talus unit, chaco culture national historical park, new mexico – by Damon Taylor (flickr)
As my readers know, I’ve been adamant about ending fracking wherever it’s happening and preventing it from reaching new areas. So this recent news from CredoMobilize.com, an activist organization, sickens me:
A thousand years ago, Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico was the ceremonial center of ancestral Pueblo Indians, whose culture encompassed 75,000 square miles of the Southwest. Today, Chaco Canyon is a World Heritage Site, and one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas. However, the Chaco cultural expanse reaches beyond this center into unprotected land on the verge of a blanketing of energy development, driven by new oil and gas extraction technologies.
It’s unconscionable that the Bureau of Land Management is already leasing land for fracking around New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park (Chaco NHP). It’s even worse that the BLM is now proposing to expand drilling through a vast new area — potentially extending to millions of acres. This region contains thirty-five Chaco Great House ruins and a network of subtle and fragile ancient roads, sites held sacred by Native American descendants.
The BLM has proposed massively expanded fracking on land surrounding New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We cannot allow the BLM to turn Chaco’s invaluable historic landmark into an industrial wasteland.
The land now threatened by the BLM’s leasing plans holds irreplaceable information about the Chacoans’ culture. For many Pueblo people, whose Chacoan ancestors used no written language, these traces on the landscape are their history.
There is so much information about fracking’s health and environmental hazards, yet fracking companies are not only still in operation, but are expanding to new areas, including a national park!
The Bureau of Land Management is accepting public comments on this issue until May 28, which means that the public can voice its concerns directly to the bureau with the hopes that it will listen and stop the proposed fracking project. To sign a petition asking the bureau to prevent fracking in this historic area, go to CredoMobilize.com.
If you’d like more info about fracking, please see my posts in the “Our Planet” category of this blog to the left. Look for the “Facts About Fracking” subcategory.
Illuminate 
What a shame.