walking outside, enjoying nature and breathing in that clean crisp air we all need in order to survive. New Mexico, with its vast space, huge cobalt skies, and beautiful mountain trails, is an ideal place for this. Or was.
It’s not so easy to breathe fresh air today. Not anywhere. According to figures recently released by the World Health Organization (WHO), pollution killed seven million people worldwide in 2012...
Hualapai Canyon: A hard paradise
The preposterously vivid green-blue river flows wide and fast. Lush groves and gardens fill the canyon between red ferrous walls rising nearly vertically for thousands of feet. Two horses leisurely bathe and play in the river. Butterflies flit among purple aster, red penstemon, giant white cholla blossoms, orange globe mallow, purple lilac and yellow prickly pear blossoms, and large feathery yellow plants I can’t identify.
Life in paradise is not easy. The scenic beauty of Hualapai Canyon, part of the Grand Canyon, is about as close to paradise as you are likely to find in the United States...
Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks designation would boost economy in southern NM
Recently I had the privilege of participating in a convening of business owners from the Taos area to celebrate the first anniversary of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in northern New Mexico. The consensus among these business owners was clear: just one year in and the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument has been good for local businesses.
As our community discusses the prospect of a new national Monument in the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks region, I think it’s important to look at the data and lessons from our neighbors in the north...
Climate Foreclosure / Climate Migration
Climate migrants may soon be a new breed: the latest wave of those forced to leave their homes and seek refuge elsewhere. These will not be people fleeing political violence or poverty. Or not simply those two things. They won’t be leaving only their homes and the graves of their ancestors behind. These will be the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—forced to migrate because their homes, ancestors’ graves and every bit of familiar landscape will have disappeared, beneath the rising sea levels caused by global warming...
Spring Awakening
Spring in the mountains reminds me of a woman awakening after a good night’s sleep. She yawns and stretches lasciviously. She comes slowly to awareness of the new day, the new season. She turns over and is tempted to sleep again as momentary snow storms speckle the evergreens, gentle reminders of the past winter, of sleep. She periodically dozes and awakens, as chill and warmth alternate, as clouds drift in and away, as winds torment us and then bring blessed serenity...
Insect Allies March Forth in Spring
Spring is here and the bugs are out. There are numerous beneficial organisms in every yard and this is the main reason, plus your safety, for not using synthetic pesticides. They can be beneficial in different ways. Some are pollinators and we certainly need them. Others feed on decaying or dead plant or animal matter and they are important as well. The most important for a gardener are the predators who feed on plant pests...
The Scorecard on ABQ Sprawl
The Albuquerque region has been engaged in an epic growth battle for at least the past decade. Much of the struggle occurs in the city council chambers, in the county commission public hearings, and in water and air board meetings. The combatants are large landholders, property developers and businesses (think Chamber of Commerce and NAIOP) on one side, pitted against neighborhood activists, conservationists, smart businesses, planners and good government folks on the other.
One side wants business-as-usual (BAU) where the levers of public power can be manipulated for private gain. The other side sees a very different future...
Authority and the Art of Lying
A great dichotomy grips our social interaction. On the one hand we are taught—by our parents, in school, and through every cultural and consumerist message—that the world is divided into experts and the rest of us. Those leaders we vote into power by such dubious “democratic” process know what’s in our best interests. We are conditioned to ignore the fact that so many of them are bought and paid for by commercial or geopolitical interests.
I was motivated to write this rumination after listening to V.B. Price’s illuminating interview with Dan Hancock. Hancock is a true expert. He knows a lot, but doesn’t pretend to have all the answers...
Air Quality Board passes the buck again!
On Wednesday, the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Air Quality Board ruled against SWOP’s (Southwest Organizing Project) request for a public hearing. SWOP and community members were hoping the board would set a future meeting to consider a new rule to require a cumulative air quality impact analysis in the permitting process.
“Cumulative impacts” appeared to stump some members of the board. When a new industry moves into the neighborhood today, the applicant provides information about the types and amount of pollutants that will spew from his own smokestack. SWOP’s draft rule would have required the air quality board to consider the pollutants coming from all of the smokestacks in the neighborhood; hence “cumulative impacts"...