Greater Chaco – ending oil and gas leasing in the heart of the American Southwest.

An Energy Sacrifice Zone

The Greater Chaco region spans nearly 8,000 square miles in northwestern New Mexico, with Chaco Culture National Historical Park at its heart. For six centuries, starting in 700 A.D., Ancestral Puebloans constructed monuments of architecture and engineering in this area, and ruins still dot the landscape today. Modern-day Pueblo in New Mexico maintain ties to the land, and, over the last 600 years, Navajo have settled it.

In the 1970s, the Nixon administration designated the Four Corners area, which includes Greater Chaco, as an “energy sacrifice zone”—essentially giving extractive industries a blank check to inflict environmental destruction while the government turned a blind eye. Uranium, coal, oil, and natural gas companies mined the land for decades.

With the invention of horizontal drilling (“fracking”), which allowed companies to reach oil and gas deposits previously locked away under layers of rock, fracking activity in the area exploded.

Industrialized fracking continues to wreak havoc on the landscape of Greater Chaco and on its Native communities. Convoys of semi-trucks destroy communities’ dirt roads. Sacred lands are inaccessible. And that’s before diving into fracking’s heinous effects on air, water, and wildlife.

Today, 91 percent of lands in northwestern New Mexico are leased for oil and gas drilling, with much of the remaining nine percent located in Greater Chaco. The Bureau of Land Management continues to auction off more land despite protests from the Navajo Nation, the All Pueblo Council of Governors, the National Congress of American Indians, 15 Navajo Chapter Houses, the New Mexico House Legislature, Guardians, allies, and hundreds of thousands of public citizens—and despite the fact that it hasn’t studied industrialized fracking’s effects on environment and community.

Enough is enough. Greater Chaco must be protected.