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.
Christmas Eve 2008 has me reminiscing about that marvelous institution from the long ago called The New Mexico Undevelopment Commission.
Dreamed up by Mark and Mary Beth Acuff, who ran the original New Mexico Independent, the Undevelopment Commission was always a great joke that was a little bit more than half serious.
The commission reflected the mood of the early 1970s, when the OPEC oil crisis was looming and Earth Day was an innocent outpouring of pure love for Mother Nature.
It stood for respectful growth, and by that the commission meant, as I recall, growth in wages and employment, growth from conservation, growth from creative responses to dwindling fossil fuel resources and endangered water supplies, growth from alternative energy, and the emphasis of urban competition spurred on by local pride and love of place, keeping New Mexico distinctive and as free as possible from the economic infections of national franchises and boffo architecture.
It was a humble and sometimes silly undertaking. But even then, we meant it, even if we didn’t understand the full implications of our impulses and ideas. There was no fear of global warming then. Peak oil was a matter of prophecy, not an imminent reality, drought was lurking, but too far away to feel. Sprawl was dominant, sprawl and its bulldozers making terrible scars in the New Mexico countryside.
Undevelopers created a handsome t-shirt, I still have mine, somewhat tattered from endless miles running in it on the ditches. The commission had a manifesto, too, but it was covered over in red chile splashes and long gone in the dusts of Waldo.
The old railroad watering stop at Waldo, north of Cerrillos, was where the New Mexico Undevelopment Commission held its annual picnic in the summer, a time of great and happy hullabaloo.
Amid cow chip tossing contests, mooning Amtrack, and much red wine, the Undevelopment Commission set a standard for innocent merriment in the name of progress.
The kind of progress the commission had in mind was an enlightened entrenchment based in local business, local agriculture, the revitalization of downtowns around the state, the shunning of strip malls and Crass Marts, the anti-Californication of New Mexico that relied in many ways on doing away with publicly subsidized sprawl incentives (TIDDS would have caused the commission to go volcanic) and stimulating infill development to create more compact and efficient cities that required less fuel and less public expenditure to operate.
The New Mexico Undevelopment Commission was about 35 years too early.
This Christmas Eve we can see that its good humor was rooted in reality.
The predictions of scarcity and the value of locality that animated the Undevelopment Commission are coming true, even if the prognosticators of the past couldn’t see the extent of the housing, landbased, sprawl agravated financial mess we’re in today.
The New Mexico Undevelopment Commission did understand, however, the paradox of New Mexico.
On the one hand, New Mexicans live in a kind of sublime natural paradise, filled with deeply creative, adventuresome, hardy, cosmopolitan people who help make it one of the most beautiful and fascinating places on earth, but a place also plagued by immense poverty, pollution, and exploitation by disrespectful outsiders.
The Commission was irreverent, but not really joking, when it called for a moratorium on all reflexive growth until Albuquerque and New Mexico convened themselves as communities of committed citizens to determine, in open discussion, what we wanted our world to look like in 25 years.
This sprawling, unsustainable New Mexico we face today, with all its over-building and water problems, is not what the New Mexico Undevelopment Commission had envisioned. What we got didn’t work when the times got tough, just as the commission knew it wouldn’t. And now it seems beyond rational hope that we will ever return to the status quo of even six months ago. A new world is emerging, and we need to think ahead, as the commission tried to do so long ago.
But Albuquerque and New Mexico needs to do some old fashioned, grassroots, bottom up planning. When Forbes magazine last week ranked Albuquerque fifth in the nation in requests for Obama’s New Deal economic stimulus package, it was news to most folks in the state. Five days later, the Journal, in a solid copyrighted piece by Dan McKay ran a list of the proposed projects that Forbes said would cost $2.3 billion and create an estimated 5,181 jobs.
The projects include a solar power plant at the Sunport, a Central Avenue street car, changes to the Paseo Del Norte/1-25 interchange, a wind farm, streets, sewers, storm drains, a gray water system, all worthy projects.
But what’s troubling is that grassroots activism, the kind that the Obama campaign created here, is simply not a normal part of Albuquerque’s political life. So the mayor and the city council could not call upon a cadre of urban activists to argue and pound through a well-conceived wish list, one that met a variety of needs and interests, and uncovered important and necessary but perhaps obscure uses for that money, should it come.
The kind of citizen involvement in urban issues that the Undevelopment Commission advocated, and was a part of in the heyday of the 1970s, has not existed here for 25 years or more. And though Albuquerque neighborhood associations are perpetually active, they do not constitute the kind of political base that could have demanded such grassroots planning.
In a week, New Year’s Eve will be upon us. Perhaps we could all resolve to become more involved in local issues, to become thorns in the side of committees, bureaucrats, and elected officials again, to take seriously our obligations as citizens to see to it that our city thrives in reasonable, self-sustaining, and self-respectful ways.
If we did that, what a Christmas present it would be on Christmas Eve 2009.
