A new study finds a link between air pollution and low birth weight.
New Mexico
Posted inJuly 2024
In search of the continent’s largest shorebird
The elusive long-billed curlew finds refuge in fragmented grasslands.
Posted inJuly 2024
Abandoned mines cover the West
Their legacy is destruction and pollution of lands and waters.
Posted inJuly 2024
Photorealistic fencing, far-traveling felines and some very weird-looking fish
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Posted inJune 2024: The Idea of Wilderness
As the Gila Wilderness turns 100, the Wilderness Act is still a living law
Wilderness areas are changing in profound ways — and so are our ideas about them.
Posted inJune 2024: The Idea of Wilderness
Water inequality on the Colorado River
A new accounting reveals deep disparities in Western water consumption.
Posted inJune 2024: The Idea of Wilderness
The race to understand the risks of the energy transition for wildlife
Researchers are trying to understand how utility-scale solar affects New Mexico pronghorn.
Posted inArticles
Is Biden a public-lands protector?
The administration makes the biggest land-management moves in a half century.
Posted inArticles
Satirizing gentrification in ‘The Curse’
Avant-garde entertainment’s new topic of interest: urban transformation in the American Southwest.
Posted inArticles
The good, the bad and the ugly of the state legislative season
While Congress does nothing, Western state lawmakers pass a flurry of consequential and/or crazy — bills.
Posted inArticles
Oil industry profits don’t pay for cleanup
A failure of regulation has allowed industry to avoid the true cost of cleaning up its unplugged wells.
Posted inArticles
Stolen Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. Climate change is its legacy.
Extractive industries are filling public university coffers on stolen land.
Posted inJanuary 11, 2024: The Creatures in Our Midst
Bighorns, badgers, coyotes and Christmas tumbleweeds
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
Posted inArticles
New Mexico pushes back on Big Oil
New bills in the legislature could curb industry excesses.
Posted inJanuary 1, 2024: January 2024
The New Mexico co-op breaking up with fossil fuels
An 80-year-old electricity supplier goes all in on decarbonization.
Posted inIssues
As migration routes shift toward New Mexico, so does death
Migrant deaths in the state have jumped from 2 to 109 in a few years.
Posted inDecember 1, 2023: December 2023
How the New Mexico whiptail became a gay icon
All members of the lizard species are female and reproduce asexually through a process called parthenogenesis.
Posted inArticles
New Mexico’s displaced coal miners have gotten the shaft on severance pay
The state’s just transition plans promised by the Energy Transition Act haven’t panned out for many workers.
Posted inOctober 2, 2023: The Dark Side of the Sheepherding Industry
Short-lived or shallow, it’s still water
Notes on what is fluid and flowing, even if ephemeral.
Posted inSeptember 1, 2023: Food Justice
‘I want people to know me for the good that I do in my life’
#iamthewest: Giving voice to the people that make up communities in the region.