Border surge misses real security threat in Transborder West
New U.S. initiatives associated with immigration reform proposals aim to seal the U.S.-Mexico border with more hulking fences, high-tech surveillance, sensors, and drones -- all to “secure the border” against a dramatically diminishing flow (lowest in four decades) of south-north immigrants, and costing at least $30 billion in additional border security funding.
Generally unnoticed in this border security buildup is the rapid onset of a new transborder security threat. Not immigrants, not terrorists, not drugs, not spillover violence. Rather frightening changes in the deserts, in the mountain flora, in the surface water flows, in the falling levels of reservoirs, and in the disappearing aquifers and underground water basins...
Water wars in the modern west
New Mexico is running out of water. We are in drought. Our laws and regulations are based on principles that existed over 100 years ago in very different social and economic climates.
The state was sparsely populated, and people relied mainly on surface water supplies in 1907 when New Mexico's Water Code was enacted. The main economic factors, and therefore the main political influences, were agriculture and livestock concerns. The state’s constitution adopted in 1912 set into place laws that reflected old ways and old thinking that are not feasible in today’s reality...
What’s happened to ABQ? Part 5: Rio Grande Vision- Nature center or amusement park?
The Rio Grande Vision plan for “improvements” to the Middle Rio Grande Bosque breaks continuity with the long and illustrious history of citizen activism to preserve riparian habitat and allow residents to refresh themselves in a natural setting and observe wildlife without disturbing it.
Modeling itself on duded up urban rivers in Texas and other places, the Vision seems to have overlooked completely the ideal model right under its nose – the Rio Grande Nature Center, a masterwork of architecture so inconspicuous and respectful of its place that birds and other creatures have no fear of us when we’re visiting...
Leave Mount Taylor in peace
There’s something particularly ugly about the proposed new uranium mine on Mount Taylor west of Albuquerque. If past history is any indication, it will leave this sacred site littered with mining debris and contaminated water. And it will probably sell the uranium to China and India, the biggest uranium markets in the world, ruining a local place to make some people an international fortune. This will truly amount to ill gotten gains...
Attacking Chaco Canyon
Imagine traveling to one of the world’s greatest and most desolately beautiful monuments to human genius and finding when you get there that drilling equipment, jack pumps, truck dust, back up beepers, and road noise have been allowed to destroy the mysterious solitude of such a singular and magnificent place.
That’s what will happen to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park if the state of New Mexico and our congressional delegation doesn’t insist upon an extensive buffer zone around the 53-square mile monument where drilling and other extractive process are prohibited. This is not only a buffer zone, it’s a zone of respect...
Farming and water in New Mexico
Living in New Mexico, it is obvious that we have a water issue. Our largest river turns to a stream during the winter and our lakes are at the lowest point in recorded history. A lot of the problem is the drought that the southwest has been experiencing for the past ten years. With these two together, New Mexico's already limited water supply has taken a turn for the worse. The situation is now threatening New Mexico's economic and environmental sustainability.
As threatening as the State’s situation may sound, New Mexico can still cut down on its wasteful water use. The largest culprit in water consumption, according to the New Mexico state government, is agriculture...
New Mexico uranium and mini-reactors
Mention nuclear energy in New Mexico, and many of us get a cold shiver. Despite all the claims that nuclear energy is clean and safe, what it means to New Mexico is a long history of dirty – very dirty -- uranium mining and processing and the cancer that it brings.
So the thought of the federal government subsidizing the development of hundreds of mini-reactors to stimulate a new American nuclear industry that could generate thousands of portable nuclear power plants for export around the world, and use in our own backyard, has unnerving reverberations here...
Lessons from water – Never enough
I’m a student of water. I’ll never graduate because water teaches more than a lifetime can absorb. I’m trying to figure out New Mexico water — the projects and compacts and acequias and districts and adjudications and Pueblos and diversions and groundwater, and I’m marveling at how water disputes take forever and cost a fortune in legal fees. Words like dysfunctional and maladaptive come to mind.
One thing is clear. There isn’t enough water, and odds are there will be less of it as the years go by. Then what happens? ...
Disaster’s false dichotomy
We differentiate between human-made disasters and those caused by nature. I believe this is a false, and ultimately misleading, distinction.
If a building housing sweatshops collapses in Savar, Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand workers, we assess blame to the architect who approved the plans (undoubtedly for monetary gain), a government that cannot establish building codes or, if it has them, refuses to enforce them (plenty of kickbacks there as well). We can blame the clothing brands in the US and other Western countries, which reap exaggerated profit and have never been serious about improving the facilities where their clothing is made...
400 parts per million
As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?
Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition...