New Mexico Mercury

Prejudice looks like this

Santa Fe has seen in the last month an act of unique and open-hearted political courage and an example of dumbfounding intolerance when it comes to same-sex marriage and the civil rights of all persons in our state.

Governor Martinez’s vetoing of a bill to help same-sex domestic partners of military personnel expedite acquiring professional licenses to carry on their careers when they return to the poorest state in the union is so blatantly bigoted it’s hard to fathom in the 21st century...

Quality food shouldn’t be an oasis

According to the USDA, over 23 million Americans live in a food desert: an area with a concentration of low-income households and low access to a supermarket.    In an urban environment, a low access area is defined by being at least one mile from a major grocery store.  Imagine the odyssey of walking for blocks or taking public transportation carrying handfuls of plastic bags stretching ever closer to rupture or pulling an overfilled personal shopping cart only to arrive at your building to begin climbing flights of stairs to your kitchen.

Solar Decathlon ingredients: College students + construction + competition

The Solar Decathlon is an international collegiate competition in ten contests for a fully solar powered house sponsored by the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. University of New Mexico students have had the opportunity to compete alongside many of the best and brightest students in the nation to design, construct and operate  a solar house under competition standards. A highly competitive evaluation will be held October 2013 in Irvine, CA...

Don’t fall behind

Hi, welcome to your new corporate University of New Mexico orientation and advisement. This is your first semester. You should be excited!  Your grade of C+ earned at a certified New Mexico high school has won you the right to pursue a college education. Oh boy.

Because you work thirty hours a week at Chic Fila, and you have to take care of your aging grandfather for twenty hours a week, we want to be sensitive to your schedule needs. This is why we recommend for your first year that you take eighteen hours each semester.

FBI Surveillance Technology

El Machete

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.

Herb Goldman Among Us

When I think of Albuquerque’s preeminent art scene at the mid twentieth century, I think of Raymond Jonson, Jack and Alice Garver, Connie Fox, Dick Kurman, Don Ivers, Bainbridge Bunting, John Tatchel, and Herb Goldman. I think of visiting UNM professor and artist Elaine de Kooning, who did as much as anyone to bring this group together, and help nudge several of them to national prominence. Many of these artists are long gone. Others have moved elsewhere. 

Herb Goldman, who died in September 2012, was one of New Mexico’s most unique and powerful artists...

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?

Weekly Poem: Wash

Sometimes—like right now—when you
need to see yourself from
outside, so you can say, objectively, how it
really feels in there,

your mind is a translucent sheet of plastic
taped on to the hotel room window in a
ragged part of town
that looks over a parking lot, a late night

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?