'Heartland of Consequence'

Plus, Secretary Wright's honesty on climate change

Thanks to a friend’s recent reflections, I just re-read Ellen Meloy’s 1999 book, The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest.

It was a different experience from when I read it in the early 2000s. Meloy wrote, for example:

The Los Alamos National Laboratory stopped making atomic weapons in 1989. Since then it has directed a reduced workforce to dismantle the U.S. nuclear arsenal and help clean up the mess, as well as continue research unrelated to weapons. We taxpaying fund-raisers hold faith in Los Alamos’s ability to baby-sit our investment, the remaining stockpile. Taming those outlaw spasms of abject terror with polite albeit imperfect trust, partial nuclear disarmament is now like checking one’s firearms at the door of the saloon, all but the little bitty one in your sock.

Of course, nowadays there’s no such thing as disarmament. Los Alamos has been back in the bomb building business for a while now, and U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright just called for building “more than 100” new plutonium pits by 2029.

As for cleaning up the mess at LANL, all anyone has to do is read Alicia Inez Guzmán’s excellent reporting to see how that’s going.

And despite some good PR that helps New Mexicans imagine otherwise, only a tiny portion of the lab’s annual budget goes toward anything other than nuclear weapons¹.

Meanwhile, we’re all still very polite, avoiding conversations about the moral implications of continuing to build weapons of mass destruction right here in the Jemez Mountains. But I’d still like to consider the question Meloy posed decades ago: "What if we myth-hungry Homos spent less time on heavy leptons and galactic bagels and reservoirs of dry-cleaning fluid and more time on Eden?"

I could be tempted to write that since the 1990s, we’ve moved farther and farther away from being a caretaker species of this Earth and the more-than-human world.

But instead, I'm going to write: We have so many opportunities to be a better caretaker species.

So, let’s start the news run-down with this recent story by Laura Mallonee co-published by Grist and the Texas Tribune: “The Rio Grande Valley was once covered in forest. One man is trying to bring it back.”

Also in the news:

U.S. denies Mexico’s request for Colorado River water for 1st time in 80 years (Nina Kravinsky, KJZZ)

Feds backtrack on mining ban in the Upper Pecos watershed (Danielle Prokop, Source NM)

Uranium transport through Navajo Nation sparks concerns in New Mexico (Patrick Lohmann, Source NM)

Energy secretary reduces regulations on national labs construction (Alaina Mencinger, Santa Fe New Mexican)

Trump Administration Opens More Public Land to Drilling and Mining (Lisa Friedman, The New York Times)

In Democratic New Mexico, Oil and Gas Legislation Doesn’t Pass (Jerry Redfern, Capital & Main)

Surveys reveal widespread cattle damage to New Mexico’s rivers and wetlands (Bryce Dix, KUNM)

It’s time to end cattle grazing on public lands (Heath Haussamen)

‘Time to move on’: Yates family lists massive New Mexico ranch for $68.5M (Kylie Garcia, Albuquerque Journal)

Recent peer-reviewed studies:

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) mass flux and mass balance at an aqueous film-forming foam release site in semiarid eastern New Mexico, USA (Erin L. Gray et al. Journal of Contaminant Hydrology)

Disproportionately large impacts of wildland-urban interface fire emissions on global air quality and human health (Wenfu Tang et al. Science Advances)

Events:

If you’re in Santa Fe, don’t miss journalist Rebecca Nagle at the Lensic on Friday night. You can buy tickets online. And if you’re in Albuquerque later today, come by Hodgin Hall at UNM at 6 for a reading and community conversation about water.

Secretary Wright on climate change

Let’s go back to Energy Secretary Chris Wright for a second. This is from The Guardian:

Wright has been called a climate skeptic, for instance for repeatedly denying that global heating is a crisis.

“This is simply wrong: I am a climate realist,” he said.

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

I appreciate this quote.

Americans have spent decades bickering over who “believes” in human-caused climate change and who doesn’t. Meanwhile, Wright’s openness here reveals that people in positions of power have long known the climate climate is changing — and why. (I wrote a little about this a few weeks ago.)

“Everything in life involves a trade-off,” Wright said.

Keep that in mind when it comes to every action on the part of Trump and his cohorts. Keep that in mind when tempted to bicker with your neighbors, social media friends, and family members, too.

And okay, just one last thing from Meloy’s book, The Last Cheater’s Waltz:

“… and I try to live here as if there is no other place and it must last forever. It is the best we can do. Everyone’s home is the heartland of consequence.”

1. In the FY 2024 congressional budget request, for example, 78.8 percent of the lab’s budget was for nuclear weapons; other requests were for defense nuclear nonproliferation (8.6 percent), environmental cleanup (5.7 percent), “science” (1.5 percent), and energy efficiency and renewable energy (0.17 percent).