With Kirk on the mend, Lobos’ Aget clocks in more game time Sports, B-1
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Philip Seymour Hoffman dies
‘Weight fate’ set before kindergarten?
Highly regarded character actor was 46. PAGe A-12
Study shows kids’ obesity risk determined by age 5. FAmILy, A-9
Lobbyist atop contribution list backs giving ban Bullington led peers in New Mexico last year with $81K distributed to political campaigns for clients By Steve Terrell
The New Mexican
J.D. Bullington, a longtime New Mexico lobbyist on contract to represent more than 20 clients, made
J.D. Bullington
$81,050 in campaign contributions to New Mexico politicians on behalf of his clients last year — more than any other lobbyist registered in the state. But Bullington said last week he doesn’t think a good lobbyist needs to
hand out the cash to do a good job. In fact, he said, he’s a staunch supporter of banning all contributions from lobbyists. “I’m an expert in the issues I advocate,” Bullington said. “I was on my high school debate team. I can make my case armed just with valid arguments.” Judging from past years, prohibiting
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DENVER FANS DISAPPOINTED AS SEATTLE WINS SUPER BOWL
W
hat was hyped as a classic matchup between an unstoppable offense and a miserly defense turned into a rout Sunday as the Seattle Seahawks won their first Super Bowl crown in overpowering fashion, punishing Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos 43-8. The Seahawks never let the five-time MVP get going, disarming the highest-scoring offense in league history.
INSIde u Super Bowl coverage, reaction and analysis.
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u The best of this year’s commercials. PAGe A-2
Ann Murray and Ross Lockridge, who have lived in Cerrillos for 40 years, oppose a proposed 50-acre basalt mine on La Bajada Mesa near Waldo Canyon Road. JANE PHILLIPS/THE NEW MEXICAN
LA BAJADA MESA
County to mull mine request as locals voice opposition By Staci Matlock The New Mexican
ABOVE: Alec Fischer checks his phone during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLVIII at Junction on South Guadalupe Street. Fischer, who was cheering for Peyton Manning and the Broncos, was disappointed as Denver fell to Seattle. TOP: Calvin Fields, who also went to Junction to watch the big game, cheers after the Seahawks scored a touchdown. PHOTOS BY KATHARINE EGLI/FOR THE NEW MEXICAN
LA BAJADA MESA — Just off Waldo Canyon Road, south of Interstate 25, cows graze the dusty land where an Albuquerque company wants to mine basalt. Albuquerque-based Rockology and Buena Vista Estates, a development company owned by Peter Naumburg and Hugh J. Graham Jr., have applied to rezone and mine a 50-acre parcel of land on the mesa. Buena Vista Estates owns more than 5,000 acres, which are currently for sale, on the mesa. A hearing on the application is scheduled Feb. 20 before the Santa Fe County Development Review Committee. The black basalt rock is prized as the crushed material used in asphalt, roadway base course and readymix concrete. For residents in the nearby villages of Cerrillos and Madrid, who can see La Bajada’s historic dark escarpment from the south, this is the latest call to battle. They roused the public troops the last two times the same company applied to Santa Fe County for permission to dig pits on the mesa and scrape out the rock. “It is an utterly destructive use of the land,” said Diane Senior, who lives in an off-grid, solar-powered home with a view of the entire mesa. Rockology owner Steve Hooper, who also owns the aggregate company Buildology, said if the project is allowed, the plan is to operate the mine for 25 years. The mine would create three pits, each about 60 feet deep. One pit would be mined at a time, for seven or eight years, and then reclaimed with topsoil from the site. The mine would move and stockpile 34,000 cubic yards of dirt and mine 1.26 million cubic yards of basalt. Santa Fe County has agreed to sell water to the project, even though it is outside the county’s service area. “We have issued a willing and able letter to provide
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Declassification of data critical to future scientific efforts ABOUT THe SeRIeS The Santa Fe Institute is a private, nonprofit, independent research and education center founded in 1984, where top researchers gather to study and understand the theoretical foundations and patterns underlying the complex systems that are most critical to human society. This column is part of a series written by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and published in The New Mexican.
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id you know top-secret intelligence by the U.S. government has played a key role in helping scientists understand how human societies and ecosystems have evolved over the last 10,000 years? The catch, of course, is that this has happened only after the declassification of the intelligence. I am an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Santa Fe Institute. With my colleagues, I study the long-term evolution of human societies, seeking the shared underlying principles that are responsible for the emergence of complex social, political and economic organization. To do this, we need two things: ideas about how things happened and data to evaluate those ideas. The evaluation of ideas with data leads to new ideas; this is the process that leads to scientific discovery. Here is a story about a discovery in which declassified top-secret data was critical. We know from archaeology
Classifieds B-6
Comics B-12
Family A-9
that the first largescale societies with a differentiated labor force, record-keeping bureaucracies and political systems that united communities beyond kinship emerged on the planet Eric Rupley at least 6,000 years ago. Science in a This happened first in Complex World Mesopotamia — not just the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but all the lands drained by them in what is now southern Turkey, western Iran, Syria and Iraq. The evolution of these first economies, we now know, occurred across the entire region. We didn’t always know this. Twenty years ago, we used to think the evolution of the earliest economies occurred only in a restricted area of south-
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Opinions A-11
Editor: Ray Rivera, 986-3033, rrivera@sfnewmexican.com Design and headlines: Kristina Dunham, kdunham@sfnewmexican.com
ern Mesopotamia, mostly south of Baghdad. The area, called the “heartland of cities” by the eminent archaeologist (and former Santa Fe Institute trustee) Robert McCormick Adams, requires irrigation for agriculture. New ways of thinking and new evidence have changed our view. Initially, we envisioned a core area of initial social innovation, while regions outside the core were “under-developed” and only passively participated in the creation of the first complex societies. The mechanisms for the creation of a centralized bureaucracy were thought to have stemmed from the environmental characteristics of the core: In the earlier part of this century, some archaeologists believed it arose from the need to manage irrigation. But when it became clear that complex irrigation systems do not require
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Santa Fe Botanical Garden Winter Lecture Series Downton Abby: Its Gardens and Landscapes, by Michael Pulman, 2 p.m., Santa Fe Woman’s Club, 1616 Old Pecos Trail, $10 at the door, 471-9103. More events in Calendar, A-2
Today Cloudy with snow showers. High 45, low 21. PAGe A-12
Two sections, 24 pages 165th year, No. 34 Publication No. 596-440