New Mexico Mercury

Why New Mexico’s Climate Future Has Already Been Decided – and What Can Be Done

No, the New Mexico official told me, you’re getting too far ahead of the science. Your certainty about the consequences of climate change, he cautioned me, isn’t warranted. You’ll hurt your credibility.

This official deals with water issues for our state. He was gracious enough to provide feedback on a paper I’d written in my capacity as a law student at the University of New Mexico. The paper dealt with how the state’s prior appropriation system of water law manages water shortages during drought. In writing about that subject, I had emphasized that the state faced a future of, in essence, permanent drought, and had best prepare accordingly...

Silverton’s Current Hope

A a small town in southwestern Colorado grapples with the toxic legacy of mining, with implications that effect New Mexico. 

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...

Dirty Minds: The Benefits of Vermicomposting

Worm-aided composting can have a huge impact on sustainable living and soil reclamation.

Provincial Matters, 5-12-2014

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.

Insight New Mexico - Denise Fort

V.B. Price talks with Denise Fort, UNM research professor and longtime environmental attorney, about a new paradigm for water in New Mexico and the need for framing water issues in a regional and long term context. 

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...

Provincial Matters, 4-29-2014

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.