I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Most urban consumers of news in New Mexico probably don’t know about the intensity and widespread Native American opposition to uranium mining and the dread that is felt across Indian Country of another so-called uranium boom.
And it’s clear that despite desalinization being in the news a lot these days, the controversy surrounding it is not a hot topic either. Los Angeles, for instance, refuses to even consider desalinating Pacific Ocean water to supply its millions of water customers while San Diego gets considerable media attention for its efforts to become the “desal” capital of California.
When it comes to complicated technical and political questions about water and energy, if all that readers had to go on were reports from national news outlets and local mainstream media, they’d really have no idea of the complex reality of the issues.
Readers need the alternative media to give them more substantial information. I’m not only talking about talk radio and alternative commercial journalism, online or on the newsstand, as valuable as they are. There’s another source of news that resembles technical journals from the professions, but arise from organizations with a more public focus.
Tabloids like “Voices from the Earth,” published by the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC), or environmental news magazines like High Country News, published in Paonia, Colo., are must-reads for informed modern citizens. Though publications with specific interests, they have more credibility with me than even professional journals like Chemical Engineering Progress, the bible of innovation in corporate and academic chemistry, because they represent views and research unattached to big money. In other words, they produce focused journalism that’s not for hire. Their credibility is far greater than so-called “unbiased” mainstream journalism which hides its biases in a cloak of normalcy.
The way uranium mining, the precursor to nuclear power and nuclear weapons, is portrayed in the booster media, you’d think it was a benign process, with no health repercussions or economic drawbacks.
When it comes to desalinization, and the so-called gold mine of brackish water many thousands of feet below the West Mesa, the local media gives overwhelmingly more coverage to expressions of booster glee than to it does to those with serious reservations. There are exceptions to the rule, like the excellent Journal Op-Ed piece last Sunday by UNM’s Bruce Thomson under the headline “Brackish Water Can’t Sustain N.M.”
The best writing on uranium in New Mexico, in its attention to detail and its inclusion of many voices, is being done by the editors and writers of Voices from the Earth. And the ultimate piece, so far, on western cities desalinating ocean water, appeared in High Country News last week, written by former Albuquerque Tribune reporter Tony Davis.
Voices from the Earth and High Country News should be required reading for every environmentalist in the western states.
Voices from the Earth can be obtained by joining SRIC, which is among the longest surviving, and most respected, environmental research groups in the region. I can’t imagine why anyone with an interest in New Mexico wouldn’t become a member of this organization, with its dedicated staff and exemplary track record.
High Country News, at $37 a year, is an indispensable asset for anyone concerned with land and resources in the mountain West. It’s known for its in-depth, lively and authoritative reporting style.
Tony Davis’s article on desalination was the most informative piece I’ve read on the subject. Writing about California’s drought and San Diego’s love affair with desalinization, Davis explains the role of California’s ornery watchdog Coastal Commission which warns that while Colorado River water costs anywhere from $250 to $700 an acre foot in California, desalination today would cost “closer to $1400 an acre foot. ‘In fact,’ Davis writes, ‘water from a host of new desalinization plants in Australia costs twice that.’”
If California’s drought continues, Davis says that desalination will become the norm just as it is in other dry places like the Middle East.
The worry for us in New Mexico is the relationship between massive California desalination plants that require huge quantities of energy and New Mexico’s coal. It’s not beyond possibility that new coal-fired power plants in the Four Corners would be so profitable supplying electricity to California that the San Juan basin could become even more of a sacrifice zone than it already is.
That’s what large numbers of Native Americans are trying to prevent in New Mexico when it comes to renewed uranium mining. Voices from the Earth reports that the Multicultural Alliance for A Safe Environments (MASE) believes that uranium booms do little for the local economy and are public health disasters.
MASE members include the Bluewater Valley Downstream Alliance, Dineh Bidziil Coalition, Eastern Navajo Dine’ Against Uranium Mining, Laguna-Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment and the Post-71 Uranium Workers Committee, composed of former uranium miners, millers, ore haulers and drillers who want compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
As one MASE member, Candace Head-Dylla, put it in Voices from the Earth, “The problem is that some very lucrative industries come with unintended and long-term consequences that are simply not worth the short-term gains to the economy.”
Head-Dylla and MASE want the New Mexico Legislature to fund a regional water study this year to find out exactly how much ground water has been contaminated from the last uranium boon; fund long-range health studies of all residents of uranium-impacted areas; fund “a qualified, third-party economic research organization to study the state’s potential for an economy built around sustainable uses of resources and renewable energy applications, with a focus on rural economic development,” and pass a resolution asking Congress to determine the federal governments share of the costs of cleaning up New Mexico’s uranium legacy.
Public policy debates are only as useful as the information they are built on. So far, the mainstream media has given citizens and decision-makers a hollow body of knowledge when it comes to desalination and uranium mining.
Chances are the decisions will be hollow and dangerous too.
