New Mexico in Focus; John Nichols Interview

Okay, we're not going to do the count down. Okay. Okay. Taking one step toward a healthier lifestyle. That path can be completely different from men and women, with a healthcare system built around and geared toward male patients. State leaders are now looking at new ways to bring equality here to New Mexico. What they're working on and how you can help take that first step toward a healthier tomorrow and a rebroadcast of an important and focused special coming up next. Okay. New Mexico's health problems are nothing new.

As one of the nation's poorest and largest states, we have high levels of the uninsured and a lack of healthcare resources. The problem is even worse for New Mexico women. But state leaders are beginning to take notice of those sex and gender disparities. The governor has created a Women's Health Advisory Council in just this month. The state will hold its first ever Women's Health Policy Forum. Canemies committed to addressing these disparities and helping find solutions. To help do that, we want to re-air a very special episode of Infocus, looking at the state of Women's Health Care in New Mexico. Here now is an on-core viewing of Take One Step for New Mexico Women. Take One Step for New Mexico Women is just part of a national program designed to bring a quality to the healthcare system. You can learn more about it at canmehealth.org. The new website is full of resources and information on a wide range of women's health issues. And be sure to tune in this Sunday for two very special shows right here on Canemies dedicated to women's health.

Fat. What no one is telling you will air from 1 to 3 p.m. followed by a rebroadcast of heart disease in America, the hidden epidemic from 3 to 5. For all of us here at Infocus, thanks for watching. John Nichols, welcome to the program. We seem to know everything we need to do to improve the environment, weren't we making faster progress? Because we're so tuned in to at least in the United States in particular to the method of consumption that we've been developing for the last 100 years that we simply don't

know how to change. People with the best of intentions still live in houses that consume enormous amounts of electricity and natural gas. We drive cars that consume extraordinary amounts of gasoline. We live in a culture that encourages us to go 75 to 80 miles an hour instead of 55 miles an hour, et cetera. And it's very, very difficult to break out of the culture that surrounds us, demanding sort of planned out the lessons, conspicuous consumption, et cetera. What role does greed play? Excuse me? What role does greed play? Well, I suppose you could say that global capital is predicated upon maximum feasible profit from minimum investment and that every corporation running every business on earth

just about is based on the idea that you have to make that profit and that resources are limitless. And we still don't have, in our economic culture, the idea that you have to recreate kind of sustainable businesses because there's not the kind of profit involved in those businesses that there is in sort of super exploitation. So where will we find the leadership to make a big shift? I don't know. It's like I tell people we need a new, genius economic philosopher like Adam Smith or Karl Marx or somebody that can give us an entirely new, brilliant, macroscopic philosophy for running the planet in times of increasing scarcity, running the planet in tune with the finite nature of its resources.

Global warming is such an immediate concern you and I were talking earlier about how it's even affected how we do vegetable gardening. What are you personally doing differently to cut your own impact on that problem? You know, most of my life, when I was 23, I kind of made a vow of poverty to live really poor. I made the vow because I wanted to be a writer. I didn't have that much environmental consciousness. What I said, if I live with a really small imprint and don't develop many material needs, I will be free enough to do the career that I want to do, which was to be a writer. I learned subsequently that living, you know, really kind of poor or living really simply is the first step towards some kind of environmental salvation. So I just don't buy stuff, I don't shop, I don't get in debt, I don't want material things, you know, I don't have a $1,500 entertainment pod or something like that. I have a $39 boom box from Walmart, you know, that I can play CDs on or I can play tapes

on or whatever. I don't, I've trained myself to have very few material needs. Once a year or once every three years I come to Albuquerque with $100 in my pocket and I go to thrift town and I buy, you know, three pairs of pants and I buy like five shirts for $2.29 a shirt or whatever, you know, I mean, I get things secondhand, I, the last car I bought, I bought for $2,500, it had 90,000 miles on it, it was a little Dodge shadow, you know, it gets 30, 35 miles to the gallon or whatever. I just don't, you know, spend stuff and that's the first step. What gives you hope for the environment? I get hope for the environment as the environment can survive anything, you know, the environment has survived ice ages, the environment has survived asteroid that hit the Gulf of Mexico wiped

out the dinosaurs, you know. I kind of look at human activity as another natural disaster and if we don't manage to check ourselves and really, you know, do a number on the planet, the planet will regenerate itself, ultimately, we may not be here to see it, but, you know, the universe is long, life is long, life is extraordinarily tenacious, I always love looking at the sidewalk and all the little weeds that come up through the sidewalk, you know, nature really can regenerate itself, no matter what we do to it, but it would be great if, because we have the consciousness to understand what we were doing, if we actually manage to change our ways in some kind of manner that allowed us and 100% of the other life forms on the planet to survive longer.

What does it you love about New Mexico? What do I love about New Mexico? Oh my God. The people, I love the cultures. I was raised in a tricultural family, spoke Spanish, French and English, so I loved the fact that I can live in a place that speaks Tua and Spanish and English, et cetera, and I love the landscape of New Mexico, I live in Tows County and I spend three quarters of my life either in the Rio Grande Gorge or in the high country, the Alpine areas of the mountains or in the Montain Forest or watersheds of pot Creek Rio Chiquita, little Rio Grande, and there is no more beautiful country or more interesting or more wild country that I know of in this United States. John Nichols, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us.

Yeah, thank you. Author John Nichols, thank you so much for joining us. For years, you've been climbing Tows Mountain, sometimes several times a week, how come? I've been climbing, not really Tows Mountain, but I've been climbing the high mountains in the Tows area in the Wheeler Peak Wilderness and I've lived in Tows since 1969 and all that time I've spent many, many, many days and hours camping in the mountains, hunting and fishing in the mountains, fishing the Rio Grande Gorge, I mean, just moving around the entire county which goes from 6,000 feet at the bottom of the Rio Grande Gorge to 13,000 feet at Wheeler Peak.

But about six years ago, I decided, I get fixated on places. I spent years on the Tows Mesa, west of the Rio Grande Gorge just looking at stockpons and learning about the life cycles in little tiny spots of water and then I spent many, many years going up and down the Rio Grande Gorge, fishing, I love fly fishing, et cetera. But I really learned the gorge, I learned a 30 mile section of that river, you know, in the riparian habitat, the eagle nest, the hawk nest, the owl nest, blah, blah, blah. And then I spent years going into the mid mountains between 8,000 and 10,500 feet with little watersheds, little streams coming down, I love to fish, I love to hike, follow game trails, I have lots of friends who are elk hunters, I've never shot an elk but I like to scout for elk and that just means, you know, going everywhere. And finally, I had never spent a whole lot of time in the Tundra above tree limit, you

know, between 12,000 and 13,000 feet and about six years ago or seven years ago, I have sort of an erratic heart, I've had open heart surgery, I have like a metal ring in one of my valves to my heart and to sort of try and get my heart into really good shape, I started climbing really high and I started doing it like every three days or four days and I've been doing that for six years and specifically I climb up to the Williams Lake Bowl which has Wheeler Peak which is the tallest mountain in New Mexico, then it has Old Mike which is almost as tallest Wheeler and it overlooks Blue Lake over on the Indian Pueblo, then it has Spoon Mountain and a peak called Lake Fort Peak which is my favorite mountain and my favorite thing in the whole area is that nobody goes there, there's no

trails, it's like in the last six years I think I've bumped into four people in my hikes and I'll climb up to Williams Lake which is very accessible, many, many people do it, it's just above the Towsky Valley and then I just branch out and most people go to Williams Lake or they climb Wheeler Peak because Wheeler Peak is the highest mountain in New Mexico and everybody wants to mark that on their chart, right? And so I avoid Wheeler Peak like the plague but the rest of the area is just wild, it's Angleman Spruce Forest, there's Alpine Meadows, Sub-Alpine Meadows, there's Little Tarns which are snow melt lakes about as big as this chair, you know, at 12,000 feet, there's huge boulder fields, I mean there's boulder fields that run for half a mile, just you know some of the boulders are 8 feet high or whatever and then you get up into the Tundra area and

I love the Tundra, the Tundra is just no trees, the vegetation is about that high, you know, there's little plants on the Tundra that take 50 years to grow enough to have a little flower, you know, I mean things move really slowly up there, there's snow up there usually into July or August and then maybe it melts off for a few weeks and then new snow comes in, I love following big horn sheep, the Wheeler wilderness has about 250 big horn sheep up there and I have a spotting scope, I take a spotting scope and a little tripod and watch the big horns during the autumn when they're in rut, you know, they bang heads, this is just incredible thing and the area where they live, I mean the big horns live at 13,000 feet, 12,000 feet year round, I go up on snowshoes all winter, you know, I

trump up and get up to maybe 11,500 feet and I have these little stations and boulder fields where I make little pack down the snow, you know, and just sit there and watch the big horns and there'll be 60 mile an hour winds on the ridges and you see these snow plumes just blowing off, just, you know, savagely and you'll see the big horns up there just, you know, munching away, grazing away in this kind of weather and I love watching a prehistoric animal, I mean big horns were developed in the Pleistocene, the ice age that can survive any ice age type of climate up there and I've taught myself the botany, I've learned hundreds of little alpine plants, I've taught myself a lot about migration of different

birds, you know, I know when the Audubon warblers come in, when the ruby crown kinglets come in, you know, when the hermit thrushes come back, the pipettes, that kind of stuff and why do I do it, I mean it's just to familiarize myself with the earth, you know, a, b is there's no people, sometimes I go with friends but I prefer to go alone because when I go alone there's really not much human contact except what's going on in my own brain and I can basically just suspend my human life and just watch the natural world and what's really cool about the natural world is the three quarters of the animals in the natural world, they spend most of their lives just watching, you know, understanding their environment, I've followed Raven families,

one summer I saw Ravens building an est, laying their eggs, the babies got born, the babies grew up, I watched the parents, you know, teach the babies how to get food, you know, how to take them into the meadows, catch grasshoppers, I watched them teach their young how to fly, right, and it's so exciting to get really tuned in to watching how animals survive in the natural world and in a harsh natural world, right. What's a big lesson you've learned from that observation? Well the lesson that I have learned is an extraordinary sort of all and respect and intrigue in that natural world, you know, and it functions great without us, you know, one of the lessons I've learned is if we would leave it alone a lot more, the natural world would be a lot healthier,

you know, if I have a friend who works for the Forest Service and we go on hikes every now and then and I'll go up with my friend in some of the areas that I go to and at the end of the hike my friend will say you're right, the best way for the Forest Service to take care of this land leave it alone completely, no paths, don't advertise it, just leave it alone, you know, if you leave it alone it really gets along really well. But in recent years with the drought and with no burn policies in the Forest, the health of what you're seeing up there must have changed dramatically. Yeah, the health, I mean, everything I read suggests that there will be no tundra in New Mexico within 50 years because global warming will end, you know, the possibility of- The people will just keep growing up higher and higher.

The people will just keep growing up higher and higher and higher. Yeah, everything is kind of moving north, you know, the deserts will probably move north, etc. And so I am aware that it might not be here forever, you know, part of spending so much time focusing on an area, I suppose it's kind of like bearing witness, you know, I read Holocaust survivors a lot, you know, from World War II and the Holocaust, and people keep writing about their experiences because beyond everything else they feel it's really important to bear witness, you know, to what happened. But I also believe it's really important to bear witness to what works and to what is wonderful, you know, and to share it with people. I think that probably the most important thing that humanity has to learn right now is how to re-identify with the natural world and the biology that sustains us, you know,

we've lost our connection to our genetic sort of programming, you know, we were sort of programmed to be, to really survive with our world during the Pleistocene Era, I believe. And then we've sort of abandoned the knowledge that we used to have on how to survive in nature. Of course, we are a part of nature and we sort of, in the last three or four or five or thousand years, we've kind of thought we're above nature and we need to control nature and that kind of thing. And what we're learning is that controlling nature is not going to work, right? I mean, we're eventually going to destroy nature, which will destroy ourselves. It's like we'll kill the goose that laid the golden egg, you know. So what we need to do is to relearn how to take care of the goose that lays the golden egg. And I think part of it is people like me who

become really, really familiar with, you know, the biology that sustains us because all of it, I mean, even the tundra that seems so harsh and inaccessible is an important part of the ecosystem. You know, every part of the ecosystem is important to the rest of it. The same way that every organ in our body is important to the other organs. You know, every cell in our skin is important to every other functioning part of our bodies. And so I guess that's why going, you know, into the mountains, I find that, for me, it's, I don't get a whole lot of positive reinforcement from looking at all the condo development in Tows, from looking at all the second home development in Tows. I don't get much positive reinforcement from looking at the glot of SUVs

that are driving around Tows. You know, I get very little positive reinforcement from much human activity, but I get total positive reinforcement when I'm walking in the mountains or in wild country. You know, it's like I am just amazed that a tiny little bird like a ruby-crown kinglet can survive temperatures of 30 or 40 below. You know, I read books about how it does an animal survive in the winter like that. And they go in torpor. You know, there's so many miracles of survival that have been figured out in the natural world, you know, from little tiny bacterium in the earth to how big horned sheep survive in blizzards. And the more you look at that, the more you get, I think reinforcement of the possibilities for us learning our own survival. You've been documenting your experiences in the mountains with both stories and photographs. Tell us

about that. I keep careful field notes every time I go out because I really like to learn. And I have a little tape recorder that I'll talk into and then I transcribe the notes and put them away. I've written articles about just, you know, climbing in the mountains and what I see. As part of the record, I take photographs every time I go up. I take a little tiny point and shoot camera. And I click panoramas and then just tape them together and some and Xeroxam sometime. It's a record. It's if nothing else, you know, when I die or when I can't do this any longer, I will have file cabinets of information that people will be able to study and learn what the weather was like, what the plant life was like, what the, what the flower and you know,

the fauna was like, what the migratory patterns of birds were like. In this little patch of wilderness and you know, every patch of land is infinity in a grain of sand. I mean, you can study the 10 or 15 square mile area that I really, really know well, you know, above 10,000 feet and you can get a pretty good idea of the situation on the planet, you know. And so I do that. I like to share it, you know, I'm not really eager to have millions of human beings, you know, come and walk around in the area. I'm walking around in because part of what makes it so special is that it isn't trampled by human ingenuity, you know what I mean? I mean, there's just, it's too harsh. People might go there for, you know, a little hike during the day, but you can't live there,

you can't stay there. The weather is scary, you know, three quarters of the time. I find myself running downhill to avoid lightning storms or whatever, you know. But we need to know how precious it is and what an integral part of the biology that sustains us. What has become part of a book project for you? Maybe. I sort of, the minute I sort of say maybe when I can't do it anymore, when I'm in a wheelchair or whatever, you know, that maybe then I would write about it. I don't really want to write about it too much right now because I think I get self-conscious, maybe, you know. But I do keep really careful notes because I believe that repeated observation of the same place and of the natural world is really important towards learning, you know, how it functions and towards respecting it in some way that we wanted to keep on functioning and

that we want to learn how to function with it. You know, I mean, the great, the great problem for humanity now is relearning how to take care or how to become a part of the natural world that we are a part of again and then learning how to take care of that natural world because we get all our resources from it. You know, the electricity that's lighting our faces, the the shirt that I'm wearing, the dungaries. I mean, all of it comes from the natural world. John Nichols, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.