Wild opportunity
Conservationists aim to redefine natural resources
It wasn’t until a backpacking trip during his freshman year of college that Michael Casaus came to realize the treasure that was in his backyard as a child.
The Silver City native says he still vividly remembers entering the Gila Wilderness for the first time with a group of friends from New Mexico State University, shedding the last signs of civilization and spending five transformative days trekking through the forest. It was here, in the world’s first designated wilderness area, that Casaus said he came to see the value wild lands provide and set him on a path to advocating for the preservation of the state’s most pristine places.
“Now that I have two young babies under 2 years old, that experience is even more relevant to me in that I want to ensure that my kids are able to experience those wild places, those quiet places away from society in order to remind them of who they are as human beings,” said Casaus, the New Mexico director of The Wilderness Society.
Under the urging of Aldo Leopold, often called the father of the wilderness system in America, the Gila was declared the nation’s first official wilderness area in 1924. Nearly 40 years later, New Mexico U.S. Sen. Clinton Anderson sponsored the wilderness bill that was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson as the Wilderness Act in 1964. The law provided a legal definition of wilderness, protected 9.1 million acres of federal land and created guidelines for designating future wilderness areas.
New Mexico has been at the forefront of wilderness conservation since the movement’s inception, and the people who are a part of those efforts today see this as a unique and complicated moment in time for the state as both its wilderness system and its extraction industries experience expansion.
“We are in a time of dramatic oil and gas production in the state, some of which is happening in very wild places,” Casaus said. “I believe that there are places that are just too wild to drill, that are too sacred to mine, and that while oil and gas play an important part of New Mexico’s current economy, there is a need to balance that energy production with protecting these last remaining wild places for future generations.”
Camilla Feibelman, director of the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter, calls the extraction industry in the state “relentless.” She cited a statute that requires the Bureau of Land Management to offer quarterly oil and gas lease sales of available federal lands as a threat to surrounding water sources and wildlife habitats.
“Throughout the state, but especially in the Permian Basin, we’re seeing expansion and threat to our waters, threat to our air, and so ensuring that there are wilderness study areas and wildernesses declared, I think, is important for striking a balance between the use of our public lands,” Feibelman said. “And right now, I’d say extraction is winning.”
Recently, a proposed exploratory mine near Terrero just outside the Pecos Wilderness has caused a stir for residents in and around the village of Pecos. A community meeting that was initiated by the Upper Pecos Watershed Association last month drew 125 or so residents, many of whom spoke
out against the proposed mine while expressing concern about possible contamination of the region’s watershed.
Joey Keefe, spokesman for the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, said he’s seen across the state that it’s these hyperlocal efforts that spearhead the defense of the land.
“These battles are actually driven by the locals who depend on these places for their livelihood and that are a part of their culture,” Keefe said. “We feel very strongly that we’re in a good position every time we’re in one of these battles because it’s really driven by the locals there who are the most affected and the most passionate about it.”
Wilderness advocates can’t deny the financial benefits of the state’s record-setting oil production, which is projected to contribute to revenue of nearly $8 billion in the next budget year. The “new” money added to the budget is being used to fund programs such as early childhood education.
But just three years ago, New Mexico was facing a budget deficit, largely due to a downturn in oil and natural gas markets that crippled the state’s tax revenues. Feibelman said New Mexico can’t continue to rely on such a volatile
source of revenue to prop up its economy.
“We don’t confront the sort of boom and bust situation that puts us in a fix in some years, and makes it seem like the money will solve all of our problems in other years,” Feibelman said. “So far in our history, that just hasn’t happened.”
State conservationists see wilderness as a way to help New Mexico escape the boom and bust cycle and provide a more sustainable revenue stream.
A 2017 study by the Outdoors Industry Association, a trade organization, found outdoor recreation in the state generated $9.9 billion in consumer spending annually and added $623 million in state and local tax revenue. The study also found outdoor recreation resulted in 99,000 direct jobs, more than twice as many as in the energy and mining sectors combined (35,000).
With the recent creation of an Outdoor Recreation Division within the state’s Economic Development Department to help promote tourism, wilderness advocates feel New Mexico is taking a positive step in trying to diversify its economy.
The conservation community saw a
significant victory in March when the state added its largest land designation in a single year since 1980 with President Donald Trump’s signing of the Natural Resource Management Act. More than 270,000 acres across
13 new wilderness areas were declared, mostly within the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and Río Grande del Norte national monuments.
The state now has 39 wilderness areas that cover 1,972,507 acres, or roughly 2.5 percent of the state’s land area. Still, New Mexico lags behind all other Western states in its percentage of total land area designated as wilderness.
There are large swaths of land immediately surrounding the Gila and Pecos wildernesses that Casaus said The Wilderness Society and local communities are pushing to gain protection as new wilderness areas. He said he hopes the state can keep its momentum rolling and add to its rich history of land preservation.
“We have some of the wildest land remaining in the Rocky Mountain West,” Casaus said. “I see there to be a tremendous opportunity to build on the legacy of wilderness in New Mexico and to build on the recent victories.”