‘There is no more local story than the environment’

Dear friends,

Last week, NMPBS’s Antony Lostetter and I headed back up to Mora, after filming there with our colleague John Britt this spring. We were visiting the people who hosted us so generously in March, including the Garcia family. (And I was psyched to snap a photo with Paula Garcia; her mom, Angela; and her sister, Pamela!) 

“Loving Our Changing Homelands” was funded in part by a grant from PBS’s Climate Station Engagement Initiative, which also allowed NMPBS the opportunity to host a thank you lunch with the people who shared their time and experiences with us. 

Is hosting a lunch enough of a thanks to a community? Certainly not. 

But it’s one small way for reporters to spend time with people without expecting anything in return. And there’s something wonderful about just eating together, laughing, meeting family members, and enjoying a beautiful day together. (And since it rained in the afternoon, we also witnessed firsthand how post-fire flooding is still a problem, two years after the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire.)

At a time when more and more reporters and news outlets lack the funding and resources to meet with people in person — or see changing landscapes firsthand — I’m thankful to PBS for funding a project that allowed us to make a thoughtful broadcast program, re-visit with some of our friends in the state, and even create middle school lesson plans from the content we created. Stay tuned for those, which we’ll be releasing on PBS LearningMedia later this month.

And I’m bummed to say goodbye to John Britt, who recently left NMPBS. I had a blast working with him this year on “Healing and Adapting with the Land” and also a piece about Mexican gray wolves.

Here’s some of the news you shouldn’t miss this week:

• “Boebert looks to replace Haaland at Interior Department if Trump wins” (Shaun Griswold, Source New Mexico)

• “New Mexico Has Some of the Nation’s Toughest Oil and Gas Regulations. Enforcing Them Is Another Matter.” (Jerry Redfern, Capital & Main)

• “Why Is the Oil Industry Booming?” (Rebecca F. Elliott, The New York Times)

• “Taliban tries reconciling science and religion in facing climate change” (Rick Noack, The Washington Post) 

• “FBI warrant claims couple started Salt Fire” (Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico)

• “‘Animosity building up’: Ruidoso mayor seeks more details about South Fork Fire investigation” (Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico)

• “Ruidoso, battered by wildfires in June, now digging out from another round of flooding” (Associated Press)

• “Anti-nuclear advocates decry LANL pit production plans” (Cormac Dodd, Santa Fe New Mexican)

• “Tribes won input on Petroglyph-area developments. In the case of one large project, it’s too late.” (City Desk Abq, Elizabeth McCall)

• “Who’s using the most water in Albuquerque? Golf courses and a country club top the list” (Elizabeth McCall, City Desk Abq)

• “Top American election concerns include environment, reproductive right, and more” (Stephanie Riviera, KUNM)

On Monday, I spoke before the New Mexico State Legislature’s Water and Natural Resources Committee. As I prepped for that short presentation, I thought of a hundred things I wanted to convey to legislators within my 15-minute time frame. 

One of the issues had to leave off the list is my concern about the loss of local newspapers and community news outlets — and how that lack of on-the-ground coverage by people who live within a community affects environmental awareness, action, and protections.

As luck would have it —– since lots of other people are worried about this, too — there’s a great piece in Audubon Magazine, “The Local Journalism Crisis Is Bad News for the Planet.”

My friend Meaghan Parker hits the point exactly: “There is no more local story than the environment,” Parker says in the story; she’s the former executive director for the Society of Environmental Journalists. “It is the air we breathe. It’s the food we eat. It’s the water we drink.”

Thankfully, in New Mexico, there are a bunch of great journalists covering the environment, but it’s sad to know that we’ve lost robust local reporting from communities like Ruidoso, Raton, Los Alamos, Alamogordo and even Carlsbad and Las Cruces as newspapers are shuttered or starved. 

Lastly, I love personal maps and paper maps, and all kinds of non-electronic maps, so I appreciated the presentation of this piece by Ben Buckland, “Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps.” 

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