Heath Haussamen
Wind picked up sand on Monday, covering a huge swath of New Mexico in a thick, dark cloud of dust.
I took a walk early in the morning, trying to get ahead of predicted wind gusts of 50 miles per hour. Halfway through my walk, the emergency notification on my phone went off.
The National Weather Service was warning that a massive dust storm was heading my way. My walk led me up a hill. From the top I could see the wall of dust on the horizon to the southwest.
I took a path that would get me home more quickly.
Back in my house, I turned the air filters up. While I worked, I watched through windows as the sky turned brown. Then it got dark.
I went outside to look around. I couldn’t see the Organ Mountains. If homes weren’t blocking my view, I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to see the hills that are a half mile away.
I went back indoors because I started coughing.
By midafternoon I was wearing an N95 mask because my air filters weren’t able to keep up with the dust inside my house and I was still coughing. I could feel dirt with the bottoms of my feet when I walked across the tile floor. I had to dust my kitchen table to eat lunch.
It stayed that way over Las Cruces until well after sundown. It was worse in Deming and Roswell.
Haboobs like the one that rolled over Southern New Mexico on Monday are really bad for health and public safety. They’re also becoming more common because of the impacts of climate change and terrible land-use practices like overgrazing.
Welcome to dystopia.
Creating a less-informed public
Elon Musk’s DOGE laid off an estimated 800 people at the National Weather Service and the agency above it, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last week. Project 2025 aims to dismantle NOAA and focus what remains on collecting data and selling it for profit.
That’s no surprise. Our oligarchs spent decades buying and crippling local news across this country. Now they’re destroying national news institutions like the Washington Post and NPR.
And they want to strip us of our access to timely, accurate and free information about the weather and climate change. It’s another step in unraveling our democracy.
A less-informed public is easier to control. Our lives will become more tenuous and we’ll increasingly depend on the generosity of the wealthy.
Putting people in danger
Eliminating warnings like the one I received Monday about the approaching haboob puts people in danger.
The Weather Service’s forecasting is used by individuals, businesses and government agencies to respond to storms and disasters. On Monday the agency’s El Paso and Albuquerque offices tracked the dust storm and warned the public of potentially dangerous situations.
That information helped the N.M. Department of Transportation decide to close highways around Deming and Roswell for much of the day to keep motorists safe. Television meteorologists spread that information to help.
John Toohey-Morales, a TV meteorologist in Miami and a former Weather Service forecaster, told The New York Times that the Trump Administration’s NOAA layoffs will put people in danger.
“I am telling you, the American people are going to suffer from all this,” Toohey-Morales said. “…I can’t do my job without the entire scaffolding that NOAA and National Weather Service provides.”
Intentionally creating hardship
The cuts will harm the economy as well. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, told CNN that NOAA’s “specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”
“Ships will not be able to safely navigate through our waterways. Farmers will not have the data they need to manage their crops,” Cantwell said. “NOAA’s workforce keeps people alive and provides communities with the scientific support tools to protect their families and grow their businesses.”
Musk warned us to brace for hardship. Now he and President Donald Trump are intentionally — and unnecessarily — creating it.
In addition to Musk’s layoffs, the tariffs Trump imposed on Canada, Mexico and China this week led stock markets to plunge. That’s because we’re going to pay more for all sorts of goods including automobiles, lumber, cherry tomatoes, Tonka trucks, maple syrup, tequila, avocados, smartphones and sledgehammers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Taking everything
Folks, they’re doing this on purpose. It all ties together — and all relates to the same extraction economy that is directly responsible for the increasingly extreme weather like Southern New Mexico’s haboobs.
The oligarchs have been taking our oil and gas and water out of the ground to make themselves richer. These resources are finite.
They’ve been farming and overgrazing our land to make themselves richer. They’ve been releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere — and have substantially altered it. We’re living through a time of extreme warming and unpredictable weather.
Our topsoil — what’s left of a fertile layer that took thousands of years or more to create — is blowing away in some places and washing away in others. In Southern New Mexico, much of it is already gone. They took that, too.
As it’s become crystal clear that the oligarchs are destroying our planet, they’ve worked to eradicate systems that inform us, like journalism, and replace them with public relations and misinformation campaigns. They’ve taken charge of institutions that give us the power to stop them, like a functional Congress. They’ve spent endless dark money to turn the U.S. House and Senate into a circus show.
They’re going to keep taking and taking until there’s nothing left to take. They don’t care what they destroy in the process. I’m not a big fan of the phrase “Eat the rich” — but I will say that currently they’re the ones consuming the rest of us.
Fleeing the planet
Musk is planning to colonize Mars to save humanity from the destruction of Earth, which he already sees as a foregone conclusion. Jeff Bezos, who is killing the Washington Post himself, thinks space is also the solution to the devastation we’re causing on Earth.
Have you ever seen the 2013 film Elysium, starting Matt Damon and Jodie Foster? Earth has been all but destroyed in this dystopian movie set in 2154. The wealthy live on a space station orbiting the planet where they have machines that can cure cancer.
The rest of us are dying down here from the problems caused by climate change, overpopulation, disease, pollution, and so on.
This is the reality these greedy oligarchs are creating. So many of them have built themselves militarized bunkers to survive societal collapse. Many of them — led by Musk and Bezos — aim to eventually get themselves and humanity off this planet.
Take the planet back
It didn’t have to be this way. It still doesn’t. We must take the planet back from the oligarchs.
There’s no time to waste. Every day, the Trump administration unravels more of the systems and safety nets we’ve built up over decades that give people greater security, freedom, wealth and input into what happens in our society and on this planet.
And the wind is blowing across Southern New Mexico again as I’m writing this, taking more topsoil and sand with it.
There’s hope. Polling shows that Musk is unpopular. People are protesting Musk, Trump, and Republican members of Congress. Folks are rising up across the United States and elsewhere. Europe is mobilizing.
Don’t stop.