New Mexico Mercury

Food Stamps, Abortions, and the Conservative Mind

What kind of people use pregnant women as pawns in a brutal game of political mind-twisting that can inflict upon women horrible pain and suffering simply because they are women? What kind of people think nothing of using the wickedest sort of lying to win an election? What kind of people take food out of the mouths of the poor? Or make people who work two to three low-wage jobs a day suffer even more by cutting their food stamp benefits?

They are same kind of people who prey upon the poorest state in the union, requiring local taxpayers to fork up many thousands of dollars for an abortion ban referendum in Albuquerque that was not generated by local people, but turns out to be a national experiment in local political manipulation. They are the same kind of people who think it’s OK to run on the front page of the state’s major daily newspaper an anti-abortion political drawing that insults and disrespects women to illustrate a debate on banning abortion after 20 weeks (which is five months) with an image of a woman who is a minimum of seven or eight months pregnant, which is 28 to 32 weeks. Her head is not shown, therefore neither is her face, depriving her of her own humanity for political effect, as a mindless thing who feels no pain and thinks no thoughts.

These people call themselves Republicans these days, and often use the more lofty term of conservative.

Conservatives, you’d think, are people who believe in conserving what’s valuable in life – human beings of both genders and all orientations, landscapes, history, the well-being of children and the elderly, culture and its tradition, libraries, museums, universities, public schools.

Conservatives in my childhood tended to be conservationists; fiscally strict perhaps, devoted to rugged individualism and self-reliance for sure, but never at odds with the values of preserving and nurturing what’s valuable in life and never begrudging nature its due. Conservatives didn’t like to rock the boat, that’s true, but they tended to be straight arrows, and even President Hoover was concerned with the poor, even though his distrust of government never allowed him to use his power to actually help the poor.

What is it that turns pragmatic conservatives, who are devoted to the cash value of what works, into people who denigrate the poor, who blame the victim, who equate poverty with laziness, especially when conservatives worked to create an economic system that depends on the kind of very low paying jobs that make the majority of poor people poor? What is it that turns conservation-minded people who make a fetish out of frugality into people who support gas and oil pipelines that have a potential to destroy wildlife habitat and human environments?  They are the same kind of people who support the Keystone Pipeline, stimulating the production of greenhouse gases which they, and almost they alone, deny have any climate changing consequences. What is  it that allows people who distrust and dislike humanity in general, a whole political party, in fact, which considers human beings – especially women--to be beyond redemption, to put their faith in human engineering, in pipe fitting and welding, when its been proven accident after accident that human fallibility is universal and disasters happen frequently if unpredictably.

How could a political party made up of conservation-minded people take the food right out of poor people’s mouths for ideological spite. Why would they assail a woman’s right to make decisions about her own life, going so far as to pit her health against the health of a fetus, and all for some obeisance to economic ideology and misogynist theology?

The answer is, I think, that Republicans are not conservatives anymore. They are no longer morally bound to serve the well-being of their fellow human beings and they have abandoned the conservationist ethic and left the land open to pillage and squandering by their fiscal zombies in the business community. So many have become woman-controlling ideologues who see all females as fallen villains and everyone else as fools.

They have become political predators, people who work to win at
at any cost, people for whom ends justify virtually any means. It’s hard to fathom, but they consider themselves so deeply in the right, and so perpetually attacked by the forces of “evil,” that they literally think money equals not only speech but that it is an indicator of moral worth.

Here’s the rub. Congressional Republicans, allegedly concerned with government waste and the national debt, champion the grossest kinds of military waste, vast subsidies to the richest industries, tax loopholes for the mega scrooges, and taxpayer clean-ups for polluting companies while deciding to solve the problem of waste by attacking the very the people who have nothing, those who really know how to waste-not-want-not because they have no other choice. These people in Congress cut other folks’ food supplies while spending like the proverbial drunken sailor on the pampered and privileged industries that give their election campaigns enough money to feed whole populations of poor people.  It’s so obvious it makes you sick.

Worse, to strengthen this policy of endless waste, and fortify their sense of moral superiority, they spend millions diverting attention from their fiscal perfidy and social cruelty by creating the completely bogus health and compassion issue of “late term abortion” by pitting women against fetuses, inferring that the unborn and unviable are, in fact, morally pure and “better” than the women who bear them, with no mention of the men who helped conceive them. By doing this, they enflame our culture’s shameful and deep rooted prejudice against women, once again, working to undercut decades of advancement by women in America when it comes to reproductive rights. And then in Albuquerque, a city that anti-abortionists called the late term abortion capital of the country, they create a ballot initiative that even fails to protect women who are pregnant from rape or incest.

The late term abortion issue is an invented political one of course. In fact, abortions in the 21st week are so rare that they amount to some 1% of all abortions performed in the United States. Most medical experts agree that a fetus is not “viable” until 23 or 24 weeks. Abortions after that are strictly regulated by law in most states and take place only when the fetus has such horrible health problems that it would die, perhaps with great suffering, even if it survived birth.  To make a woman carry such a child to full term, against her will, is an act of violence against women. And no one should sanction forced birth, or any kind of force that harms another human being.

Forcing people to starve is not an unrelated issue. In New Mexico, some 443,000 people need food stamps. That immense number includes children, elderly people, pregnant women, families with babies, and most of the adults belonging to a social class described as the working poor. An Alamogordo Daily News editorial put it clearly. The food stamp cut will force a single person to live on something like $6.30 a day. Before the cuts, the same person was eating on $6.66 a day, enough for three packets of Ramen noodles and maybe a hotdog and some milk for one meal. At $6.30 a day, “Forget the hotdog. It’s ramen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

What happens to the family, the elders, and the other children of a woman forced to give birth to a child that is suffering from terrible and fatal abnormalities that require huge expenditures of money she does not have. What happens to her, herself, if she and those she cares for are some of those 443,000 people dependent on food stamps? We all know the answer. But only some of us care.

George Clayton Pearl, FAIA – 1923-2003

Running roughshod over people, their homes, the particulars of their world and how they live their lives, is the way of the West. Not only does it conquer other people, it’s become a “throw away society” itself, one in which its own tradition-rich older places are often plowed under to make way for new ones just because they’re new, where people become disposable when they cease reaching a certain level of efficiency, and where the things people make with art and care become confused with mass produced and easily replaceable stuff.

This is the world that architect George Clayton Pearl, FAIA, worked much of his life to counteract.

When I think about respect for the character of a place, when I think about honoring context and the importance of treating people and their physical worlds with the dignity and appreciation everyone and everything deserves, I automatically think of the architectural philosophy and way of life that George Pearl embodied.

George died ten years ago this August at age 79. UNM named the new School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Community and Regional Planning building after him and called it George Pearl Hall. The building, designed by Antoine Predock, FAIA, also houses the Fine Arts and Design Library on the top floor with a wonderfully intimate George Pearl Reading Room, created and assembled by UNM architectural historian Chris Wilson. George’s career was intimately tied to UNM where he designed additions to Zimmerman Library and numerous other buildings.

In the first edition of Century Magazine, October 1, l980, George wrote an essay about his long time friend University Architect Van Dorn Hooker. At the University of New Mexico, he wrote, “at least a decade before ‘post modernism’ became  a popular expression, a great number of architects were steered by Van Dorn Hooker into transcending the philosophy of the international school without abandoning anything except that school’s dogmas of placelessness and arrogant ignorance of surroundings.   Even when we were still striving, elsewhere, to achieve smooth surfaced cubes sitting in splendid isolation on their militantly unadorned plazas, we overcame ourselves at UNM and produced buildings which lent themselves to fit their place.” 

George designed probably thousands of buildings and homes during his long career, including the award winning Albuquerque Public Library’s main branch downtown, a major part of the campus at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, parts of the Presbyterian Hospital complex, the Observatory at New Mexico Tech and the Simms Fine Arts Center at the Albuquerque Academy

George’s emphasis on place and context, on working within restraints placed on designers by their “surroundings,” and on respect for history, idiosyncrasy, and the inherent dignity of design solutions that are adaptive rather than dismissive, were at the roots of his philosophy of what I’d call pragmatic design – doing what works in a given situation, working with a place rather than against it.

George often said that architecture was not the place for “artistic expression,” but rather an opportunity to serve clients needs in the context of their surroundings. He’d sometimes use the metaphor of a sonnet, saying that limitations imposed by structure and place give a particular reality to design. A sonnet is a sonnet, not blank verse. A building in New Mexico is New Mexican, not Bostonian. Architecture for him was a social service and collaborative process, in a specific place and at a specific time.

When you design a house for someone, he liked to joke, your role is somewhat like that of a shoemaker. You advise, for instance, that hammering in a long nail pointing up from the middle of the heel is possibly not the best idea even if the client thinks it looks good.

This sense of respectful problem solving is why I consider George a pragmatic environmentalist. He would design a house with spot footings, for instance, so as not to damage the roots of big trees. He respected what is as much as what was coming into being. George was a master appreciator. He found meaning and value in most things, and honored craftsmanship and the mysteries of appropriate form with a sense of both reverence and joy. The world was not a throw-away place for him.

It’s impossible to say much about what goes into the creation of a personality beyond the banalities of nature and nurture.  George’s life was rich with contradiction and even adventure. He was born on a small farm in West Texas, in Depression era circumstances. He first heard Mozart on a wind-up record player that he rigged to play using a cactus needle. It had no loudspeaker, so he put his young ear almost on the record. He studied architecture at UT Austin, but was drafted into the Army in World War II. After boot camp he was trained to be an engineer, but he and his fellows were abruptly turned into an infantry unit to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, where he served and was wounded. During his convalescence in an Army hospital in California, George memorized, among other works, the entire Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot. And quoted them often even in his late 70s.

George had a profound aversion to violence, to any kind of cruelty or dismissive behavior and to self-importance in all its forms. And he never spoke of the war.

He returned to UT Austin, earned his architecture degree, and came to Albuquerque with his family in the late l950s, eventually becoming the chief designer of Stevens Mallory Pearl and Campbell.

Stories abound about George Pearl. Two of my favorites involve agates and Georgian silver.

George’s garden in Tome’ had small acequias running through it. He was a gifted gardener and for most of his life tended his own plants and did his own brick laying for patios and pathways.  In the Tome’ garden, the acequias were lined on the bottom with agates his parents had collected over the years. He loved to show people what happened when he released the water into the troughs, turning the whole water works into a gleaming and colorful gem.

Georgian silver, with its classic elegance and simplicity of form, inspired George’s admiration and he collected it. He’d find bowls and plates and cups whenever he could. He stored them in closed cupboards for a time and then realized he should use as much of it as he could, as often as possible, to truly enjoy it. A couple of uses he found were as a big silver water bowl for his dog and a large tureen in the kitchen in which to toss bread crumbs and crusts to save for the birds.  He was not a man given to pretense, but he enjoyed people’s responses to these eccentricities.

Ten years after George’s death, I’m still amazed when I walk past George Pearl Hall that he’s not alive and in his downtown neighborhood house gardening, reading, loving his animals, enlivening his friends, and drawing, drawing, drawing house plans for those lucky enough to work with him in the fullness of his magnificent generosity of spirit, sympathy, and enthusiasm for whatever the gift of life would bring.

Feats of Water Engineering and the Principles of Sound Investing

Water and money are a lot alike, and not just in the obvious ways. Water does, of course, flow to money and power. But water in the desert has to be managed like an investment portfolio, and one that can’t be bungled by being overly aggressive, or blasé’ about potential dangers. The risks are always too high, if you’re not flush with money or have all the water you’ll ever need.

Successful investors, no matter how big or small their nest eggs might be, know that diversification is the secret to not losing your shirt entirely. And they know that the principle of diversification is to have a range of scenarios for the future including a variety of worst case views of what’s to come.

Only folks who can afford to lose most of what they have, because they have so much, can get away with wild-eyed optimism. And, even then, they must acknowledge the possibility of massive changes in life style if things go bad.

When it comes to cities in the American west, none of them can afford huge losses when it comes to investing in the water future. That’s why worst case scenarios must be played out, and whistling past the graveyard and singing a happy tune should be kept to a minimum.

That false optimism is what’s got cities in the Western United States in a terrible pickle. Many – including Albuquerque sitting on its bogus “Lake Superior” -- simply denied that they’d ever really have serious water shortages to deal with because big cities gambled on power, like all big bullies do. They figured they could take, in one way or another, what they needed.

So city water planning in the west tended never to be about preparing for a water crisis in which a city’s very existence as a viable environment was at stake.
Water planning tended to be about water for growth, not water for survival.

That’s why one needs to take off the rosy glasses of growth infatuation, and start thinking about, at least, what it might mean for a city like Albuquerque, never mind Phoenix and Las Vegas, to sustain itself over a long term drought – say 20 to 30 years, which is not unknown historically in our region -- in which major water sources, like the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, become useless for purposes of economic growth, imposing severe hardship on residents, rich and poor alike.

Not to consider this this is irresponsible and foolhardy in the extreme, especially in an age of global warming.

It’s still a lot about back slapping here. Boosterism prevails. But we need to take this drought seriously and come to terms with the possibility that aridity is becoming more the norm than ever before, and stop thinking of it as a periodic exception. Our water rates are still far, far too low. We could set much bigger goals for conservation than we have, goals in line with Santa Fe’s which uses almost 40 gallons a person a day less water than we use.  This is not to say that Albuquerque hasn’t made strong efforts over the years to move away from being a water guzzling city to one that’s much more conscious of its water use. It’s just that given what’s possible, we’re more self-congratulatory than self-critical. And that puts us in danger.

I know I’ll get snappy retorts for writing about this.  But too much back-slapping leads to a loss of focus and a loss of focus leads to a loss of investment. In a shrinking pool of big city sharks, small timers like Albuquerque, and like most of us, have to invest defensively, and think defensively, if we are to avoid blowing our wad.

So what would we do if Colorado River water stopped flowing into New Mexico via the San Juan/Chama project and if the Rio Grande was greatly reduced because of long term drought and historic lows in snowpack in its watershed? This is not an impossible physical scenario, given global warming, though it is more likely to be a political reality quite soon. Drought has made it quite possible that an implied provision in The Colorado River Compact of 1922 could be triggered to curtail New Mexico’s use of Colorado River water.

The Compact is straight forward in most areas except for Article III-d in which the Compact says that “states of the Upper Division (New Mexico. Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre feet for any period of ten consecutive years,” sending that much to the Lower Division (California, Arizona, and Nevada). What worries folks like me is the word “cause.” We worry that “cause” can only come to mean our “use.” What other “cause” could there be? “Use,” though, could include storage as well as consumption. And if water “use” in the upper states causes the flow to the lower states to be “depleted,” it’s not unreasonable to assume that some federal court might require the upper states to curtail their use until the obligation to the lower states is met? Or worse, might not some big state, like California, sue smaller states to cough up the water owed to them under the compact? That curtailment could well be partial or a complete loss of Colorado River water delivered to New Mexico for an unknowable period. And if drought becomes the norm, our potential use of the Colorado could become so unreliable we wouldn’t be able to depend on it. What “curtailment” actually might mean is a matter of politics, and politics is a matter of power and money, things that New Mexico does not have much of, but that California, Arizona, and Nevada do. Such a possibility is worth public discussion by responsible people.

When you plan for your future with an investment councilor, you are asked to assess your aversion to risk. You are asked if you have a liquid reserve? No ethical councilor would advise going all in and being completely vulnerable to the whims of the market, which, as we all know, mirrors the whims of the weather. When the market looks dicey good small time investors restrain their spending, rethink their goals, use potential troubles and slowdowns as opportunities to do better thinking. It’s the same with water. We need to rethink our pricing structure, our conservation goals, our potential storage strategies, our watershed philosophy and practices, our dealing with storm water and run off, and make fixes, big and small, to our portfolio of strategies and tactics.  And at every step of the way we should be guided by caution and hope, but not by optimism and a gullible tendency to believe our own PR.

Public discussion of potential scenarios is not somehow bad science and bad for business. It is prudent and responsible. 

Look what happened to the waste treatment plant in the South Valley that is only now working to fix a stink problem that has plagued residents in the area for more than 50 years. If the metro area’s leadership had believed its own growth scenarios and propaganda, and cared for residents who live out-of-sight-out-of- mind, it might have foretold the stink issue, done some simple engineering math and found out that millions of gallons of sewage a day, that came along with the urban growth they’d predicted, would stink to high heaven.

I’m glad they’re fixing it now, at last. Why didn’t the leadership do it earlier?
Was the anti-stink technology not available until now? Had they just been so self-congratulatory about a sewage system that worked for a growing population that they didn’t think they needed to fix the smell? Or, heaven forbid, did they just not care about the people in the area?

Now we have some 55 million gallons of sewage a day pouring into the treatment plant. And what an engineering and laboring feat that is. Virtually every house and every business all across the metro area is hooked up to the sewage and water systems. And the waste treatment plant recycles its methane and produces about 70 percent of the power it uses. Good on them! 

But there is a worrisome metaphor that comes to mind. Despite the engineering marvels of those systems, they didn’t really plan for the stink, or plan to get rid of it until now. It’s hard to come up with a numerical equation that characterizes the relationship between stink and disgust, misery, and a diminished sense of well being.  The environmental suffering of some people did not play a decisive role in planning and decision making in the past. If it had, the stink would have been fixed long ago.

And what a stink it would be if we backslapped and glad handed our way into continuing a kind of growth at any cost optimism without preparing for the possibilities of what might happen if growth stops because of the weather and we don’t have sufficient liquid holdings to see us through because we didn’t think we were spendthrifts and complacent, even when we saw the troubles looming ahead, and didn’t think much about them.

(Skull X-Ray by Lindsay Holmwood)