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.
A federal oil and gas lease sale in the Rio Grande drainage of southern Colorado that had been scheduled for Thursday has been postponed over concerns raised by environmentalists, elected officials and the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had announced the sale of more than 175,000 acres in March, the bulk of which are in Rio Grande and Saguache counties. On Friday, the agency said it was bowing to widespread opposition to the sale and deferring the lease sale of 144,000 acres in Rio Grande National Forest.
The decision comes on the heels of a protest filed over the BLM’s April 16 sale of oil and gas leases in New Mexico. A coalition of environmental groups and the Western Environmental Law Center say the BLM hasn’t taken into account the cumulative effect of oil and gas development on global climate change:
Sloppy industrial practices make oil and gas drilling the second-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in New Mexico, but the Bureau of Land Management intends to open up another 100,000 acres of the state to the oil and gas industry without considering the impacts of climate change and without requiring the use of the latest technologies to cut global warming pollution.
Conservationists are shifting the debate over oil and gas development across the West from the preservation of a single species here or there to the potential impacts that development could have on entire landscapes due to climate change.
