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Sunday, July 18, 2010
Letters
Valles Caldera Better With NPS
New Mexicans could be relieved that our U.S. senators have advanced legislation to transfer the Valles Caldera National Preserve from the temporary experimental trust to the National Park Service, which would afford permanent protection to this national treasure. The Bingaman/Udall proposed legislation will help the regional economy, give the public quality access to the preserve, protect natural and cultural resources, expand hunting opportunities, and protect tribal interests.
The current managers of the preserve apparently will not let this necessary change happen without some discord. Valles Caldera National Preserve Trust Chairman Steve Henry has recently expressed great concern, in a Journal article dated July 14, about possible forest fires and the need to thin the forests on the preserve. It is hard to understand why he would mention this now. In 10 years, the Trust has only done only one small thinning project and has delayed its planning for fire and thinning up to 2013. Further, thinning and fire has rarely been mentioned in over a decade of Trust public meetings.
Meanwhile, neighboring Bandelier National Monument, operated by the National Park Service, has managed all wooded acres of the park with a combination of thinning and/or prescribed fire to make the monument fire resistant and restore it to a pre-European contact condition. All National Park Service areas in the West have detailed, publicly vetted forest or grassland restoration programs.
Chairman Henry also mentioned his concern about parts of the new Valles Caldera legislation which would protect the mountain peaks in the preserve from development and motorized access but which would allow hiking. Mr. Henry is worried that the public won't have access to those peaks. Yet under his leadership, all of the peaks except one on the Preserve have been completely closed to public access, with a $200 fine for trespass. Likewise, his worry about hunting under the new law seems detached from recent history. Expensive private hunts and a nearly hopeless lottery under the Trust would be replaced under the new law by a system accessible to all hunters under New Mexico Game and Fish control.
Sen. Bingaman has long experience with public land legislation and knows that inserting micromanaging ideas would be both unnecessary and counterproductive. We fully support the bill in its current form and urge Congress to pass it as soon as possible.
TOM RIBE
Executive Director, Caldera Action
Santa Fe
Chimp Research Akin to Torture
Chimpanzees walk on two feet. They have hands, use tools and language, and have a complex society. They display intelligence and emotion. Yet the United States Government treats them as property, with no more rights than ashtrays or toilet seats.
About 240 chimps at the Alamagordo Primate Facility in New Mexico were rescued from an abusive owner — cited for improper care and even negligent deaths — in 2000. They had been used for decades for research, much of which could be considered torture.
Now the National Center for Research Resources, their new owner, intends to transfer them to a facility in Texas, also cited several times for negligence. They will be housed in an environment designed for macaques — 1/4 the size of chimps — and used for invasive biomedical research.
Few, if any, advances in science have resulted from research using chimpanzees. The only two countries in the world that still use them are the United States and west-African Gabon.
I urge you to contact your congressional representatives, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and NCRR Director Barbara Alving. Tell them to stop the senseless torture and killing of the Alamogordo chimpanzees and grant them much-deserved sanctuary retirement.
ADELE E. ZIMMERMANN
Embudo
New Plan For Chimps a Betrayal
Recently, PBS aired a program titled "Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History" and it evoked public outcry as viewers were shocked by the horrific treatments that these chimpanzees had endured. They were captured in Africa; some were sold to circuses and amusement parks, some to laboratories for cruel experiments.
One such lab was right here in our state, which has a long history of using chimpanzees for research. For over 30 long years, chimpanzees in New Mexico were first used for Air Force experiments, then were sent to the Coulston Foundation for painful biomedical research and drug testing. The foundation was closed down due to violations of animal welfare law and consequently, 266 chimpanzees were allowed to retire at the facility; they have not been used for research since 2001.
Unfortunately, now the federal government plans to move 200 retired chimpanzees to a lab in Texas for invasive medical research. This is an outright betrayal of these chimpanzees who had sacrificed so much for the benefit of their human relatives. ...
The truth is, these researches are both wasteful and inhumane. We must demand the federal government keep its promise to retire these "chimpanzee people" permanently. They have suffered enough psychological trauma and physical mutilation. Instead, the government should provide funding to build sanctuaries. Chimpanzees are other people with the same expressions and affection, very much like our kind.
MIRA FONG
Santa Fe
Hispanic Recruiting Has Long History
The recent remarks by John Berry, executive director of the Office of Personnel Management at the LULAC convention taking place in Albuquerque regarding the under-representation of Hispanics in the federal workforce, brought to mind the early history of the efforts to improve that representation that had New Mexico connections.
It is interesting to note that it was under the Republican administration of President Nixon that those efforts began in earnest with the enactment of the then 16-point program in 1970 to bring more "Spanish speakers" into the federal workforce. The Office of Personnel Management, then named the Civil Service Commission, was assigned the task of implementing the program. He appointed as the program's first director a young man from New Mexico named Fernando E.C. DeBaca. I was working in the Civil Service Commission at the time and, since Fernando had little or no experience with federal employment policies, I was assigned to help him get started. We began to make agency visits to promote the program and initially met with little success.
Less than a year later, Fernando left the program for a better job for himself in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. President Nixon again looked to New Mexico for a successor and appointed Gene Costales from Albuquerque as the second director. Having worked in the equal opportunity recruitment field at Kirtland AFB, Gene was conversant with federal hiring policies. I continued to assist him in the program implementation until I transferred to the National Park Service regional office in Santa Fe in December 1972. Apparently Hispanic representation in the federal service continues to be a problem, given John Berry's remarks. However, given the current economic situation, the federal service will now receive greater attention from our young Hispanics.
The 1970s were the heyday of Hispanics, in Washington at least. Henry Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio, and cabinet secretary under President Nixon, was then a young White House Fellow. The Equal Employment Commission had a number of Hispanic commissioners, beginning with Vicente Ximenes, Raymond Telles, and Armando Rodrigues. President Obama might take a cue from President Nixon's efforts to improve Hispanic representation in the federal workforce.
JOSE A. CISNEROS
Santa Fe
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