From Bill Richardson's "Between Worlds, The Making of an American Life"

Putnam Publishing-2005

Pages 310-311

Going back to my days in Congress, I always believed that economic growth and environmental protection were not mutually exclusive--that it was possible to strike a reasonable balance between them and even produce a win-win situation. New Mexico depended on oil and gas drilling to produce jobs and revenue for the state, and when possible, we needed to ensure that this important part of the state economy continued to flourish. As I had in Congress, I told oil and gas people my door always would be open. But I also said that drilling wasn't an unfettered right, even in a business-friendly administration, and that there were lines I would not cross. One of them was on a tract of federal land called Otero Mesa.

Otero Mesa, in the Chihuahuan Desert of south-central New Mexico, features one of the most sweeping areas of native grasslands in North America. It is environmentally important for several reasons, not least because it carpets a vast groundwater system that should not be exposed to the risks of contamination. It is also a major hunting ground important to the state's sportsmen. For nearly a decade, the oil and gas interests have wanted to open up Otero Mesa, and in January 2005, the got a big leg up when the federal Bureau of Land Management approved a plan to drill a maximum of 141 exploratory wells on a couple of million acres that included the grasslands. The individual "footprints" of the wells, wouldn't be huge, and there was a cap on the total acreage that could be disturbed. But the likely outcome was that wells would be dotted throughout the half-million-acre Otero Mesa, making a mess of this pristine part of New Mexico.

A year earlier, I had submitted my own plans for Otero Mesa, which would create a National Conservation Area, zoning off 300,000 acres from development, and impose restrictions on the rest of the land. The BLM director of New Mexico said no, and the national BLM's decision made it official. But that won't be the end of it. We're taking on BLM in court, and I'm going to do what I can to turn Otero Mesa into a national issue. The Bush administration has continued to observe a moratorium on oil and gas leasing off the coasts of Florida and California. Now the administration and Congress ought to apply the same principles to some ecologically sensitive areas onshore.

I am neither a blind environmentalist nor a free-market purist, which may be one reason why I was honored in March 2005 by the National Environmental Trust on the one hand and by the Cato Institute, a conservative/libertarian think tank, on the other. There often is a middle ground on these growth-versus-preservation issues. But what the BLM sanctioned for the Otero Mesa wasn't close to a compromise. It was an abdication of responsibility.

Call Governor Bill Richardson and Thank him for all his efforts on Otero Mesa; Encourage him to continue fighting to

Protect this wild desert grassland.

Office of the Governor

505-476-2200