It’s Time to Speak Out: Save Chaco Canyon

This post calls for action by citizens of the United States.  I acknowledge that others stand with me on the preservation of wild and natural lands, everywhere.

I’ve written more than a dozen times about a remarkable place in the American southwest: Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

This wild, remote portion of the U.S. is in danger. You can do something to protect it.

Casa Chiquita, Chaco Canyon

Chaco Culture National Historic Park serves as the most visible centerpiece of this part of the high desert in northwestern New Mexico (see map, below).

There, Native Americans built some of the most impressive communal structures in the western world, in about 1200 A.D. At the same time, London and Paris were cities of approximately the same size.

The cities built by the culture along Chaco Wash are the most visible evidence of human habitation that reaches back approximately 10,000 years.

To reach the National Park, one drives 16 miles on an unpaved road through arid, high desert.

That land is part of the Navajo Nation. More than 170,000 people live there. About 75% of them live without access to the Internet, and have no direct way to influence decisions that are being made about places that are sacred.

And, make no mistake. This also my sacred land.

It’s there, a UNESCO World Heritage site, that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management intends to issue licenses to drill for oil.

Don’t let them do it.

You can stand — as I have — under the desert sky, in a place untouched by development. You can hear the wind blow. You can see the hares, deer, bobcat and and mountain lions that call the place home. Or you can let it become the site of oil drilling, fracking, the sound of machinery drowning out the profound silence of the high desert.

One of the limitations of our online culture is that I cannot show you “silence.”

There, though, is where you hear it. Listen. Breathe.

Now is the time.

In just a few days — May 28, 2020 — the Department of the Interior will close its public comments on its proposal to open that land for drilling.

Call your legislator and ask that they cancel this plan. If you don’t know your legislator’s email, a place to start is the government’s website: Click here: https://www.house.gov/representatives.

Send your legislator an email. Give them a phone call. These contacts matter. Whether your legislator is in Massachusetts or Oregon, if you express your concern, they’ll pay attention. Call. Write. They pay attention to their constituents.

You can send a message directly to the Secretary of the Interior. The Natural Resources Defense Council will take active measures to oppose drilling in sacred, Native lands like Chaco Canyon. Add your voice here: https://act.nrdc.org/letter/4957-chaco-canyon-200514?

The wind blows. The high desert sky is clear, a hard blue above.

The subtle silence of the desert endures. For now.

Please act now. Let us save this place. For once and for all.

Here is Chaco Canyon, in the high desert of New Mexico. Remote, yet a part of all of us:

© Brad Nixon, 2020. Map copyright Google.