Grab the opportunity to make a difference

By Willem Malten

December 28, 2019

The area that used to be occupied by the College of Santa Fe and is now coming due for the biggest city development, just off St. Michael’s Drive, has a working title: the midtown campus district. It is 64 acres, and it is a big deal. The major shareholder in this development is really the taxpayers of Santa Fe.

The holy city of Santa Fe owns it — so the development of it should be fully public, not just an in-house affair. So far, only one person — Allan Affeldt — has made a public presentation of his plan, generously hosted by Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse (“Silicon Valley exec eyes midtown campus project,” Dec. 11). It was packed with goodwilled Santa Fe residents. Affeldt introduced the many aspects of that area and financing that any developer and the city itself will have to deal with. It was very informative.

One of the potential tenants of the property is Los Alamos National Laboratory, which already has dangled proposals and financing of that site on its own. In the larger context of LANL’s pronounced intentions to become the national plutonium pits factory, a new Rocky Flats, and employ almost 1,500 new workers working on new nuclear weapons pits, this needs to be looked at with suspicion.

Santa Fe should reject becoming the enabler of the insanity of nuclear weapons in our time. No longer will we further support the nihilism of violence; we are not warmongers.

Pope Francis, who just visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, reminded us that the last thing humanity needs is more nuclear weapons. He said, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, as is the possession of atomic weapons.” Pope Francis warned that we will be judged for this. Already, too much of the lab’s production wastes pose incalculable problems, including heath challenges, in particular for the many Native communities in Northern New Mexico.

Instead, Santa Fe should play a vital role in the reestablishment of balance in our world. The area at St Michael’s Drive should be the motor of ecological, educational and spiritual renovation and innovation, including technological — sustainable growth that would attract people from all over the world. There is real need and opportunity.

Santa Fe should recognize this need and provide it space — in that space. We have to reinterpret our human reality. The former College of Santa Fe area is a beginning. Santa Fe should grab the opportunity to make a positive difference in this suffering world.

Willem Malten lives in Santa Fe.