New Mexico Mercury

Going home homeless

Going Home Homeless is a personal account of a graduate student who returns home to document the history and culture of the acequia that has sustained her village for centuries...

The Coming Water Wars in Mexico

Once forbidden as a transgression of God’s natural laws, irrigated agriculture backed by increasingly deep wells and the most advanced farming machinery has become the norm. Mennonite farmers are meeting—and taking advantage of—the challenges of climate change and intensifying drought cycles by embracing the most unsustainable practices of capital-intensive, resource-depleting agribusiness...

Taking a stand on the Rio Grande

In the final days before the expected destruction of the Asarco stacks in El Paso, critics have not ceased their demands for a halt to the demolition on environmental and public health grounds.

Foreign infiltration of U.S. uranium industry?

Uranium Producers of America elect executive of Russian-government owned uranium company as President

Insight New Mexico: Don Hancock

This week Don Hancock, one of country's leading experts on nuclear waste, discusses the proposed transfer of high-level radioactive waste from the Hanford site in Washington state to the WIPP site in Southern New Mexico.

The great Mancos boom

Senator emeritus Pete Domenici and I are getting all charged up about oil giant BP and their industry buddies moving in on New Mexico to take part in the Great Mancos Shale Oil and Gas Boom.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I can hardly wait. These oil and gas folks have their own little sense of cosmically uproarious practical humor...

Toxic stalemate on the Animas river

Eight hundred gallons a minute of toxic custard-yellow water pours out of the mouths of four mines around the ghost town of Gladstone, Colorado. Zinc, copper, cadmium, iron, lead, aluminum, and manganese flow down Cement Creek into the Animas River just south of Silverton...

Small-scale chicken-keeping in New Mexico

I knew I wanted a coop and flock the very first time I read about Albuquerque’s zoning codes for poultry. For most of the city, this policy equates to “don’t have a rooster, thanks”— making residents of central New Mexico luckier than suburban dwellers in many an elsewhere, where residents battle city codes prohibiting even the smallest farm animals...

Compact Complications

Water Wars between Texas and New Mexico Are Nothing New—But the Times Are Changing

Kirtland Spill: Get Serious

With the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill now estimated at 24 million gallons, it’s time for New Mexico’s U.S. Senators to get serious about cleaning it up. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich need to come to Albuquerque, hold formal hearings with their power of subpoena, and require all associated parties to testify under oath about how such a calamity could happen, and what can be done to make that massive amount of polluted water drinkable again.