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Morning Word
Gov to Racing Commission: Take action now
The New Mexico Racing Commission has “completely failed to take proactive measures to fix or address” the use of performance-enhancing drugs, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham writes in a letter to the commission sent last week. During a special meeting this morning, the commission will reportedly discuss the governor’s letter, which follows the deaths of several horses this summer at the Ruidoso Downs, scheduled to host the All American Futurity horse race over Labor Day weekend. Regulators have said those deaths prompted more pre-race examinations, as well as closer monitoring of the horses between races. The governor’s letter calls those measures “too little too late.” In 2012, a New York Times investigative series found New Mexico’s horse racing industry had the worst safety record in the US. Subsequently, the Racing Commission voted to limit legal use of drugs, such as pain relievers, for horses and to impose stiffer penalties for those who didn’t follow the new rules. Nonetheless, according to the governor’s letter, between 2014 and 2022, New Mexico had 642 racehorses euthanized—the sixth-highest number of racehorse euthanized in the US. Seven horses were euthanized between Aug. 11-13, following races at Ruidoso Downs. The governor says the commission should mandate the new protocols Ruidoso Downs has implemented, including “continuous monitoring of horses in their stalls, during and after training before a race; pre-approving all medications and maintaining the dispensers (such as syringes) for analysis; and more robust requirements for home training horses to be onsite prior to races so that the horses can be observed.” She also says the commission should consult Kentucky, California and New York to obtain understanding of the industry’s best practices. “Let me be clear,” the governor writes, “this is not a request, I am directing you to act now.”
Report details NM’s “Space Valley” successes
“Spaceport America supports 548 direct jobs, 811 total jobs in New Mexico while contributing $138 million to economic output, $60 million to value added production and $46 million in labor income to New Mexico’s economy.” So says New Mexico State University’s Arrowhead Center Program Advisor Kramer Winingham, co-author of a new report about Spaceport America’s economic impact. Arrowhead Center and the Center for Border Economic Development produced the report for Spaceport America, which plans to have them do so again annually. In addition to analyzing the Spaceport’s local economic impact, the report also evaluates seven major areas: tenant operations, tenant employment, privately-funded construction, out-of-state visitor spending, revenues, total economic impact and tax revenue impact. “At its core, Spaceport America is an infrastructure-developed project designed to spur economic development, specifically in the space industry for the region,” Spaceport America Executive Director Scott McLaughlin says in a statement. “As such, it is incumbent upon us to show what impacts and benefits the investment has created, and whether its operations create jobs and business opportunities. This report shows that the investment is paying off, and that the counties and the state are benefiting from this long-term effort.” McLaughlin adds that Spaceport and its partner organizations are now calling the region “Space Valley” because “there are so many assets available for building the aerospace ecosystem. From Los Alamos to El Paso, the region is rich with research at federal laboratories and great universities, an increasing number of aerospace design and manufacturing companies, and a growing skilled workforce.” One of Spaceport’s high-profile tenants, Virgin Galactic, announced this morning the target flight window for its second private astronaut mission, Galactic 03, will open Sept. 8.
Abortion access battle in NM
The Carnegie-Knight News21 project, America After Roe, homes in on New Mexico, where anti-abortion activists are working to upend the state’s sanctuary status for women for seeking reproductive health care. According to the story, between July 2022 through April 2023, New Mexico’s five Planned Parenthood clinics recorded 2,749 appointments—a 97% increase from the 10-month period before Texas banned abortion at around six weeks. Following last year’s US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, 57% of Planned Parenthood patients in New Mexico come from Texas, Planned Parenthood says, with others coming from Oklahoma, Arizona and elsewhere. While Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and other state leaders have remained stalwart in protecting reproductive choice here, several New Mexico towns that passed so-called sanctuary laws restricting abortion as part of a concerted anti-abortion strategy. “We gained a lot of ground with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but now it’s at the state level,” says Logan Brown, a science teacher from Portales, New Mexico, who helped organize a recent church gathering and anti-abortion strategy meeting documented in the News 21 story. “Now,” Brown says, “instead of one battlefield, it’s 50 battlefields.”
This is your brain on wildfire smoke
New findings from University of New Mexico scientists indicates wildfire smoke can trigger inflammation in the brain that persists for a month or more. University of New Mexico Health Sciences scientists’ paper on the topic recently appeared in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, and notes that wildland fire acres burned per year have roughly doubled since 1985 and now routinely generate smoke that deteriorates air quality for most of the country. The inflammation identified by the scientists impacts the hippocampus, the area of the brain associated with with learning and memory, according to the paper’s senior author, Matthew Campen, Regents’ professor in the College of Pharmacy and co-director of the UNM Clinical & Translational Science Center. “Most people don’t appreciate that there is a neurological outcome from these particles,” Campen says in a statement. “You think of the lungs and maybe the cardiovascular system, but to move to the realm of cognition and memory and mood, that’s a very different phenomenon.” As detailed in a UNM news release on the paper, researchers exposed rodents to wood smoke every other day for two weeks to try to determine “if the stuff we saw in the wild could at least be partially figured out in the lab,” post-doctoral student David Scieszka said. “We were able to measure the inflammatory response amplitude and time frames. We expected it to be a lot shorter. Some of it progressed out to 28 days and we didn’t see a complete resolution, and that was very scary to us.”
Listen up
In “New Mexico Nuclear Underground,” a special program from New Mexico PBS show Our Land, host, senior producer and environmental journalist Laura Paskus takes an in depth look at Holtec International’s federally licensed plans to construct a facility between Hobbs and Carlsbad to store nuclear waste from decommissioned power plants across the US. Paskus talks with former state Rep. John Heaton, D-Carlsbad, who chairs the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance and supports the project, as well as state Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces, sponsor of Senate Bill 53, which prohibits the creation of such a facility without the state’s consent, and only if the federal government proceeds with creating a permanent holding facility for such waste. Paskus also speaks with University of New Mexico Honors College Associate Professor Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos.
Secrets from the Pajarito Plateau
Although she’s a descendent of settlers in Northern New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau, Francesca Smithwick-Driver grew up knowing next-to-nothing about her family’s experiences living on land that would eventually be ceded to the government in order to stand up what would become Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2004, Congress established a $10 million fund to compensate homesteaders and acknowledge Hispanic homesteaders had been paid less than others. The US Department of Energy also funded a book on the history of homesteading in the area: Homesteading on the Pajarito Plateau, 1887-1942, published in 2012. In an essay for the Los Angeles Times, Smithwick-Driver writes of learning about the the book when a historian at the Los Alamos Historical Society in New Mexico contacted her and subsequently sent her a copy. No one in her family had ever spoken of their time in New Mexico, Smithwick-Driver notes, during which her grandparents—beginning in 1921—lived on and managed the plateau’s Anchor Ranch. “Reading the parts about my family only deepened the mystery of the silence of my father and grandmother about their lives on the plateau,” she writes. “But it clarified historical aspects of their story, including issues of power, race, privilege and loss made newly relevant by the movie Oppenheimer.” Approximately a decade later, Smithwick-Driver visited the Pajarito Plateau at the invitation of the Los Alamos Historical Society. “I still can’t reconcile the evidence of their lives on the Pajarito Plateau with their later lives,” she writes at the essay’s conclusion. “But I did come away with a sense of the inscrutable spirit of the plateau, a mix of beauty and horror. I have also come to understand the power of secrecy.”
An Irish farewell
Last week, this newsletter reported on Cosmopolitan magazine’s inclusion of Santa Fe on its list of locales for “girls’” trips (quotation marks ours). Now, Men’s Journal has Santa Fe on its roundup the nine best small towns in America for every type of traveler. In the case of Santa Fe, the “type” of traveler would be the “art lover” (quotation marks also ours). To wit: “From the 100-plus fine art galleries on bougie, adobe-lined Canyon Road to the trippy neon multiverse at Meow Wolf to an opera season where attendees tailgate in the parking lot in Southwest style (i.e. cowboy boots and turquoise bolos), Santa Fe is a one-of-a-kind destination for art lovers,” Men’s Journal proclaims. The story specifically recommends Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi for accommodations, chowing down at The Shed, Del Charro and Tomasitas and detoxing from a trip down the city’s Margarita Trail at Ten Thousand Waves. In other words: the usual. For a slightly off-beat take on a visit to Santa Fe, the Irish Post came for the opera, but also makes note of other aspects of the city, such as the Railyard area, where writer Mal Rodger says “you’ll likely come eye to eye with more than one dedicated trainspotter” (our minds went to the 1996 film Trainspotting, but upon re-reading we think he just means people who like trains). Rogers also recommends El Callejon for what he describes as Tex/Mex food. We would not call it that but agree El Callejon deserves more attention. Rogers ends his Santa Fe coverage at the opera and with confusing bemusement that the Santa Fe Opera doesn’t allow firearms on the premises.”Any person carrying a firearm is guilty of a fourth-degree felony,” Rogers notes. “America, eh?” he concludes.
Rain check
The National Weather Service forecasts a 50% chance for precipitation today, with scattered showers and thunderstorms after 1 pm. Otherwise, it will be mostly sunny, with a high temperature near 81 degrees and east wind 5 to 10 mph becoming west in the afternoon. More rain likely tonight as well, before 10 pm.
Thanks for reading! The Word digs these images from the exhibition Noguchi Subscapes, which she discovered from this Los Angeles Review of Books feature.
