Eight miles south of Socorro, Vannetta Perry owns a 54-acre farm. Her husband bought the land in 1973, and five years later, the couple started growing crops like alfalfa, winter wheat and corn for grain. Both worked other jobs to keep the farm running. “It’s almost impossible to be out of the poverty level just by farming if you’re a small farming operation,” says Perry. “But for us, for my husband and I, we chose that as a way of life. We chose it for our children and because we love farming.” But when Perry’s husband, Gary, died in 2010 of a rare brain disease, she couldn’t keep up with the loan for the land where they raised their children and where she continues to live while working as the Socorro’s interim superintendent. That’s when she decided to sell her water rights—164 acre-feet, or more than 5.3 million gallons—from the Rio Grande to the City of Santa Fe.

“A representative government is dependent upon an informed electorate.” Thus begins New Mexico’s Open Meetings Act, which makes transparency a central responsibility of public officials. In Santa Fe, that transparency exists in the form of City Council meetings, which are held biweekly and are open to the public. 

But in recent years, city officials have found ways to circumvent that requirement, meeting behind closed doors when taxpayer money is at stake.

On a windswept hill in Albuquerque’s south valley, rows of metallic blue solar panels gleam beside a humming control center. The energy they capture from the sun’s rays goes into orange containers stacked with special lead batteries that store the energy for use after the sun goes down.

In a scathing dissent from the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, former US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that, by equating corporations’ campaign spending to individuals’ free speech rights, the Court’s opinion was “a rejection of the common sense of the American people.” The ruling prompted an explosion of campaign spending: The 2012 elections are expected to be the most expensive in US history, and multimillion-dollar TV attack ad campaigns are already flooding airwaves—even as Congress becomes increasingly unproductive. In such a climate, it can be tempting to repudiate the whole charade and refuse to vote. But to disenfranchise ourselves is to abrogate our duty as citizens of a republic.

Lisa Gansky describes herself, somewhat improbably, as “a monkey with one trick”: starting companies. Gansky has made a career of spotting potential trends, then molding those ideas into wildly successful business enterprises. And while Gansky herself has thrived in the current economic system—Ofoto, a mobile photo-sharing company she cofounded in 1999 and then sold to Kodak two years later for somwhere under $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, is just one example—her latest venture involves upending that system. In Gansky’s view, a new economic paradigm is emerging with the potential to recast the way we think of buying, selling and creating wealth. She calls it the Mesh, and its premise is as simple as a kindergarten aphorism: We all need to learn to share.

On July 12, 2011, Lynn Degenhart resigned from his post as a member of the New Mexico Passenger Transportation Association board with a message titled “Ethical Concern.”

The book chooses the reader. I believe this; however, I also believe that the reader has an obligation to make himself available to the book.

Listen: Years ago, I stopped taking advice on reading material. First, every reader has his own tastes; second, some readers just aren’t very discerning—they’ll read anything; and finally, RIYL only applies to people who want to read books like the ones they’ve read. Moreover, as a literature and creative writing student, I struggled to split my time between the assigned texts and the books that interested me, and the required readings only interested me after they ceased to be assignments. Maybe I’m coming off as contrarian—as someone who just doesn’t like being told what to do—but really, I’m just a slow reader, and I only absorb materials out of personal interest rather than obligation.

On an unseasonably cold spring night, Santa Fe University of Art and Design students are busy cobbling together all manner of computers, projectors and speakers for a dress rehearsal of this year’s Outdoor Vision Festival—a free, outdoor celebration of interactive video installations.

Who doesn’t make bad choices, whether it’s choosing the brownie for breakfast instead of the banana or picking the life partner who lasts much less than a lifetime?