Albuquerque's Environmental Story
Albuquerque's Environmental Story  |
Albuquerque embodies tremendous contrasts. A thriving urban core in essentially rural New Mexico, it is blessed by mountains and mesas, a river and its bosque, and what many consider an ideal climate. It offers a mix of scenic, seemingly endless open spaces surrounding and pervading clustered buildings, tall and small. It is home to major educational institutions, a military base, research laboratories, hospitals, museums, and an energetic, growth-oriented business sector. All of these provide employment for its human blend of Hispanics and Native Americans (the earliest settlers), and an enriching, continuing influx of newcomers who reflect our nation's cultural diversity.
This book is designed to give young people the knowledge base to help them recognize, understand, and care about the region's many interdependencies and vulnerabilities. We hope it leads them to develop the character-building mix of respect, integrity, and sense of community that make for informed, responsible citizenship and adulthood. May those young people find here that this focus on their own community offers a deep understanding of the interrelationships that are part of their own experience. They may then learn to avoid simplistic, "black and white" responses to issues—regional, national, and global—beyond their sphere of personal experience. That understanding will help them realize, as future voters and decision makers, that we live in and share a world of complex issues and forces that must be appreciated and balanced if we are to truly sustain our community.
Albuquerque's rapid growth has made it increasingly important to develop an environmentally and socially literate population that sees beyond self-interest or economic, cultural, and ethnic bias. As we learn to work together, we can protect our dwindling open space and mindless land use patterns, as well as indiscriminate development and automobile-clogged roads, which pollute and further threaten our health and life-sustaining ecosystems.
Recognizing that too many people function apart from and unaware of the fragility of these ecosystems, we can and should educate young and old, newcomers and old-timers, business people and public officials—all kinds of people—and persuade them to plan and act together intelligently and decisively to preserve and perpetuate this region's diversity and livability for many generations.
Fundamentally, they - all of us - must learn that each of us, individually and collectively, are part of that interdependent, interrelated ecosystem that makes up our world. Government is what WE make it. It is not a much criticized "THEY", but "WE" who by knowledgeably and responsibly involving ourselves and working together can achieve a sustainable community and future.
(Up to Introductory Material, Back to Dedication, On to Acknowledgments)