ALBUQUERQUE — The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice June 4 of its intent to sue the U.S. Forest Service for failing to protect riparian areas in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains from cattle. The area is critical habitat for the endangered New Mexico meadow jumping mouse.

“These mice represent the health of the upper elevation meadows and streams. It’s immoral and illegal for the Forest Service to continue allowing cattle to decimate the area and cause a local extinction,” Robin Silver, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, stated. “If these tiny creatures become extinct, Forest Service officials will be responsible. We won’t stop...

McKinley county is second only to Los Alamos County among the counties that helped New Mexico in its efforts to reach a 60 percent level of vaccination in order to reopen July 1.

McKinley County had 77.9 percent of people who completed their vaccination series as of June 14.

On June 18, N.M. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham confirmed that the state will retire its color-coded county-by-county system, along with the COVID-19 health restrictions on commercial and day-to-day activities on July 1. On that date all pandemic-related occupancy restrictions on all forms of commercial activity will be lifted and all businesses across the state may once again operate at 100 percent of maximum...

CONCLUSION: A deal climate change could bust

As part of the settlement that made the Navajo-Gallup Project a possibility, the Navajo Nation shifted its priority date from 1868, when the reservation was established and among the earliest rights in the Colorado River Basin, to 1955.

“That’s yesterday, in terms of water rights,” Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University, said.

Given that the system puts the newest rights at the top of the list to cut when faced with a shortage, that puts Navajo water supplies in the crosshairs when faced with ongoing drought and increasing aridification of the Southwest.

Flows in the entire Colorado...

Week ending Friday, June 4, 2021

Urban Microbiomes

Every city has been found to have its own unique “fingerprint” of viruses and bacteria that researchers say can probably be used by authorities to determine where someone is from with about a 90 percent accuracy. A team led by Cornell genomics expert Christopher Mason asked colleagues around the world to collect swabs from urban transport systems and conducted a genetic analysis on each. Besides finding that the larger the city, the more complex its diverse microbial life, they also discovered 10,928 viruses and 748 bacteria that were previously unknown to science. “I think it’s a wonderful affirmation of how much left we have...