The author is a big lib, known for her leftwing touchy-feely opinion pieces in the rag called the Albuqueque Journal. So she travels from the teeming metropolis of Albuquerque (chuckle) to the sparsely populated outskirts of the state to find opinions of rural people she can mock.
You have it right. The columnists are standard lib-educated writers including one who has swallowed Al Gore's global warming bunk and inserts it as a ready reason in stories on drought and forest fires.