New Mexico & El Paso
Some people call it economic diversity for Lea County, N.M. I recall the days when I would see a calm and dry desert scene common in this area, with cows and the occasional coyote or rabbit. Now I see red blinking lights and industrial activity.
The entire Pecos River system of watersheds, river, tributaries and floodplain could be re-contaminated due to a recent application by the Australian based New World Cobalt Mining Company that has a small limited liability group, Comexico, LLC, filing for exploratory rights in the old Tererro Mine area.
As the country weathers the current crisis, and as state and national guidelines are ever evolving to curb the spread of coronavirus, the Bureau of Land Management has charged ahead with a minimal 10-day protest period for its planned May lease sale of thousands of acres of public land in southeast New Mexico.
On February 26, the 100th anniversary of the Mineral Leasing Act, Sen. Tom Udall introduced legislation to update oil and gas royalty rates that have not been increased since the 1920 law passed — as well as minimum bids for our public land that haven’t changed since 1987.
The Sierra Club’s position is that not enough is known about fracking wastewater to determine if it is safe for outside use, even after it is treated. Along with high levels of salt, there are many hundreds of potential other chemicals, heavy metals, and even radionuclides in produced water. Before even considering treatment standards, we need much peer-reviewed research testing how the contents of the wastewater might impact crops, soil quality, or surface and groundwater.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich and U.S. Rep. Xochitl Torres Small hailed final passage of legislation to designate White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico. The provision was included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, which passed the Senate by a vote of 86 to 8 and was slated to be signed into law.
In December, Congress passed an appropriations package that bans new oil and gas leasing for a year within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park until an ethnographic study for the region is completed. The Navajo Nation and pueblos will have significant control over the study, so this is a great step in the right direction.
You may know that drillers inject water underground to release oil and gas during fracking. The industrial waste that comes back up is called “produced water,” and it is contaminated both by the chemicals that companies put into it and by the minerals released from the ground. Tell New Mexico Environment Department: Prohibit reuse of fracking wastewater outside the oil fields.
Right to Harm is a film exposé on the public health impact of factory farming across the United States, told through the eyes of residents in five rural communities.
Contact: Miya King-Flaherty, 505-301-0863, Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter organizing representative Washington, DC — Today, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act (H.R. 2181), which would ban new leasing and drilling on