As the economy continues to stagger and the effects of climate change become more obvious, many on the local front lines of the green-jobs movement believe the chasm between rhetoric and reality also grows more discernible. They say the state’s best hope for transformation—environmental and economic—may lie with its youth.

Using undercover sources, agents from the FBI and the US Bureau of Land Management spent more than two years infiltrating a tight-knit community of looters in the Four Corners area who dig up graves and pillage archaeological sites on public lands, then sell the items they find to dealers and collectors.

Under a questionable partnership, the Fish and Wildlife Service has managed to give away its statutory responsibility to recover endangered species to a consortium of agencies, allege critics of the way wolf introduction is being managed in the southwest. Wolves are being removed—or killed—by the very people charged with reintroducing the animals to the wild.

Signs of ancient life are everywhere in New Mexico. Consider the Galisteo Basin, just outside the city of Santa Fe, where hundreds of archaeological sites blanket the ground. These range from drawings etched hundreds of years ago onto boulders and scatters of flaked stone—where someone sat and chipped a tool, leaving behind bits and pieces of rock—to entire villages and sacred ceremonial structures.

But not everyone believes the State Land Office is properly overseeing the thousands of archaeological resources on state lands. As a result, archaeologists say, history is being lost.

Proponents of the Desert Rock power plant say it will create 1,000 construction jobs and then approximately 200 permanent jobs once it’s up and running.

But the region already has three coal-fired power plants, including two in the Four Corners, which are considered among the dirtiest plants in the country.

In a rush to further relax environmental rules and deregulate oversight, the Bush administration is pushing a number of rule changes to take effect before Inauguration Day: easing restrictions on power plants, allowing factory farms to skirt the Clean Water Act and weakening toxic emissions standards for oil refineries, among other things.

While the cultural importance of chile remains unshaken, the actual crop has seen better days. Between the shaky agricultural market and the influx of various diseases, commercial chile farmers say they are struggling to survive.

Scientists believe genetically modified chile seeds could be the answer to the crop’s woes.

Few people on the planet are unaware of climate change—reducing one’s carbon footprint has practically become a fashion statement. But behind the headlines and slogans, scientists are tracking the impacts global warming is already having—and projecting what is yet to come.

Potential effects of climate change in New Mexico as part of the August 27, 2008 cover story, "Feel the Heat"

The Navajo Nation has learned a lesson about uranium–has anyone else?

For almost eight years, Lopez and his brother-in-law, George Brown, crushed uranium ore, separating it into different grades, then mixing slurry and leaching uranium from the liquid. Until the plant closed in late 1966, the men worked each day enveloped in a cloud of uranium dust...