The Concerned Citizens of Wagon Mound and Mora County is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a community gardening project in Wagon Mound.

The group started a community garden to help support gardening in the village to promote small agriculture and the saving of our heirloom seeds and beans as a symbolic gesture for the village's annual fiesta on Labor Day, "Bean Day." Centennial Bean Day occurs this year! Although beans are no longer grown in the area, we hope to encourage gardening for better health, to promote seed saving and to reduce our carbon footprint.

Wagon Mound is a small community in rural northeastern New Mexico with a population of between 250 and 300 people. Many of the residents work in the village, at the school, or for the highway department; others travel at least half an hour to work outside the village. Although there are two small convenience-type stores, residents must travel to Las Vegas, Springer or Raton for groceries and other household and personal needs.

Ten years ago, the community was poised to lose its perpetual water-use right and to see its beautiful environment become a dump for this country's special waste. This special waste would come to the private dump by highway and rail from throughout the United States. Concerned citizens of Wagon Mound and Mora County came together and did the initial research for the village government on the water issue and then defended and affirmed the village's water-use right all the way to the State Supreme Court.

The group led the fight against the Special Waste Permit that the Northeastern New Mexico Regional Landfill had applied for from the New Mexico Environmental Department. By the way, the owner of the landfill is also the person who attempted to take away the village's water-use right. The NMED issued a Special Waste Permit to the NENMRL in 2000. Concerned Citizens then filed suit against the NMED for giving the permit under environmental-justice considerations.

In 2003, Concerned Citizens won a New Mexico Court of Appeals case rescinding the Special Waste Permit. But, not before we received over 7,000 cubic tons of tainted ash from the Cerro Grande Fire in Los Alamos. This confirmed the environmental injustice: One of the nation's poorest counties received the waste from one of the richest.

Concerned Citizens has since won two decisions from the NMED in continued attempts by the landfill to obtain a Special Waste Permit. The last permit application by the NENMRL was filed in 1997 at its 10-year re-application hearing for its municipal-waste activities. While we support this service, the community has stood strong in its resistance to the additional request for the Special Waste Permit. The NMED agreed with the village again in 1997. The NENMRL sued the NMED over this decision and our fate is once again in the New Mexico Court of Appeals.

We are hopeful that we will once again be successful. If we lose, we stand to become the dumping ground for dangerous and carcinogenic waste that others from California to Florida do not want in their communities. We will also be the only dump in the state that will allow so many, or rather all but one, of the special wastes identified by the New Mexico Solid Waste Regulations.

As we wait for the court decision, we testify against the new threat of oil and gas drilling in Mora County and the squandering of our natural resources at White Peaks by officials who think first about corporations rather than the residents of New Mexico.

And, as we wait, we continue to sustain our culture, our language, our environment and ourselves. The Community Garden in Wagon Mound is a place that helps build community, provides nutrition for those who work the garden as volunteers and for the elderly and frail. It has been a wonderful project that has found many partners including the Wagon Mound Public Schools, which included the garden as a summer-school project.

The volunteers and the Senior Citizens Center participants, as well as other elderly and frail, will benefit from the garden produce. Surplus will be sold at low cost at the vegetable stand Concerned Citizens opened last week.

We invite you to Bean Day on Labor Day weekend, and we invite you to visit our garden and vegetable stand and to continue to support our work. Your financial contributions are greatly needed and appreciated. Send your tax-free contribution to CCWMMC, P.O. Box 318, Wagon Mound, NM 87752 or call us at (505) 573-1904.

Sofía Encinias Martínez is president of Concerned Citizens of Wagon Mound and Mora County.