Nine Days to Save Chaco Canyon
The BLM's own environmental assessment says erasing the buffer around a World Heritage Site yields fourteen wells and fourteen jobs. Comments close July 29.
A thousand years ago, in a high desert basin in northwestern New Mexico where the wind strips everything down and almost nothing grows, people built a city.
They had no wheel. No draft animals. No iron. They quarried sandstone out of the cliffs by hand and dressed it into walls so precisely laid that a millennium later you can still run your palm across one and feel the pattern. They hauled two hundred thousand trees — ponderosa, spruce, fir — off mountains fifty and sixty miles away, on foot, on their shoulders, to roof buildings that rose four and five stories and held six hundred rooms. Pueblo Bonito was the largest building in North America for the next seven hundred years. Nothing on this continent was bigger until the industrial era. Archaeologists call these buildings great houses. Remember that, because it matters in a minute.
And then they did the thing that still stops archaeologists cold. They cut roads. Thirty feet wide, running arrow-straight across open desert for thirty miles at a stretch, over mesas instead of around them, connecting Chaco to more great houses scattered across a hundred miles of the San Juan Basin. Straight. Without surveying instruments. They built stairways into cliff faces to keep the lines true. Nobody is entirely certain what all of it was for, and that uncertainty is part of the point — we’re still reading it.
The people who did this didn’t vanish. Their descendants are alive right now, and some of them live at Acoma, on a mesa an hour and a half south, in a village they’ve occupied continuously since Chaco was still standing. Sky City. One of the oldest continuously inhabited places in America. The Governor of Acoma is a man named Charles Riley, and I’ll come back to him.
Chaco is one of twenty-six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States. That designation isn’t a plaque. It comes out of a treaty the United States wrote — the idea started in a White House conference in 1965, and when the world adopted the convention seven years later, America was the first country on earth to ratify it. We invented the concept. The standard for the list is “outstanding universal value,” meaning the place matters not to a country but to the species. Chaco is on that list with the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, Stonehenge, Yellowstone.
On July 15, the Trump administration gave you fourteen days to argue for it before they tear it open. There’s now nine left.
What They're Actually Opening
The park itself is 33,000 acres. The withdrawal is 338,690 — a ten-mile ring of public land around it, closed to drilling and mining claims in 2023 after a decade of tribal advocacy, 150 days of public comment, eight public meetings, and nearly a hundred thousand submissions.
This administration argues that the protective ring was overkill. That the park is protected, and the buffer was a land grab. So let’s be precise about what’s in that ring.
The BLM’s own records list 7,552 known historic properties inside it. A hundred forty-five documented traditional cultural properties — living sacred places, still in use. Nine Chacoan great houses standing on BLM ground inside the area the Secretary wants to open.
And then the agency tells you, in its own document, that those numbers are floors. Not counts. Floors. Because most of that country has never been adequately surveyed. Archaeologists working the region estimate as many as twelve thousand cultural sites out there. The 7,552 is what we happen to have tripped over.
One of the nine great houses is called LA 72343. That isn’t a name. It’s a catalog number — what an archaeologist writes down for a place nobody has excavated yet. Its row in the BLM’s table runs four columns across and every one of them is blank. No conservation area. No protection site. No World Heritage listing. Nothing standing between it and a bulldozer except the withdrawal they’re proposing to erase.
Now here’s how the protection works once it’s gone. Under the 1872 Mining Law — the actual law, still on the books, signed when Grant was president — a company that files a notice to prospect gets a fifteen-day review. Fifteen days for the BLM to inventory ground that’s never been surveyed. And if a crew hits something out there anyway, if a blade turns up a wall or a road segment or a burial, the regulation says the BLM officer has to evaluate it and let operations proceed within ten working days.
Ten working days. That’s what a thousand-year-old road is worth once the withdrawal comes off. Two weeks and get the bulldozers back to work.
And they’re doing it over the objections of the twenty Pueblos whose ancestors built the place. Acoma has invited Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to come see it. They’ve asked to sit down with the people who’ll actually make the decision. Those requests have gone unanswered. The BLM’s own consultation table lists Acoma’s only two meetings and marks both of them “informational.” Seven of the twenty-four tribes never got a meeting at all.
The Numbers They’ve Used are Lies
Here’s what makes this particularly obscene.
You’ve may have heard that the Chaco buffer is costing America a billion dollars. 233 wells, 86 million barrels, $51 million a year in lost royalties. Bruce Westerman’s Natural Resources Committee put those numbers in a press release in 2023 and they’ve been repeated ever since like they came from the government.
They didn’t. They came from an oil company.
Go read the testimony. A land consultant for Enduring Resources of Centennial, Colorado — a company holding 18,000 acres inside the buffer — drew a map, ran her own model, and produced 233 wells. And in the middle of her own testimony she says this:
The BLM asserted in its Chaco Withdrawal Environmental Assessment (”EA”) that only 47 wells will be prevented from development by the Chaco Buffer Withdrawal… We think that is a lowball estimate.
The government said 47. The oil company said the government was lowballing, handed Congress a number five times bigger, and Congress printed the oil company’s homework as fact.
The BLM’s updated number today is fourteen.
Fourteen wells over twenty years. Their own economists ran it out: seven-tenths of a well a year, an increase of 14.14 workers across four New Mexico counties, and $727,764 a year in royalties. Fifty-eight acres of well pad.
That’s the case. That’s the entire case for rescinding 338,690 acres of protections.
Their Own Science Says There’s Nothing There
Of the 338,690 acres, the BLM rates 277,440 as having negligible potential. The only prospective ground is a sliver where an oil play clips the far edge, and most of that is already leased and already pumping. Unleased land with any potential at all comes out to 3,280 acres. Under one percent. Since 2000, not one well has been drilled within five miles of the park.
They knew, too. In July 2025 the Farmington office got back the drilling forecast it had paid a petroleum engineer at New Mexico Tech to produce. He projected 1,200 new wells across the San Juan Basin over thirty years and zero inside the Chaco withdrawal. The coal is played out. The shale turns wet as it rises toward the park. No horizontal well has ever been drilled in that buffer — not once, not ever. He handed it in on July 17, 2025. They opened consultation with the tribes on October 30, with the answer already sitting in a drawer in Farmington.
So they went and got a different answer. This is the BLM writing about itself, in this document:
The 2025 RFDS categorized the entire Chaco region as unlikely to see further development, whereas the 2018 RFDS took a more nuanced approach… In making the prediction of 14 new wells, FFO considered the 2018 RFDS, the 2025 RFDS, and local industry trends.
Their current science said nothing was there. So they reached back to a model from 2018 and mixed until the number stopped being zero. Fourteen is what you manufacture when the truth is unusable.
Why Do This?
Now go back to the oil company's testimony, because Congress left out the best part. Her section heading reads: there are no oil and gas operations near Chaco, nor any geologic potential for future development within a 6-mile radius of Chaco. She repeats it in the body — nothing within six miles, because the geology doesn't have it. And once more at the end: the industry has never leased there and has no reason to do so in the future. Her whole billion-dollar claim was about the outer four miles of the ring.
The BLM had another option on the table. Keep the inner five miles closed. Open everything past it.
Take that deal and the oil industry gets every acre it told Congress it wanted, plus a mile. The Navajo allottees — the families whose royalty checks are the strongest argument the other side has, and it’s a real argument — get every dollar that’s actually out there, because it’s all in the outer ring. The fourteen wells still get drilled. Same wells, same ground. The BLM’s own analysis says no new wells are foreseen within five miles of the park under any option anyway.
Nobody loses a barrel. Nobody loses a job. And LA 72343 stays protected.
They looked at that and said no.
So the question isn’t what the ground touching Chaco is worth. Everyone in this fight — the government, the oil company, the engineer — agrees it’s worth nothing. The question is why they want it anyway.
Uranium No One Wants
The answer’s in the document. They considered opening the ring to drilling while leaving it closed to mining claims, and they rejected it, in writing, because “Critical Minerals and energy-related minerals such as uranium would remain unavailable.”
The buffer sits over the Grants uranium district. Of the 2,723 acres this action disturbs, 2,665 are mining claims — first come, first served, no royalty, no discretion to say no. And the appropriations rider New Mexico’s delegation has carried since 2019 only ever covered oil and gas. It says nothing about mining claims. The withdrawal is the only lock on that door.
Then twelve pages later, the same document admits there’s been no uranium production in New Mexico since 2002. No producers operating. No applications filed. No proposals. Foreign ore is cheaper, and developing any claim out there is unlikely within twenty years.
So they won’t protect a World Heritage Site because it might inconvenience a uranium industry that doesn’t exist, to mine ore nobody has asked for, in a market where it doesn’t pay.
That’s the trade. That’s the whole thing. They’re not choosing between Chaco and American energy. They’re not choosing between Chaco and Navajo families. They’re taking the ground everyone agrees is worth nothing to industry, because taking it proves they can.
They Didn't Count You Last Time
Which brings me to what they do with people like you.
Back in April, as I wrote here then, they ran a seven-day comment window on this same revocation. Online only. No public meetings. Over holy days for several Pueblos. More than a hundred thousand people commented anyway.
At Acoma, as the Cibola Citizen reported, about five hundred people filed comments in that week. Acoma youth walked door to door through the villages to collect them. The Pueblo held a forum for people with no reliable internet, because the federal website was the only way to be heard.
Now turn to Appendix E of the environmental assessment. It’s titled “Report Summarizing Public Input Received.” Page 121 of 140. Here is the entire appendix:
This page intentionally left blank – the summary will be included with the Final EA.
The Final EA comes out after this window shuts. So whatever they decide a hundred thousand Americans said back in April arrives at the exact moment nobody can argue with it. Two pages earlier they can tell you what happened to every letter written to defend Chaco four years ago, down to the individual submission. They can’t tell you what happened to Acoma’s five hundred. What they say instead is that the issues have “substantial consistency” with the old ones and they’ll pass your input along to the Secretary.
Kids knocked on doors in a place where people don’t have internet. And the page where those voices go is blank.
Say It In Your Own Words
They can bucket a form letter — this same document tells us that they took 16,715 comments in 2022 and threw 16,478 of them into one pile as “non-unique, preformulated language.” and counted them as one comment. What they can’t do is ignore a comment that names a specific hole in their analysis. The law makes them answer that one in writing, and when they don’t, judges can throw the whole decision out. That’s the lever. That’s the only lever.
So use theirs against them. Their forecast said zero and they went shopping for a bigger number. Their prospective acreage is 3,280. Their own jobs figure is 14.14 people. Their oil company said there’s nothing within six miles. They’re missing the study Congress required to be completed. Every one of those is a hole to be called out.
Substantive Commenting Made Easy
We built PLAN exactly this. The Chaco page helps you write a unique comment and takes you straight to the official form to submit it. Ask for a real environmental impact statement. Ask for ninety days. Ask them to hold a meeting in Nageezi and Crownpoint and Counselor and look those people in the face.
Governor Riley told the Cibola Citizen what his people are being asked to accept — the permanent loss of a landscape their ancestors built, walked, and prayed in, in exchange for fourteen wells. Ninety percent of the San Juan Basin is already leased, he said. Chaco isn’t what stands between this country and its energy.
Steve Pearce signed the announcement — the oilfield services millionaire who told a crowd in 2012 that Theodore Roosevelt was wrong about big forests and big national parks, and promised to reverse the trend of public ownership of land. He runs the Bureau of Land Management now, and his line on this reads: “Gathering and considering these perspectives is a vital part of our process.” Fourteen days. No hearings. A study he can’t find. A blank page where your voice goes.
If there were a billion dollars under Chaco Canyon they’d take it and tell you they were feeding your children. There isn’t. There never was, and the oil companies said so themselves, under oath, while lobbying to open it. They’re taking it anyway.
That’s what tells you what they are. They’re counting on Bears Ears burying Chaco and the next thing burying Bears Ears, and on you being too worn down to notice a fourteen-day window that opened on a Wednesday in July.
Chaco is among many critically threatened lands on our brand new interactive threatened lands map. Check it out here to see which other sites need your help.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
-Jim
I contacted both of my Arizona senators. As neighbors to New Mexico and home to many Ancestral Pueblan sites, we have an immediate and crucial responsibility to engage with these actions.
I spent one night it the campground at Chaco; it changed my life to be Alone in such a place that had been a Center of the whole area in 1100 AD.