WRITING PROJECT RESIDENCIES AT THE LEOPOLD HOUSE IN TRES PIEDRAS, NM BY STEVE FOX
There isn’t a better place to spend a quiet month’s residency, writing about environment ethics, wisdom and our responsibility to the natural world, than the house Aldo and Estella Leopold built in Tres Piedras, N.M., in the summer of 1912. The Leopold Writing Program is a small not-for-profit with ardent Leopold scholars and Nuevo Mexicano land and history specialists on its board. They bring Leopold’s thought and never-more-relevant insights to the public through residencies for writers at the Leopolds’ Mi Casita, one in late summer and the other in early fall. The residency award includes $500 for the awardee’s expenses. The reciprocal part of the agreement for the chosen writer is to present what he or she wrote during residency at a public forum at the Harwood Museum in Taos. The historic adobe property holds New Mexico art treasures from the Taos Society of Artists, 1900-1930 through living masters of the present.
That “green fire” has been one of Leopold’s most lasting images, and is enshrined in Green Fire Times’ title. By the 1920s, Leopold saw the West’s mountains denuded by grazing deer whose natural predators had been eliminated. He formed that insight into “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which was included in Sand County Almanac, a classic book of essays on nature’s wisdom and humans’ responsibilities, published after his death in 1948. That short book was waiting on bookshelves when the conservation movements began, and it is still relevant in our time of global warming. Applications for the residency can be made through www.leopoldwritingprogram.org. The deadline is Feb. 28. Applicants should explain what new, personal impacts Aldo Leopold’s ideas are having on them and what work the applicant does that impacts the land, water and creatures where he or she resides. For questions, email: andrewdennison86@ gmail.com
NEW MEXICANS OBJECT TO EPA PLAN TO GUT AIR POLLUTION SAFEGUARDS Methane, a greenhouse gas 87 times more potent than carbon dioxide during the time it remains in the atmosphere, is a major public health threat, particularly for children.
Aldo and Estella Leopold at “Mi Casita,” the home they built in Tres Piedras, NM So many of the epiphanies that made the pioneer conservationist and land ethicist rethink prevailing Forest Service wisdom occurred early in the early 1900s when Leopold took his first post as a forest ranger, based at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. The mantra of the time, shoot every wolf on sight, made him shoot a mother wolf for sport. She taught him the shallowness of his trigger-happy assumptions when he saw “the green fire of her eyes go out” as she died, leaving motherless pups. Leopold got the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico’s southwest corner designated as our nation’s first Wilderness Area in 1924.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler has proposed gutting key safeguards limiting methane pollution from new oil and gas operations. As of late December 2018, opponents of rolling back those protections had submitted nearly 400,000 comments urging the EPA to keep them in place. Over 50 elected leaders from New Mexico signed on to a letter from local elected leaders throughout the country. According to the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, New Mexico has both the highest methane emissions among the eight states that produce the most oil and gas on federally leased lands and the poorest state regulations. The Law Center says, based on operations on all lands in the state, New Mexico could be venting, flaring or leaking up to $240 million in natural gas annually, costing the state about $27 million in tax and royalty revenue.
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