When I moved back to New
Mexico this summer, I did my best to contain my enthusiasm for a
long-awaited homecoming. In short, I tried to avoid tangling memory
with reality. New Mexico is often easier to love in the abstract.
Despite its often idealized history — full of noble American
Indians, a stern Georgia O’Keeffe and quaint Spanish villages
— New Mexico is a poor state that’s been left to
leaders with limited vision.
So, on my drive from
Colorado back into the state, I tried to take its dirty air in
stride. But the haze was a shock: It began just south of Durango
and lasted through Bloomfield and along the edge of the Navajo
Reservation, ending somewhere around the Continental Divide, just
west of the town of Cuba. I tried to avoid thinking this was the
way it now was.
All told, the Four Corners area has about
20,000 producing oil and gas wells, with another 10,000 to 15,000
wells planned. That boom has been bad for air quality and for
landowners fighting to lessen the damage from wells, but it has
certainly helped to boost state coffers. Right now, the state has
about a billion-dollar surplus. If only the state’s leaders
could use that money wisely.
So far, it doesn’t
look promising.
In December, New Mexico Gov. Bill
Richardson and Sir Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Companies,
announced that Branson hopes to build the world’s first
“spaceport” here in the state. Customers would pay about $200,000
to take a two and a half-hour trip into space; the company has
already taken $11 million in reservations. As part of its proposal,
Virgin Galactic’s headquarters and mission control would be
located at the airport in Albuquerque, while the spaceport would be
built in the state’s southern desert. Richardson is asking
legislators to set aside $135 million of state money for
Branson’s project.
Then, in mid-January, a
for-profit business called the Rocket Racing League announced its
intention to hold mile-high races in the desert near Las Cruces.
The planes would race one another around a two-mile long course,
dodging virtual objects projected onto the pilot’s screen.
Fans below could watch the event on big screens.
The
venture could yield the state $15 million to $30 million in what
the governor calls “economic activity” by 2010. The deal hinges on
the spaceport, and the city of Las Cruces is still negotiating with
the company, but it has already promised to donate land and
hangars.
According to Gov. Richardson: “As the future
home of the Rocket Racing League, we look forward to welcoming the
hundreds of thousands of people who will come to New Mexico to
enjoy NASCAR in the sky.” I guess he’s already courting those
NASCAR dads for 2008.
This brings us back to that
billion-dollar energy surplus. Lest anyone forget, New Mexico has
one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. In fact, 30
percent of New Mexico’s children live below the poverty line.
More than a quarter of New Mexicans do not have health care, and
that number is growing. Other chronic problems in the state include
failing schools, high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction and
low rates of literacy. In other words, there is no shortage of
social programs in the state that could benefit from even a small
chunk of change.
There’s also the problem of the
state’s greenhouse gas emissions, an area the governor has
said he’s concerned about. It turns out that aircraft are a
major culprit. According to the U.S. Transportation
Department’s Center for Climate Change and Environmental
Forecasting, about 70 percent of an aircraft’s emissions are
made up of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is the number-one
contributor to climate change. The Federal Aviation Administration
points out that in addition to a plane’s emissions, travelers
use gasoline to go back and forth from airports, and the airports
and landed planes require electricity, as do the ubiquitous
construction crews found at any airport.
Currently,
aviation accounts for 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions
from the transportation sector, and about 3 percent of the total
greenhouse emissions in the United States. That might not seem like
a lot, but consider that the use of aircraft is growing, and the
FAA estimates that emissions will increase 60 percent by 2025.
It’s time for New Mexico’s leaders to ask
themselves some hard questions about what constitutes economic
development. Besides, now that I’m about to increase my own
carbon emissions — by adding a daughter to the planet —
I’m hoping that I don’t have to tell her “when I was a
young woman” stories about the once-glorious skies of New Mexico.
Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
She writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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