Wastewater recycling: How open minds save closed systems
Singapore, Los Angeles, Windhoek (the capital of Namibia in Africa) and the tiny town of Cloudcroft, New Mexico are doing it. Astronauts do it – NASA considers it a high priority – and doing it in the desert can help to diminish the environmental impact of any town whose water needs surpass the sustainable local supply. This would probably include every community in New Mexico. And yet this remarkable marriage of space-age technology and Spaceship Earth ethics, which uses chemistry to create alchemy by making something pure and nourishing from something gross and stinky, spends a lot of time languishing in literal and figurative holding tanks.
What’s happened to ABQ? Part 2: Think tank city
Albuquerque’s economy has fallen into a big hole. It’s lost sight of itself. It’s floundering in the dark. The l950s don’t work anymore. The city needs new perspectives to help it find its way. Wouldn’t it be useful if this year’s mayoral race gave voters an arena in which to ponder and assess new economic models and plans, ones designed to rescue us from these doldrums?
What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 1: Growth uninhibited by water supply
Should Albuquerque be allowed to grow in size and population without tying its growth directly to its projected water supply over the next 50 to 100 years?
Should any big city in New Mexico permit sprawl development on the basis of “dedications,” which means, in the world of water, mere promises to find water after the developments have been built and populated?
Kush and Cornelius
I just can’t understand why people get so worked up over a couple of harmless little old jokes. Of course I’m referring to those good old peckerwood exemplars of uproarious hilarity Steve Kush, now suspended director of Bernalillo County Republicans and Bob Cornelius, former GOP county director.
During Tuesday night’s Bernalillo Country commission meeting as Working America’s director Chelsey Evans was about to testify in favor of raising the minimum wage, Kush was busy tap, tap, tapping away at his Facebook account about Chelsey’s nice boots. Kush had already twittered that a previous Working America representative was a “radical bitch.”
We need a national conversation
The Boston marathon bombing shocked us to our core. With neither the degree of coordination, immense loss of human life and treasure, or national and international impact of 9/11, it held our attention in ways even tragic recent school massacres have not.
If our national response to previous acts of terrorism on our homeland is any indication, what we will not get is a conversation, the conversation we so desperately need, about what prompted this and previous terrorist attacks. A few private discussions may try to frame the real questions, but these will not gain currency in the general consciousness. Extreme patriotism will trump thoughtful insight in every public forum...
Love dem hogs
Why do we always think someone from somewhere else, some magic someone with money and jobs has the solution for our economic problems?
Perhaps if we can just concoct the right inducements and incentives, even though we’re in a 50,000-year drought cycle, and even though we’re one of the poorest and least educated states in the union, if only we can throw the right tax incentives and benizens at such folk, they will just roll over and begin to smile on us, dispense their largesse, and New Mexico will be a blessed and golden land.
A perilous world comes knocking — again
Bombs at the Boston Marathon, poison letters mailed from Mississippi to President Obama and a U.S. senator, an explosion in a fertilizer plant destroying much of a town in Texas, two wounded by bullets as 80,000 gathered at an annual marijuana festival in the center of Denver: What are we to make of all this happening in a single week?
Against this background of mayhem, the U.S. Senate at the same time killed off all gun reform. What are we to make of that?
It seems to me there are several lessons to be learned from the terrible tragedies and momentous moments of recent days...
Housebreaking fossil fuels
While Heather Wilson was losing her Senate bid to Martin Heinrich last year, her campaign team must have been drunk on PR from the Fossil Fuel lobby. The rhetoric tipped them off the bar stool.
She accused then Rep. Heinrich of being supported by not only “radical environmental groups,” but also by “the radical environmental industry” with their “extremist agenda.”
I wonder what a “radical environmental industry” might be. Does it sell camping gear and sleeping bags or manufacture trail mix? Does it produce energy without polluting ground water and without using taxpayer dollars to clean up its excreta? Does it actually believe in free enterprise without a governmental crutch?
Did the ‘Iron Lady’ help kill capitalism?
The recent news of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death affords an opportunity to open the issue of who will be remembered as significant players in the death of capitalism. Mrs. Thatcher's image as a beacon for freedom may seem secure among mainstream media for the moment but to objective observers it is looking increasingly likely that in the long term the blind passion for "free markets" she shared with the global plutocratic class she abetted will be understood as the beginning of the final chapter for the most productive economic arrangement in history...
Life, or death, goes on: More than public will needed for gun control
Although a variety of opinion polls show 90% of Americans favor at least some measure of gun control, and although President Obama has made sincere pleas for changes to our retrograde laws, change proved impossible. When the US Senate voted on expanding background checks for gun sales—the only amendment left standing among the many introduced—neither Democrats nor Republicans were able to provide the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. US democracy doesn’t mean the will of the people. It means the vast majority of our elected officials consider their jobs first and public opinion a distant second...