The Orphaned Land

New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project

V. B. Price

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780826350510
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Although most people prefer not to think about them, hazardous wastes, munitions testing, radioactive emissions, and a variety of other issues affect the quality of land, water, and air in the Land of Enchantment, as they do all over the world.

In this book, veteran New Mexico journalist V. B. Price assembles a vast amount of information on more than fifty years of deterioration of the state's environment, most of it hitherto available only in scattered newspaper articles and government reports. Viewing New Mexico as a microcosm of global ecological degradation, Price's is the first book to give the general public a realistic perspective on the problems surrounding New Mexico's environmental health and resources.

Chapter 1:
Key Human Impacts on the New Mexico Environment

While human activity has been changing the landscape of what is now New Mexico, often dramatically, since migrants arrived in the Americas some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, nothing in the past—not even the coming of the railroad in 1879 or the dawn of the automobile culture in the 1930s—comes close to the impacts humans have made on New Mexico’s environment since World War II. Many of these effects have proven to be dangerous to the physical and social health of the human community in New Mexico and the biotic world upon which it depends. They fall into five broad categories: pollution of air, water, and soil; accelerated depletion, sometimes to extinction, of species of flora and fauna; disruption of natural habitats and processes; alteration of forests, grasslands, and countrysides by overharvesting, overuse, and improvident development; and scarring of landscapes by extractive industries and energy and transportation technologies. Environmental degradation has often taken place during the last sixty years in close proximity to marginalized populations, the urban and rural poor of all races and cultures. Most environmental problems result from economic and military activity, and in New Mexico they usually result from both, owing to the extent to which the state’s economy depends on the military.

Geographers and biologists emphasize the sheer speed of change in our lifetimes and the sense of future shock people in relatively wealthy societies have been feeling since the seventeenth century. As one scholar puts it, “Most of the [environmental transformation] of the past three hundred years has been at the hands of humankind, intentionally or otherwise. Our ever-growing role in this continuing metamorphosis has itself essentially changed. Transformation has escalated through time, and in some instances the scales of change have shifted from the [local] and the regional to the earth as a whole. Whereas humankind once acted primarily upon the visible ‘faces’ or ‘states’ of the earth, such as forest cover, we are now also altering the fundamental flows of chemicals and energy that sustain life on the only inhabited planet we know.”1

Continuous Degradation

To be sure, human history can be seen as a series of degradations since the beginning: annihilation of species; genocidal assaults, large and small, on marginalized humans; deforestation; overgrazing; soil depletion and erosion; mining pollution; introduction of invasive species; soil-damaging misuse of water technologies; and the scars left by mass human migrations and road building. Many of these historical trends run all the way into the present. But much human activity in the environment has been directly beneficial to human existence. Such efforts as small-scale farm irrigation from rivers, streams, arroyos, and reservoirs, large and small (not from aquifers); well-contained towns and roadways; harvesting of renewable resources; levee building, alkaline drainage, and flood protection; preservation of wilderness and historic sites; community grazing on commons land; soil conservation and replenishment; urban tree planting; and many other environmentally respectful and savvy activities fall into this category. The use of fossil fuels, which took off with the coming of the railroad and accelerated as automobiles grew to dominate the economy, led to a gradual accumulation of petrochemical pollution. Further contamination came with radioactive toxic waste and with the pest-control toxins and plastics that were byproducts of industrial farming, feed lot ranching, and the expansion of suburbia in the 1950s. The long-term effects of pollutants have no precursors in the pre-Conquest or colonial Hispanic past in New Mexico.

Blindsided by the Future

What’s happened in New Mexico since World War II has happened to most other localities on the planet: increased population, increased pollution, increased warming. Because New Mexico was an isolated, thinly populated state that attracted some brilliant scientists, it proved unexpectedly useful during the Cold War. Six months before the explosion in 1945 of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in New Mexico, the University of New Mexico Press published an analysis of the state’s economic prospects after the war. It was called New Mexico’s Future, written by E. L. Moulton. Usefully organized and reasoned, Moulton’s careful examination of employment, manufacturing, and service industry trends in wartime New Mexico displays, of course, no knowledge at all of the secret nuclear labs in Los Alamos, and therefore no clue as to the role that Sandia Labs and Kirtland Air Force Base would play in Albuquerque’s and New Mexico’s future. Moulton also, of course, did not know that the interstate highway system, which was initiated during the Eisenhower administration, would stimulate suburban sprawl in New Mexico. Even in 1945, however, economists were predicting that the United States would be using more petroleum by 1960 than it could discover in domestic oil fields. Moulton’s provisional solution was innovative—the hydrogenation of subbituminous coal, turning one hundred pounds of coal into eight gallons of fairly high-grade gasoline. But Moulton failed to predict the long-range impact the use of fossil fuels would have on our atmosphere and climate.2 Reading Moulton, it seems clear now that the actual postwar future caught even the brightest minds in the state completely by surprise.

Like much of the rest of the world, New Mexico in the twenty-first century looks superficially the same as it did fifty or sixty years ago, with the addition, of course, of miles of power lines and superhighways, gigantic billboards, and other accoutrements of commerce and communication. But all is not well with New Mexico beneath the surface, nor with the rest of earth. It’s not the literal earth I worry about. Like many others, I feel certain that natural processes will endure, even though altered by our presence. It’s us I worry about, and the other life-forms that interact with us.

Rachel Carson wrote prophetically and so clearly about these concerns in the 1960s. The corporate and governmental worlds ridiculed her at first, eventually paying grudging attention when isolated facts bore out her general perception of degradation from industrial and Cold War nuclear waste. And though a political subculture has arisen in the United States around her environmental insights, it appears so dangerous to corporate and military interests that its more fervent activists are labeled “ecoterrorists.”

Carson wrote in Silent Spring, “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.”3

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—and the very nature of its life.4

Since the test of the first nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site near Carrizozo, New Mexico’s environment has been assaulted repeatedly by nuclear and industrial contamination stemming from military research and development and from manufacturing and mining activities. Post–World War II New Mexico may still look like the Land of Enchantment, but significant parts of its natural environment may have been corrupted beyond repair.

Human Impacts

To make matters worse for every locality on the planet, including New Mexico, of course, four trends dominate the “human manipulation of the environment … in the modern era,” according to geographer Andrew Goudie. “The first of these is that the ways in which humans are affecting the environment are proliferating.… Secondly, environmental issues that were once locally confined have become regional or even global problems.… The complexity, magnitude, and frequency of impacts are probably increasing.… Finally, compounding the effects of rapidly expanding populations is a general increase in per capita consumption and environmental impact.… One index of this is world commercial energy consumption, which trebled in size between the 1950s and 1980.”5 Owing to population growth and the increasing use of technology, human impacts on the environment “will be greatly magnified,” Goudie observed.6

It’s not that humans were a benign presence in the natural world in New Mexico and elsewhere before the industrial revolution and World War II. Culpable in part perhaps for a mass extinction of megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene in New Mexico’s general region some ten thousand years ago and capable of making lasting alterations, scars, and disruptions—even with only stone and wood tools—on surface landscape features with urban developments in Chaco Canyon and other Ancestral Puebloan sites, humans have mined, hunted, cultivated, carved roads, and developed built environments all across the New Mexican habitat, never failing to leave their markings. But consider the differences between a digging stick and a plow, a plow and a tractor, a tractor and a bulldozer, a bulldozer and a steam shovel, a midden and a toxic dump, a flint quarry and a nuclear waste pit, stone-lined ritual roadways and a state crisscrossed by asphalt and concrete highways and underground pipelines—these give a clear picture of how persistent humans have always been at not only adapting to environments but making environments themselves adapt as far as possible to human wants and needs.

What follows is a brief overview of human impacts ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Key Human Impacts on the New Mexico Environment
• Chapter Two: Water: A Desert Among Eons of Oceans
• Chapter Three: Environmental Discrimination: Dumping on the Poor
• Chapter Four: Toxic Waste: “Everything Has to Go Somewhere”
• Chapter Five: Urban/Rural Struggles: The Broader Habitat
• Chapter Six: Conditions, Conclusions, New Paths to Follow
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index[1]