Every city in America is facing a variation of the financial, environmental, and conservation crises afflicting the nation as a whole.

But national news outlets, with their fascinating high gloss political gossip and kaleidoscopic analysis, often drown out local issues, especially if the local media is as lightweight as Albuquerque’s. Thinking people across the country and state might well know more about Iraq than they do about the intricacies of their own water laws or conservation needs.

Local matters often aren’t as sexy and distracting as federal bailouts and the strutting of superhawks, even if they have a more direct effect on our lives. But the progressive world is beginning to get the picture.

Understanding we’re facing radical changes in weather patterns, in the way we fuel our economy, in our concept of credit, and in local governments’ abilities to fend for themselves when it comes to conservation and the recreation of a local business base as national chains go under, far seeing people in cities from coast to coast are starting to agitate for growing citizen participation in urban matters that affect them the most.

And the phenomenon of local bloggers doing basic reporting and commentary is a leading reason why. Metropolitan Albuquerque from Belen to Bernalillo and the East Mountains will have to do the same.

A two- to four-year recession with a bottomed out housing market, a long term credit crisis, an ongoing drought across the Mountain West, mountains of mining and military-industrial waste, and what is sure to be sky-rocketing fuel prices starting this summer, all demand a special response from civic minded people.

Now is the time to start to care as much or more about local matters as we do about national ones. We need a well publicized and carefully reported year-long urban dialogue in the Middle Rio Grande Valley in 2009, one that includes leaders and citizens from every county, tribe and municipal jurisdiction. It needs to be sponsored by a trusted nonpartisan organization, like the League of Women Voters, or by a university affiliated program, like the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning.

This dialogue would form the basis for the development of an elected regional planning authority that could begin to coordinate water, transportation, agriculture and land use planning in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and East Mountains. Nonpartisan organizations, with legislative funding, should do the same across state.

An urban dialogue such as this would be the public equivalent of what probably the majority of households in the state are undergoing at the moment -– a complete re-evaluation of their circumstances and resources. Being unprepared in a time of rapid, and perhaps even cataclysmic, change is a sure bet for all kinds of destructive insolvencies. We need a growing body of citizen experts to motivate and guide elected leaders in directions that serve the good of all, much like we had in the heyday of the environmental movement in the 1970s.

This is absolutely crucial if we’re not going to get swamped by the severities ahead. A good example is something called the New Mexico Water Dialogue. It’s an absolutely crucial and thoroughly admirable part of our public life, but one that remains largely invisible to local media and its consumers.

The Water Dialogue is made up of hundreds of people involved in creating 16 regional water plans that contribute to an overall state plan for water use and conservation. This collection of citizen experts is the single most important leadership cadre in the state when it comes to water issues. It’s every bit as knowledgeable and persistent as any set of water lawyers serving any corporation or state agency. And it’s better connected to community life than most politicians.

The topic for the January 15, 2009 annual meeting of the Dialogue is “Bringing Accountability to Water Planning: Does it Take a Crisis?” Accountability is a word that sends shivers up the spines of urban water planners, developers, and land speculators across the state. The Dialogue’s membership is concerned “that the state may not have been sufficiently rigorous about ensuring that our water supplies are not over allocated, a problem compounded by drought and other unanticipated variations in weather.”

Conci Bokum, president of the Dialogue’s board of directors argues in an recent issue of the group’s publication “Dialogue,” that the state needs to “invest in better accounting so that we accurately foresee water shortages and other challenges. This requires studies that determine the realistic longevity of ground water supplies and the reliability of surface water supplies as weather patterns change.”

The state also needs “a realistic assessment of future conditions including both changes to water supply and water demand.” And lately, she writes, New Mexico needs “the determination to live within our means and to make some tough choices in order to insure continuity of water supplies and preserve a New Mexico we all want to live in.”

This isn’t the kind news that’s going to get banner headlines, but it’s arguably every bit as important to New Mexicans, if not much more so, than ferreting out bad guys on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

There are countless all-but-hidden issues such as these that only something like an urban dialogue could address and bring to light. They include ground water contamination, which could come to be the most important health related issue facing state residents; pollution from mine tailings and uranium mining in general; air pollution from energy production; sprawl and infill development; the labor and business issues of a shrinking and underfinanced development industry; transportation planning; feeding ourselves with local produce; the fate of small businesses like local pharmacies, bookstores, and markets; urban open space in an era of infill development; and many more.

With a mayoral election coming up next year in Albuquerque, what better time for a large core of concerned citizens to come together, perhaps electronically at first, to plan an election-year urban dialogue to address the pressing issues of our time and place?