Trump and Steve Pearce are desecrating sacred Pueblo land for oil company profits.
Tuesday night I sat at the bench after the shop closed with the BLM’s proposed rule open next to the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department’s well-water summary for 2025, and what I saw on both pages was the same picture. A backstop rule that was written to protect a piece of country was about to be removed so an extraction industry could finish the job. In Adams County, it was the shallow-aquifer protection for the south-side wells. In northwestern New Mexico, it is the ten-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park — a thousand-year-old Puebloan city that is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, that is also the dark-sky place the ancient astronomers mapped their cosmos against, and that is also a piece of ground the Navajo Nation has not consented to letting oil companies onto. The proposed public comment period was fourteen days. A hundred thousand submissions came in, almost all of them hostile. The administration has not changed course.
I have a forty-acre piece of land in Adams County that my grandfather homesteaded in 1947 and my father worked until the day he died and that I work now. I do not own it the way a man owns a pickup. I hold it. I hold it for Mike, who is eight, and Quinn, who is five, and for whoever comes after them. I have said out loud to my wife more than once that if anyone ever tells me there is something valuable under it that they want to come up out of the ground, my answer is no. I have said this without anyone ever asking. I am saying it now because what is happening at Chaco is what would happen if no one in this country ever said no.
The Bureau of Land Management under Steve Pearce — a former New Mexico congressman turned Trump appointee who spent his career representing the oil and gas industry — has proposed scrapping the ten-mile buffer zone around the park. The 53-square-mile park is the most concentrated assemblage of pre-Columbian cultural ruins in North America. Pueblo Bonito is the largest of the great houses, but it is one of many. Chetro Ketl, Kin Kletso, Pueblo del Arroyo, Hungo Pavi, Peñasco Blanco — the names are as thick on the ground as the names of the small towns I know here in central Wisconsin. The Ancestral Pueblo peoples built these great houses and lived in them for three centuries beginning around 850 AD. They built a road system that extended hundreds of miles across the Four Corners region. They charted the solstices and the equinoxes into the walls. In 2023, then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — herself a Pueblo woman of Laguna Pueblo, the first Native American to serve as Interior Secretary — put in place the ten-mile buffer that would have kept drilling rigs out of the 336,400 acres around the park. The Trump administration is moving to erase that buffer. They got a hundred thousand comments against. They are moving ahead anyway.
What is being put at risk is not the way a stand of timber is put at risk. The Chaco great houses are not ruins in the way that old farmhouses in Iowa are ruins. They are still living places. The Pueblo peoples of New Mexico — Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna, Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Sandia, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Zia, Zuni — trace their origin stories to Chaco. The Diné, the Navajo, hold ceremonies in the canyon. The astronomical alignments of the buildings are still used by Pueblo astronomers today. The dark sky over the park is so clear you can see the Milky Way the way the people who built Pueblo Bonito saw it a thousand years ago. The park service calls it one of the best dark-sky viewing sites in North America. You cannot see the Milky Way from my place. You cannot see it from most places in the lower forty-eight. You can see it from Chaco, and you can see it from a few other places like it, and there are fewer of them every year because somebody wants the land under them for something else.
Daniel Tso, a community leader in the Navajo Nation, said that outside the buffer zone there are oil and gas wells within a hundred feet of Navajo homes, and the health impacts have been tremendous. “There are allotments inside the buffer zone where the land is untouched, the aquifers are pristine,” he said. “If the oil and gas companies go in there, the sacredness of that land is gone.” UNESCO, the United Nations body that maintains the World Heritage list, has formally opened procedures regarding “potential threats” to a world heritage property and is awaiting a response from the federal government. The committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status. The United States has twenty-seven World Heritage Sites. One, the Everglades, is already listed as in danger. Others could join it. Earlier this summer, the same administration has shrunk Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, against the protests of the five tribes that hold Bears Ears as sacred. The administration has quietly leased thousands of acres around Carlsbad Caverns, another World Heritage Site in New Mexico with its limestone caves and famous bat flights. Outside the Bears Ears region, an Arizona corporation announced plans to more than double uranium output at its White Mesa Mill against tribal demands to shut it down. Twenty-seven down. None added since.
I do not claim to know the Pueblo peoples’ relationship to that land. I have read the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer on the bench at night, and I have learned from her what it means to live as part of a place. I am a guest at the edge of that wisdom, not a member of it. What I see when I read about Chaco is a thousand-year record of a people being part of a piece of land — holding it and being held by it across a thousand years of mission and railroad and war and drought. None of this registers in the BLM’s analysis under Pearce. What registers in Pearce’s analysis is that there is oil and gas in the Mancos shale and the other stacked formations under the surrounding plain, and he wants the leases sold.
I have watched the same playbook play out on my own county’s land-and-water record. The CAFO operations that consolidated over Big Flats and Leola townships starting around 2008 brought in their permits under expedited state review. When the wells on the south side of the county started testing over the ten-milligram-per-liter nitrate limit, the response from the operators was not to clean up — it was to ask the legislature to redefine the trigger. We did not get a buffer zone around the watershed. We got a fight, and then we got a redefinition. The Chaco buffer is the same kind of backstop: a piece of regulation standing between a resource extraction and the place it would damage. The Trump administration is removing it the way the CAFO operators wanted theirs removed.
Wendell Berry, in The Unsettling of America, named this forty years ago. He wrote that the difference between the exploiter and the nurturer is that the nurturer has a stake in the place and stays to live with the consequences of what they do to it. The exploiter comes in, takes what can be taken, and leaves. The exploiters have won. They have won in Adams County. They have won in the Sand Hill mill and the Wisconsin River paper towns and the dairy farms that are now feedlot CAFOs for out-of-state corporate dairies. They are winning at Chaco Canyon right now. The Pueblo peoples who built those great houses a thousand years ago had the longest possible record of being nurturers of that land. The BLM under Pearce is bringing in the exploiters and calling it energy policy.
I have a name for the pattern. I call it the nationalist shell game — when the rhetoric runs in one direction and the multinational corporate interest runs in the other. That is what is happening at Chaco. The rhetoric is America First, Drill Baby Drill, energy independence. The reality is a fossil fuel industry writing its own permits. The President’s own words help, if you can bear them. He said, in the voice he uses for these announcements: “We will be a rich nation again and it is the liquid gold under our feet that will help us do it. We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.” That is the rhetoric. The reality is that the industry is not short of leased ground around Chaco. Almost all the federal land around the park is already under lease. Maude Dinan of the National Parks Conservation Association said it plain: the idea that there is an urgent new demand for this is an illusion. There is no scarcity of drillable acreage. What there is, is the absence of a backstop rule. The contradiction is not subtle. It is the contradiction between the speech and the deed, performed at volume, every week.
I keep my own complicity in the frame. I buy gas at the co-op station in Adams. I run a truck that takes diesel. I am downstream of the same fossil economy the BLM is opening sacred land to expand. I do not pretend that the demand side is clean, and I do not pretend that closing the Chaco buffer will change the climate math by itself. What I do know is that when a piece of country is protected, the rule is the only thing keeping it that way. When the rule goes, the country goes with it. There is no middle ground here. The buffer is the buffer.
What I am watching for, in Adams County and in northwestern New Mexico and in every other county where the same administration is shrinking the protected areas, is whether the line gets held anywhere. The National Parks Conservation Association said it plain: it feels like no matter how valuable or sacred a place is, the administration is willing to trade it all in. The administration has not changed course on the hundred thousand comments. The ones to watch are the legislators, the agencies, and the courts.
I have two children. Mike is eight, Quinn is five. The country I want them to inherit is a country that still has places like Chaco, that still has dark skies, that still has rules worth defending. I do not know if they will inherit it. The rule is on its way out.