Sacred Lands Ban in Court

Environmental groups make their case against BLM's permitting practices

A judge is due to hear arguments today in Albuquerque in a lawsuit challenging the Bureau of Land Management's approach of issuing one oil and gas development permit at a time, rather than considering the cumulative effects of all the wells in an area on public health, the environment and cultural resources.

Plaintiffs include San Juan Citizens Alliance, WildEarth Guardians, the National Resources Defense Council and Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, being represented by attorneys from the Western Environmental Law Center and WildEarth Guardians.

The growing number of wells approved within 20 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and encroaching on the native communities in northwestern New Mexico has sparked the fight to stop development and to change BLM's approach to permitting altogether.

Protests from environmental groups caused the BLM to delay issuing leases for 2,803 acres near Chaco in December. The BLM has said they'll consider some of those parcels for an October lease, and the others will be deferred until a new environmental impact statement for the Mancos Shale site has been developed. The Western Environmental Law Center is seeking an injunction against additional drilling until the lawsuit in US District Court is resolved.

Conservation groups contend that while oil and gas development may have slowed from what was initially predicted for the San Juan Basin, the 130 drilling permits approved in 2014 still pose a threat to local communities and existing cultural resources found throughout the area, where puebloan communities were established 1,000 years ago.

"The earth is being attacked. In one of the meetings, I said it's being disemboweled—that's the way I explain it to folks where we're trying to do community action," Daniel Tso, a Navajo councilman, told the crowd assembled at the Center for Contemporary Arts for an event titled "Keep Chaco Sacred" on Thursday, July 9, hosted by the Western Environmental Law Center.

Native peoples are just some of the many stakeholders in an area of land where ownership is described as a checkerboard. When they were approached about the mineral rights for those lands, Tso says, no one explained that the technology was shifting from the oil derricks they were accustomed to seeing to the web of acre-sized drilling pads covered in water and condensate tanks, sometimes not even a mile apart from one another. Pumps are sometimes within 350 feet of residences, and there's no barrier to the constant noise.

Now that they see what oil and gas development near their communities really means, Tso says, many of the residents would like to withdraw their permission to extract minerals from their lands.

"But the ink is already dry on the papers," he says.

They're fighting efforts from oil and gas companies to obtain waivers on air quality standards and want developers to stop drilling long enough to gather baseline data on soil and water quality and to conduct an inventory of roads and their conditions.

"The tsunami of fracking has already come," Tso says. "We have no place to run, we have no place to take shelter."

Western Environmental Law Center's ultimate goal, says executive director Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, is to reform the fundamental policies that deal with fossil fuels.

The northwestern corner of New Mexico has long been declared an energy sacrifice zone; it is also home to coal and uranium mines and two major power plants. In 2014, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a plume of methane the size of Delaware over the area, the bulk of which is from coal bed methane.

"The Navajo people have always lived off the grid, so in a lot of ways it's like, why does the rest of America need all this electricity?" Tso asks.

Meanwhile, BLM's Farmington Field Office is working on an update of its 2003 management plan and expects to release the new plan, including an environmental impact statement and assessments of the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, this fall.

Letters to the Editor

Mail letters to PO Box 4910 Santa Fe, NM 87502 or email them to editor[at]sfreporter.com. Letters (no more than 200 words) should refer to specific articles in the Reporter. Letters will be edited for space and clarity.

We also welcome you to follow SFR on social media (on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) and comment there. You can also email specific staff members from our contact page.