Last month, in the space of eight days, Santa Fe and northern New Mexico were covered in four articles by the Watt Street Journal.

Two of the reports were travel pieces.

For the Off The Beaten Track column, reporter Neil King, Jr., went to Taos which he called “this artsy New Mexican town… funkier and less crowded than Santa Fe.” Tough duty.

King touched on the Harwood Museum, the Parsons Gallery, the Rio Grande Gorge, rafting, the earthship development, “the tiny celebrity-strewn village of Arroyo Seco,” the  San Francisco de Asis church in Ranchos de Taos, the El Monte Sagarado hotel and the Mabel Dodge Lujan House. For food, King listed the Ranchos Plaza Grill, The Old Blinking Light, Orlando’s New Mexico Café and Taos Out Back Pizza. Live celebrities mentioned were Julia Roberts and Dennis Hopper.

The second travel piece told of a guided tour of the Abiquiu area which brought Georgia O’Keefe fans an on-location opportunity to gush over the land that O’Keefe turned into landscapes.

The other two tales offered new versions of that old New Mexico phenomenon—really, really rich folks bringing their money and often non-mainstream views to northern New Mexico to save the world and/or save New Mexicans from themselves and/or perpetuate the rural ghetto status of the north.

The odder tale of the two actually isn’t odd at all if you grant holiness as a basic industry or export product in the economic development sense. The story also is a basic NIMBY land use battle. A church, officially recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court and called Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, wants to build a church building in a more-than-upscale neighborhood. For the church, a key ingredient is a psychedelic tea. The local church leader and owner of the land proposed for the church is Jeffrey Bronfman, a member of the Canadian big business family. Besides a level of discomfort about the tea, neighbors pose the usual objections—traffic and commercialization of the rural neighborhood with million dollar homes.

Then there is the investment philosophy called Slow Money, which drew 400 people to a conference in Santa Fe. The idea is that investors go for small, local stuff with small returns on the investment, maybe 3% and 6% over the long term.

An heir to the Rockefeller fortune, Christopher Lindstrom, told the Wall Street Journal he likes the idea and is committed to putting his entire portfolio into such projects.

Ed and Michael Lobaugh of Estancia are considering a slow money investment for their goat cheese production business, the Old Windmill Dairy, the story says. However, they are concerned about hassle such as investors demanding detailed involvement in the business.