Why I fight: The coming gas explosion from the West

An essay written by Tweeti Blancett, a rancher from Northwest New Mexico and a member of the NM Chapter of REP America; posted here in May 2004.

Here's what I once believed: that if the President knew about the damage done to our land by the energy industry, the damage would cease.

I once believed that if you could show that industry can extract gas without damaging land right near us—as it does on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, and on Ted Turner's Vermijo Ranch—that those examples would be followed by every company.

Believing that, I went to Washington, D.C., in August 2002, and met with Kathleen Clarke, who runs the Bureau of Land Management; I met with Rebecca Watson, a Mntanan high in the Department of the Interior; I met with V.A. Stephens, wh is with the Council on Environmental Quality; and I met with the New Mexico congressional staffs. I told them all that gas drilling could be done right but that it was being done wrong. I begged them to enforce existing regulations.

I came home to the small town of Aztec, N.M., and waited for change. I'm still waiting. I suppose not everyone can waltz into Washington and get that kind of entree. But I ran George Bush's 2000 campaign in my part of New Mexico. I ran Sen. Pete Domenici's campaign in my county in 1996. Our family has been on the land here for six generations and going on three centuries. We graze cattle on 17 square miles of Bureau of Land Management, state, and our own private land.

We once ran 600 cows on those 35,000 acres. Today, we can barely keep 100 cows. Grass and shrubs are now roads, drill pads or scars left by pipeline paths. We have trouble keeping our few cows alive because they get run over by trucks servicing wells each day, or they get poisoned when they lap up the sweet anti-freeze leaking out of unfenced compressor engines.

I have not taken this quietly. I have been on a mission for 16 years. In the beginning, I wanted to save the 400-acre farm and the adjacent piece ofwild land in northwest New Mexico that I care most about. That's not much out of 35,000 acres. My family thought I was nuts. Myson was a senior in high school, and resisted my attempts to enlist him. My husband said I was wasting my time.

They knew I was going against an industry that sharpened its teeth chewing on little people. They thought industry had the upper hand, legally speaking. But I believed industry had the upper hand because it threatened and intimidated. I once met Rosa Parks. I thought: If that little lady could sit, alone, in the front of a bus filled with hostile passengers, then I could act to protect where I live.

Gradually, I came to see why everyone else thought I was nuts. All of San Juan County in southern New Mexico has been leased for 50 years to gas companies. Our fathers and grandfathers signed these "perpetual" leases long ago,when the gas companies were owned and run by neighbors. The rest of the land is federally managed.

The industry claims its right to underground minerals trumps our rights to the surface. We don't deny their rights. Unfortunately for us and our cows and the wildlife, we are on top of unimaginable wealth, in the form of coal-bed methane. Each year, our small, rural and fairly poor county produces $2.4 billion, and most of that money flows right out of here.

My 400 acres sit at the heard of this wealth. Nevertheless, several of us last fall locked the gates to our private land.We have not denied access to those who have leases. But we now control the access. We were tired of being told by thecompanies that "someone else" had killed the cow, or the deer, or drove across freshly reseeded land. Now we know who is on our land, and when.

It's perfectly logical and legal to control accessto private land, except in gas country. So the companies pulled us into court. This, it turned out, was not a bad thing. We found out that inustry doesn't hve the rights it says it has. And when we go to court, we don't go alone. We bring our rancher friends. We bring our environmental friends—friends we never dreamed of having. We bring pictures ofthe surface damage—pictures that are so bad other states use them to show what happens when you trust industry and the BLM to "do the right thing."

We've been in moer newspapers than I can count. We've been in People magazine. We've been on Tom Brokaw's TV news program. This natural gas boom has become a Western plague. In conservative Wyoming, home to Vice President Dick Cheney, the reaction against coal bed methane helped elect a Democratic governor.

But this isn't a partisan issue. We had as much trouble under Clinton as we do under Bush. This is a campaign-contribution problem. They give more than we can.

At times it seems hopeless. Then I hear from people facing similar situations in Colorado, in Montana, in Wyomng, in Utah. Many are like us—conservative, Republican, pro-free enterprise people. Others are environmentalists, or just care about land and animals.

Shortly, there will be a huge natural gas explosion, but it won't be pipelines or gas wells that blow. The explosion will come from the average Westerner, who is tired ofbeing used by the oil and gas industry, with the help of state and federal officials.

An essay written by Kathy McCoy, the vice president of the NM Chapter of REP America; posted here in June 2002:

It's time to take back our party on environmental issues

It is time for the Republican party to "take back" the environmental platform that was initiated by one of our country’s most respected Republicans, none other than President Theodore Roosevelt, who proclaimed, "I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of many." More recently, Theodore Roosevelt IV (great-grandson of President Roosevelt), stated that Republicans like to frame the argument in terms of "a choice between property rights and wildlife, jobs and pollution, economic strength or environmental health." At best, this concept is divisive; at worst, it’s patently untrue. Unfortunately, exploitation is precisely what is occurring today, largely due to Republican initiatives.

This country has a Superfund because business interests have been given priority over environmental concerns. And who pays for this? We do, of course, and as taxpayers we should be fighting mad. A message to our political representatives: Don’t use my tax dollars to trash my environment, then tax me again to clean it up. We must not meekly stand by while some of our Republican representatives vote to promote and subsidize polluting industries and chip away at the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the important efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Republican Party must change its course and return to the environmental platform.

A national grassroots organization, REP AMERICA (Republicans for Environmental Protection), formed in 1995 to resurrect and restore the GOP’s conservation tradition as a fundamental element of the Republican Party. REP AMERICA has members in 48 states and chapters in 9, including New Mexico, where we have much work to do.

Perhaps the greatest danger to New Mexico’s environmental health and taxpayer wallets is the way in which we choose to grow. At the moment, things are looking bleak. Immediate and long-term costs to the environment and taxpayers are often minimized in development plans.

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