It’s easy to dismantle something…
New Mexico in Focus Correspondent Antonia Gonzales spoke last week to Brian Vallo, former governor of Acoma Pueblo and current chair of Chaco Heritage Tribal Association, about the U.S. Department of the Interior’s order to create a 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historic Park. You can watch that interview on YouTube.
Meanwhile, I stepped away from environmental reporting last week to invite my friend Ed Williams into the studio. An investigative reporter at Searchlight New Mexico, Ed has spent the last five years writing about child well-being in New Mexico. The numbers—and the stories of suffering beneath—are agonizing.
In collaboration with ProPublica, Ed’s latest work examines how New Mexico, and the private companies the state contracts with, have failed foster children—and in many cases, actively (and repeatedly) harmed the kids and teenagers who need the most help.
During our conversation, Ed spoke of deeply entrenched problems across the state and within the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department. And it’s also crystal clear that the deliberate and needless decimation of the state’s behavioral health care system in 2013 by then-Gov. Susana Martinez and people working in her administration still reverberates today. As Ed’s stories remind us, generations of children, teenagers and adults will never lead their best lives or have the opportunities afforded others because of those cuts in services, funding and support a decade ago.
As Ed pointed out in our conversation, it’s easy to dismantle a system. “But then building up, doing the work to build an alternative, that’s where we dropped the ball,” he said.
Of course, how we treat one another—and especially, how we treat our children and our elders—is integrally tied to how we treat the Earth and the lands and waters all around us. Right?
On to some of the other news I think you’ll appreciate reading:
• “Supreme Court rejects Navajo Nation’s water rights trust claim” (Kolby Kickingwoman, ICT)
• “Despite pushback, USDA plans to spray toxic insecticides in the Rio Chama watershed” (Bryce Dix, KUNM)
• “$3.95B not enough to meet all New Mexico disaster victims’ needs, NM delegation says” (Megan Gleason, Source NM)
• “PRC delays community solar energy reserve meant for low-income New Mexicans” (Megan Gleason, Source NM)
• “Best ways to quash mosquito habitats and prevent bites this summer” (Elizabeth Tucker, Albuquerque Journal)
• “DOE’s new tool helps you get your share of the climate law’s billions” (Alison F. Takemura, Canary Media)
• Thanks to my pal Michael Warren at NJ Spotlight News, who always keeps me posted on Holtec happenings on the East Coast, for sending this one along: “NY passes ban on dumping radioactive waste in Hudson River” (Rosemary Misdary, Gothamist)
And thanks to the Santa Fe Reporter’s Morning Word for calling attention last week to the New Mexico Environment Department’s notice to the state’s Clean Water Act National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permittees in response to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Sackett v. EPA, in which the high court ruled that certain wetlands and waters are not protected under the Clean Water Act.
In a news release, the state agency noted: “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently issues CWA discharge permits in New Mexico. There are approximately 3,950 active discharge permits in the state, including over 3,600 stormwater discharge permits and 350 industrial, feed lot, or other types of discharge permits.”
All I can say about the Supreme Court’s ruling and its fallout: What a mess. These sorts of anti-government decisions—like the Martinez administration’s decision to dismantle the behavioral health care system mentioned earlier—have vast and long-term impacts.
Speaking of vast and long-term impacts, I appreciated coverage of the late Daniel Ellsberg that focused not only on the Pentagon Papers, but also on the nuclear papers he copied.
From The New Yorker:
Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday, of pancreatic cancer, at age ninety-two, became the father of whistle-blowing in America when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the Times, in 1971. In the course of several months in 1969 and 1970, he copied seven thousand pages of top-secret documents that laid out how four successive Presidents, from Truman to Johnson, deceived the public about U.S. policy in Vietnam. But, at the time, Ellsberg was also planning an even more audacious reveal. Another several thousand pages, which were never released to the public, detailed Washington’s plans for an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union and China.
As he aged, Ellsberg grew frustrated that people associated him primarily with having leaked the Pentagon Papers and that they knew little of the six decades that he had subsequently spent as an anti-nuclear activist, getting arrested as many as ninety times in civil-disobedience protests. “Really, only the people who’d been doing anti-nuclear resistance with me knew, though it’s actually been the theme of my life since I was twenty-seven,” he told me. “That part nobody’s written about at all.’’ In 2017, Ellsberg tried to remedy that, publishing “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” a memoir of his role in building the American nuclear arsenal at rand and the Pentagon, which warned of nuclear disaster if the U.S. and other nuclear powers failed to take more active steps toward disarmament.
In The New York Times, Charlie Savage wrote about this, as well, noting that late in Ellsberg’s life—at age 90—he was still trying to draw attention to nuclear war:
Decades ago, Mr. Ellsberg said, he had taken a second classified study based on internal government records, which he had not given to reporters at the time of the Pentagon Papers because it was about a different topic: when Communist Chinese forces shelled islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, setting off a crisis. It showed that the world had come closer to nuclear war than the public had been allowed to know.
Part of Ellsberg’s motivation in bringing the issue to light, Savage writes, was “to be charged under the Espionage Act. He wanted to be a test case to put before the Supreme Court the constitutionality of how the Justice Department has used the law to punish leaks.”
On Friday, we’ll be rebroadcasting a few recent segments of Our Land, including my 2022 interview with anti-nuclear activist Greg Mello. I think often of something he said at the time:
“Simone Weil writing in the Second World War said, ‘Only those who know the empire of might and know how not to respect it are capable of love and justice’ … and that’s our problem here. We don’t know how not to respect the violence of weapons of mass destruction and the death-oriented solution to human relations. And it harms our ability to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the social innovation and the environmental innovation that we really need.”
Last fall, I reached out to Los Alamos National Laboratory and National Nuclear Security Administration officials repeatedly over the course of a month, inviting them onto the show to discuss the need for nuclear weapons and plans for pit production expansion.
I never succeeded in getting someone to come on the show and talk on the record. But I heard recently that NNSA offered some journalists a partial tour of the main plutonium facility at LANL. While I wasn’t invited, I’m looking forward to reading any coverage that comes out of that tour…send it to me if you see it!
