Though published just a few months ago, Gregory McNamee’s essay
Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grassland, about the
possible destruction of New Mexico’s Otero Mesa grasslands by oil and
gas development, was written in 2007.
As such, there are parts that read, at first, like the complaints of
a bygone age. His real-time railing against the Bush administration’s
disregard for the land and the nation’s future seems so 2005—that
is, until one remembers that hope for change and actual change rarely
find each other’s company bearable. Besides, any political essay that
quotes Cormac McCarthy more than once is all right with me.
As anyone who has read High Country News and other regional
publications with an environmental bent in recent years knows, Colorado
and New Mexico have been under siege this last decade or so by an oil
and gas industry given free reign. The “drill baby, drill!” war cry of
the now anachronistically quaint 2008 Republican National Convention
still reverberates to a certain degree on the high deserts and rare
grasslands of those states, and—despite regime change in
Washington, D.C., and a host of promises—the same ever-present
threats to the empty, wild lands of the Southwest are still there,
scratching at the door.
Otero Mesa, a sparsely populated sweep of rare Chihuahuan Desert
grasslands—some of the last such prairies to remain
unbroken—in Southern New Mexico, provides an ideal case study in
the shortsightedness of the oil industry’s founding argument, which
boils down to something like, “If we think there’s oil there, let’s get
in and start drilling.”
McNamee, based in Tucson (and a former Tucson Weekly contributor), points out that while the oil under Otero Mesa may slake
our thirst for fossil fuels for, say, a few days in the larger scheme
of things, the vast stores of water held in limestone-capped aquifers
beneath that same mesa could represent the future of New Mexico as a
place of human habitation. That’s not to mention the somewhat more
ineffable gifts that the wild and semi-wild, unimproved and unreclaimed
lands of the Southwest provide. McNamee, to our great benefit, has a
way of making such ineffables effable.
“At Otero Mesa, we have the chance to say no—and in an
entirely positive, hopeful way that looks toward a better future for
the West and the world, repudiating the greed and short-sightedness of
faraway carpetbaggers,” he writes. “The right path is obvious: not
another highway, not another derrick, not another pipeline, but a
rutted trail over stone and grass, honeycombed with burrows and lined
with thorns, patrolled by pronghorns and diamondbacks and prairie dogs
and a handful of humans, and always with an aplomado falcon watching
from high above.”
It’s a manifesto. Substitute “Otero Mesa” with “Southwestern United
States” at the beginning of that statement, and there’s a document that
I’ll sign on to wholeheartedly. There are few Southwestern writers
better than McNamee at summing up, with style, the better paths
available to us if we would only take them.
The photos that accompany McNamee’s words provide proof of what the
author praises, and this book represents an ideal pairing of word and
image. Well-known regional photographers Stephen Strom and Stephen
Capra have managed to capture a landscape that could appear to be a
featureless wasteland in lesser hands. Instead, these photographs
depict an American Serengeti, as seemingly wild, remote and exotic as
any forgotten African plain.
But what of that word “wasteland”? It is a dedication to such
concepts that has nearly destroyed many of the Southwest’s most
representative landscapes. In the future, we should forget that word
and follow McNamee’s path, the path that leads past capitalism’s
obsession with utility—a utility that typically rewards only the
few, and almost never the local.
The economic and political priests of our age have for many
generations seen much of the Southwest as a place of “supposedly empty,
supposedly remote lands … that lend themselves easily only to the
work of serving as national sacrifice areas,” McNamee writes.
It’s time for that to stop. McNamee, Strom and Capra, by focusing on
one rare and threatened place among hundreds of others, have built an
emotional, beautiful and convincing case toward that hopeful end.
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2009.