Frontline teams say a plan through the Interior Ministry to clean up mining sites in the Gran Chaco region has stalled.
It’s been two years since U. S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the Honoring the Chaco Initiative, a multi-phased plan that shows how they’re being taken in the Greater Chaco Region. But members of the Gran Chaco Coalition say there have been no signs of life since the end of Phase 1 and that a report detailing their activities was released by experts a year ago.
Formed in 2014 to address the boom in oil production fueled by horizontal drilling and high oil prices, the coalition includes leaders of indigenous networks, indigenous groups, nonprofits, and public protectors of land and water. On Nov. 14, the coalition called on Biden’s leadership to honor the Chaco.
Kendra Pinto, a Diné woman who lives in a frontline network of the Eastern Navajo Nation Agency and has been part of the coalition since its inception, remembers feeling a sense of relief when she heard about the initiative. But that feeling was tempered, Pinto told Truthout, “because it’s like having to be on guard all the time, especially when you live in a domain like this. “
Pinto arrived on the scene shortly after 36 oil and fracking fluid storage tanks exploded at a WPX Energy facility in Nageezi, New Mexico, in the summer of 2016, terrifying families living nearby and sending up black plumes. of proprietary chemical compounds into the air. The chimney burned for days. The unplanned evacuations were random, underfunded, and short-lived. Other vulnerable people with few characteristics reluctantly returned to their homes, with dirty walls, lingering chemical odors and a broken security system. Despite the billions of dollars in oil and fuel profits collected each year across the state of New Mexico, to date, the closest urgent care center is located in Farmington, 61 miles away.
Inextricably linked to these conditions, the Gran Chaco region has a century-long history of mining: gas, uranium, coal and oil. The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Farmington Locker has loaded the San Juan Basin with more than 40,000 injection wells lately in life-cycle stages – active, unproductive, orphan and deserted – all emitting destructive gases through burning, ventilation or deterioration, all of which contribute to negative effects on nearby communities like Pinto’s. The familiar grassy landscape, rough, rugged, but absolutely appreciated, is degraded into an industrialized hodgepodge of drilling rigs, drilling rigs, and oversized reservoirs: horrors by day, gentle polluters by night.
So when the Honoring the Chaco Initiative was announced, Pinto said, “It’s not the way I like it, oh, great!What’s more: OK, what’s next?Will other people get the coverage they need?
So far, the reaction has been partial and minimal.
As a component of Phase 1, the Interior Disposal approved a 20-year ore withdrawal, prohibiting any new mining leases of unleased federal lands within a 16-kilometer radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, creating a buffer zone. substantial, and although 336,404. 42 acres are no longer eligible for drilling, there are limitations that make the most likely effects negligible. The BLM press release explains that “the recall applies only to public lands and federal mining property and does not apply to privately owned minerals, state entities, or tribals. “It adds that the recall “does not include qualifying rentals; during the 20-year retirement period, production from existing wells can simply continue, more wells can be drilled on existing leases, and Navajo Nation beneficiaries can simply continue to lease their ores. BLM expects approximately 47 fewer oil and fuel wells to be drilled during the duration of the drawdown.
Still, the newly elected president of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren, who was founded in Arizona, where oil production is low or nonexistent, and who has yet to officially announce the Eastern Agency, opposed the withdrawal. In an interview with KUNM, Nygren said he grew up in poverty and ran as an “anti-poverty” candidate. Nygren is involved in that drilling operators would possibly be deterred from doing business with beneficiaries “in spaces where the allocated land is not contiguously aligned or grouped in combination in a way that allows a company to extract minerals by horizontal drilling. “
Under the Dawes Act of 1887, the federal government proposed dividing communal land into parcels that would be allocated to heads of households and tribal members for subsistence farming, based on the style of small family farms. The land allotted to the Navajos was not the first. In addition, the government decided that the “remaining” land after all members had obtained the allotments should be considered “surplus” and available for sale to non-natives. The subdivision program continued until 1934. Today, this patchwork of reserve and unreserved lands is known as the “checkerboard area. “The land is considered accepted by the U. S. government. to get the advantages of the original. ” assigned natives” or heirs. A single parcel can have multiple heirs and the beneficiaries own the mineral rights.
In July, Nygren testified before Congress in favor of the Energy Opportunity for All Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Eli Crane (R-Arizona), that would rescind the ban. Nygren responded to Truthout’s request for comment or percentage data on any long-term plans to see the big picture for themselves and open lines of communication with members of the Nation who are beneficiaries but have to live with the consequences of heavy industry.
The Gran Chaco region covers a domain of 8,000 square miles and includes the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, which is home to rare, fragile, but large stone ruins of the civilization built by the other Pueblo peoples who lived, industrialized, and held ceremonies there from 850 to 1250. Their legacy includes architecture designed with openings placed exactly to align with the sun and moon on the solstices, feats of engineering that added large, multi-story houses with more than six hundred rooms, subterranean kivas (circular rooms where ceremonies were held), and artifacts of copper, shells, and macaw feathers that imply industry with Mesoamerica.
Today, the Gran Chaco remains a landscape of deep cultural interest and religious connection for members of New Mexico’s 19 pueblos, as well as the Navajo Nation and the Apache Hopi and Jicarilla tribes. Brian Vallo, former governor of Acoma Pueblo, located 180 kilometers from the park, said in an interview with PBS that the Chaco is an ancestral site for its other peoples, a prolonged level in their migration to their homelands around the year 1100, he explained, they are incorporated into the cultural practices of the other people and their population return for prayers and ceremonies. Speaking of the withdrawal from Phase 1 after 20 years, Vallo expressed his gratitude: “This is something that’s been a long time coming, and it was really gratifying that Biden’s leadership has identified “And I finally heard the voice of Indigenous peoples and understood why we continue to insist on those protections,” he told New Mexico on Focus. “There’s still a lot of work to be done. “
Phase 2 of the Honoring the Chaco initiative would put in place two never-before-tested conceptual rubrics in mining control, in a region that proponents say deserves “enhanced protections. “The first is “landscape-level control,” which creates a blueprint for an ongoing regional verbal exchange between governments, advocacy groups, and affected communities so that they can identify, discuss, and address issues that balance nature conservation (including health impacts) and economic interests. The moment is a “framework for the control of the cultural landscape. “”In which the land is not in terms of plots but landscapes that other people are connected to through their heritage and cultural practices.
These new frameworks open the door to three goals that advocates have been pursuing: just transitions away from fossil fuels for beneficiaries, workers, and Navajo nations and tribes that are economically dependent on oil and fuel development; environmental safeguards for land, air and water in the future, and repair and provide for damage beyond; and a pathway to address cumulative environmental and social injustices committed against frontline communities.
Meanwhile, conditions on the ground are deteriorating. Spills of toxic liquids from oil and fuel production have quadrupled across the Gran Chaco landscape in the past two years. In October, the New Mexico Environmental Breakdown (NMED) reported a 50 percent compliance rate. with air quality requirements, a record that the decomposition leader called “depressing. “After causing quite a stir by New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham when the Environmental Transition Act was passed in 2019, which she called “a promise for future generations of New Mexicans,” the state is far from having met its climate goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045, in part because of disruptions on the surface. NMED Secretary James Kenney told KUNM in February:
Our workforce is not where it is. . . I’ll be the first to tell you that having national regulations on oil and fuels – or any other regulations for that matter – without the staff to enforce them is not enough to allow us to say, “We’re doing a smart job. “”Passing regulations is not destiny. Transmitting them and ensuring compliance with them is.
Daniel Tso, a former delegate to the Navajo Nation Council and one of the original members of the Gran Chaco Coalition, has long fought the scourge of fracking. Organize fracking tours for others curious to see the effects on the landscape with their own eyes. He told Truthout that the average age of the Navajo Nation had dropped to 18 and that their goal was to make sure there was blank water in the aquifers for them, adding that drainage and leaks of methane and other volatile biological compounds will, voluntarily, have to stop.
“The effects of fitness we really want to be perceived as a crisis,” Tso said. “For those of us who have followed the Health Impact Assessment, we have found that the main effect is on the endocrine formula and our young people are vulnerable. “
Tso is sounding the alarm about the five wells in front of Lybrook Elementary School, where more than 80 students spend their days.
“One of the bus drivers says that most of those academics use inhalers,” he said. He says court cases filed with the BLM, the National Division of Petroleum Conservation and NMED remain unaddressed. “Basically, they don’t fall on deaf ears, they fall on deaf ears,” he said.
Tso continues to see the Honoring the Chaco Initiative as a way to address issues affecting the community.
“However, I think we realize that, with all the desires and desires for implementation, it will take longer than expected. “
When Secretary Haaland announced the initiative, it was not part of the National Environmental Policy Act process, so it did not have any budget attached to it. It was also not published in the Federal Register, so there are no set deadlines. However, when asked what’s next for this initiative, Interior Descomponent’s deputy director of communications, Tyler Cherry, told Truthout in an email that things were moving forward:
Leaders from the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs worked alongside ancient tribal heritage preservation officials, tribal organizations, tribe-led nongovernmental organizations, and other intergovernmental stakeholders to bring the initiative into effect.
The Department expects to announce more information about Phase 2 by the end of the calendar year.
But as the environmental and health consequences continue for network members on the ground, their long-standing tolerance is being tested.
“There is no better time to confront the legacy of extraction and broken promises for the Gran Chaco,” said Rebecca Sobel, organizing director of WildEarth Guardians, on behalf of the Gran Chaco Coalition. “There will have to be a selection beyond the continued sacrifice for fossil fuels. “
Frances Madeson has written about liberation struggles in the US and for Ms. Magazine, VICE, YES!Magazine, The Progressive Magazine, Tablet Magazine, American Theater Magazine, and Indian Country Today. She is also the author of the comedy e-book Cooperative Village.
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