Federal judge throws out lawsuit over Chaco-area drilling
Decision: BLM met requirements to protect historic sites
Just a few weeks after writing that some oil and gas drilling around Chaco Canyon violates historic preservation laws, a federal judge has pivoted and said that, actually, it doesn’t.
Judge James Oren Browning this week threw out a 2015 lawsuit filed by a coalition of environmental groups seeking to stop development around the national park revered as a particularly important site in the history of New Mexico’s indigenous people.
The case is just the latest turn in a fight over oil and gas extraction around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, pitting environmentalists and indigenous activists against an industry that has been at the center of the Four Corners’ economy.
Browning’s decision pivoted on the question of whether the federal
Bureau of Land Management did enough to protect historic sites. It did, he decided — at least, it did all that was required of it. But more broadly, the lawsuit raised the question of whether historic preservation laws are meant to save specific archaeological sites from destruction or go further and protect an entire landscape.
The lawsuit argued among other things that even if oil and gas wells approved by the bureau are not inside the park, the wells could still adversely affect the park indirectly. There is light, noise and air pollution, the lawsuit contended. And the federal government should have taken that into account when deciding whether or not to allow oil and gas production in the area. By failing to do so, the government violated laws on historic preservation, the lawsuit argued.
Browning rejected most of the arguments in the lawsuit but seemed open to that one in a six-page memo he issued earlier this month.
The judge, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, wrote that the Bureau of Land Management violated the National Historic Preservation Act by approving some wells around historic sites.
Browning walked back that decision in this week’s 132-page opinion.
The judge wrote that the government was only required to take into consideration historic sites inside and immediately around a well unless officials believed it was necessary to broaden their scope.
“Such a limitation makes sense, as the archaeological site’s historical value stems from the historical data recoverable from the location and not the historical property’s setting or feeling associated with it,” he wrote.
The case was brought by Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, San Juan Citizens Alliance, WildEarth Guardians and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
For those groups, Browning seemed to draw an important distinction in interpreting historic preservation laws.
As Kyle Tisdel, a lawyer at the Western Environmental Law Center working on the case, sees it, the difference is between requiring the federal government do the bare minimum to protect historic sites and viewing preservation in broader terms to take into account the effect of oil and gas development on an entire area.
“We’re talking about what the cumulative impact of all these wells does to the landscape,” Tisdel said.
The Bureau of Land Management declined to comment on the decision.
The groups behind the lawsuit could ask the judge to reconsider or appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Meanwhile, the bureau is working on a regional management plan for Northwestern New Mexico that could affect future oil and gas development around Chaco.
And amid pushback from some of New Mexico’s members of Congress, President Donald Trump’s administration deferred action last month on leasing more sites for oil and gas production in the area.