Albuquerque Journal

Friday, March 5, 2004

BLM Sacrificing Otero Mesa for Bush's Energy Agenda

By Jim Steitz
Southwest Environmental Center

New Mexico has been among the country's most prolific producers of oil and gas, and much of our state is devoted to these uses. However, on the Otero Mesa of southern New Mexico, a coalition of ranchers, environmentalists, and sportsmen has united for a better balance that protects New Mexico's finest remaining desert grassland.

This remarkable coalition takes New Mexico's often contentious environmental debates beyond the fragmented rancor, short-term skirmishes, and crisis management that occurs so often and toward a long-term vision of stewardship and collaboration.

Gov. Bill Richardson has recognized the significance of this coalition and has directed state agencies to deny the required permits for water and waste disposal, thus preventing the destruction of this state treasure. This alliance also bypasses the "divide and conquer" strategy that powerful corporations have used for decades to split ranchers, environmentalists, hunters, recreationists, and other people who care about our natural heritage. Strip mines, clear-cut logging of old-growth forests, massive dams, and other projects have been enforced from Arizona to Montana only after turning neighbor against neighbor through predictions of economic disaster and cultural subversion otherwise.

These tactics— used to separate Western communities along demographic, political, and cultural lines and neutralize community resistance— have ended at Otero Mesa. For this reason, the oil and gas industry as well as syndicated columnist John Dendahl find this groundbreaking alliance a profound threat.

Otero Mesa's values have been widely covered, and contrary to assertions of the BLM and the industry, this extremely fragile land cannot be reclaimed once destroyed. Far from being balanced, as a recent Journal editorial claimed, the BLM's drilling plan is a radical and aggressive abandonment of conservation and multiple use, dropping even the most basic of the environmental safeguards of the previous draft plan.

Critical protections for wildlife and vegetation have been dropped to clear the decks for drilling. It is this lack of balance on Otero Mesa, as well as lands already being drilled elsewhere, to which ranchers have responded by joining arms with the environmental community.

New Mexico has contributed more than its fair share of oil and gas to the nation. New Mexicans are entitled to some of the special places that sustain our quality of life.

The recoverable gas supply beneath Otero Mesa, even under wildly optimistic and generous calculations, is only two weeks of U.S. consumption. The BLM has pushed aside the desire of the large majority of New Mexicans to keep this remnant of our natural heritage for ourselves and our descendants. Instead the BLM has offered Otero Mesa as a sacrifice zone to placate the Bush administration's agenda of rapid and unrestrained oil and gas drilling. The Otero Mesa drilling plan is a top-down directive, thrust upon New Mexico by Washington-based political operatives who know little of Otero Mesa, and do not have New Mexico's best interests at heart.

I personally witnessed the BLM's chief of staff touting the new plan to drill Otero Mesa at a junket for industry executives, lobbyists and politicians in January at a Phoenix golf resort. This defies the local BLM's disingenuous denials of such influence.

When powerful interests treat our state as a sacrifice zone, equally powerful coalitions can emerge, including that between ranchers and environmentalists that Dendahl finds so threatening.

Of course, environmentalists and ranchers have had, and continue to have, serious differences over public lands management, and we debate those differences vigorously.

However, the battle for Otero Mesa has highlighted the values we have in common, most importantly the capacity of the land to regenerate and sustain its vegetation, water, and wildlife. Upon this capacity depends each of the constituencies equally threatened by gas drilling. If Gov. Richardson manages to prevent gas drilling on Otero Mesa, New Mexico will highlight the possibilities open to western communities who protect their own long-term future against those whose sole priority is their own profit margin.