This week V.B. Price talks with Alfredo Corchado, Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, and author of the recently published "Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey Through a Country’s Descent into Darkness."
There’s something particularly ugly about the proposed new uranium mine on Mount Taylor west of Albuquerque. If past history is any indication, it will leave this sacred site littered with mining debris and contaminated water. And it will probably sell the uranium to China and India, the biggest uranium markets in the world, ruining a local place to make some people an international fortune. This will truly amount to ill gotten gains…
Whatever else happens in this degrading age of universal surveillance, let us as New Mexicans make sure that if we’re stopped in a speed trap for going ten miles an hour too fast that our entire genetic identity isn’t taken from us by some guy with a swab, blue gloves, and a gun.
It’s bad enough that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion last week declared that seizure of DNA is a “reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure” in serious crime arrests. But then the AP reported that New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez was considering proposing to the Legislature next year a bill to make DNA a reasonable search in misdemeanors as well as felonies…
V.B. Price speaks with Don McIver – poet, producer and poetry curator for the New Mexico Mercury. They discuss political poetry and the evolution of the art form.
Imagine traveling to one of the world’s greatest and most desolately beautiful monuments to human genius and finding when you get there that drilling equipment, jack pumps, truck dust, back up beepers, and road noise have been allowed to destroy the mysterious solitude of such a singular and magnificent place.
That’s what will happen to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park if the state of New Mexico and our congressional delegation doesn’t insist upon an extensive buffer zone around the 53-square mile monument where drilling and other extractive process are prohibited. This is not only a buffer zone, it’s a zone of respect…
Mention nuclear energy in New Mexico, and many of us get a cold shiver. Despite all the claims that nuclear energy is clean and safe, what it means to New Mexico is a long history of dirty – very dirty — uranium mining and processing and the cancer that it brings.
So the thought of the federal government subsidizing the development of hundreds of mini-reactors to stimulate a new American nuclear industry that could generate thousands of portable nuclear power plants for export around the world, and use in our own backyard, has unnerving reverberations here…
As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?
Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition…
V.B. Price speaks with the Paul Robinson, Research Director at the Southwest Research and Information Center, about the legacy of uranium mining in New Mexico, how the uranium market works and who suffers if there's another boom.
What we can all learn from the concept, history and practice of collective wisdom in Northern New Mexico.
V.B. Price talks with political scientist Richard Fox about the push for privatization of education, Skandera's ties to for-profit education interests and Gov. Martinez' liabilities for the upcoming race for Governor.