Mora County, fracking and the art of war
When an editorial is titled “The truth …,” be prepared for self-justifying opinion. John Olivas’ attack (“The truth behind fracking and Mora County,” Looking In, May 29), on Mora County Commissioner Paula Garcia (“Protecting Mora County from fracking,” Looking In, May 18), is a prime example.
Garcia is a staunch advocate for traditional communities and local agriculture. While with New Mexico Acequia Association and New Mexico Association of Counties, she fiercely opposed the oil industry’s many attempts to exempt itself from local regulation. Garcia was the only Mora County commissioner with the wisdom to vote against Mora’s 2014 ban on all petroleum drilling, which was immediately struck down in court. Olivas supported that ban; attempting self-justification, he now accuses Garcia of trying to “rewrite history.”
The Mora ban was the brainchild of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF, a Pennsylvania group advocating the admirable idea that local government should be able to veto unwanted industrial development. I say “admirable” because we should indeed be working to end corporate abuse of such doctrines as “split estate,” which allows drillers and miners to take private property, over the owners’ objections and without compensation, for well pads, “man-camps,” and other large-scale destructive uses.
Unfortunately, this change will only come about through amending the U.S. Constitution, a move I would strongly support. Some community must pass a ban, be struck down and foot the immense bill of Supreme Court appeal; or, miraculously, an honest Congress member might introduce a constitutional amendment. Merely asserting, as CELDF “model ordinances” do, that local power trumps federal, is a costly and suicidal gesture. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
The Pennsylvania group’s inspiring but strategically clueless anti-federalism carries huge community risks, while raising funds for further advocacy in new communities. Olivas, understandably, prefers not to name the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, but to claim that Mora was “working with environmental lawyers from across the U.S.”
During the process that led to unanimous passage of Santa Fe’s 2008 oil and gas ordinance, I paid to attend a two-day workshop by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in Santa Fe. I had high hopes that it might have tools to protect the Galisteo Basin from drilling. Instead, attendees were berated for thinking that “mere regulation” was ever legitimate, and told that, with our “colonized minds,” we were actually enabling the drillers. (The arguments aren’t entirely false, but the group’s presenters were the worst intellectual bullies I have ever encountered.) Anyone dissenting from head-on confrontation with the government was shamed and belittled. Olivas’ dismissiveness toward Garcia continues that stance.
Fortunately, the group’s browbeating backfired in Santa Fe. The ordinance we passed has become a national model and is the basis of Mora’s current efforts. It holds industry responsible, up-front, for costs it usually expects taxpayers to subsidize. Santa Fe refused, which is within any community’s actual legal rights.
I absolutely agree with Olivas and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund that “we must continue to challenge those companies that seek to exploit us [and] courts that shield those companies from us.” But as Garcia understands, you cannot position yourself as a Supreme Court test case and then back down at the first prospect of appeal. Under Olivas’ chairmanship, inevitably and as predicted, the Mora commission lost in court; then it and the group blinked.
American communities do need to declare war on split estate, but not with futile gestures as their only weapons. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Olivas, along with progressives everywhere, desperately need to learn this lesson. Rather than attacking an ally whose wisdom exceeded his own, he should learn from Garcia and direct his fighting spirit where it stands a chance.