Trump’s Interior Sec Wants to Destroy a 1,000-year-old World Heritage Site for a 1% Chance at Gas

Trumps secretary of the interior Doug Burgum wants to drill fourteen gas wells next to Chaco Canyon, and to get them he’s willing to erase the protections around a thousand-year-old city.Chaco is a national park in northwestern New Mexico and one of only twenty-six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in this country. Same list as the Pyramids and Stonehenge. Ancestral Pueblo people built stone great houses five stories tall. Pueblo Bonito has more than six hundred rooms. They lined the walls up with the solstices and ran roads straight across open desert. A thousand years later it’s still standing, which is more than anyone will say about anything Doug Burgum has built.Their descendants are still there. The Pueblo of Acoma is a sovereign nation. Its people live at Sky City, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America. Charles Riley is their governor.The park is small. About thirty-three thousand acres. The civilization was enormous. Most of what those people left sits outside the park line on BLM land, which is open for business by default. Anyone can lease it unless the government specifically says no. In 2023 the government said no. Ten miles out, twenty years.Burgum wants that gone. All of it. For fourteen wells.There are already thirty-seven thousand wells out there. Thirty-seven thousand. Plus fifteen thousand miles of access road, five times the drive from Los Angeles to New York. The flaring is so heavy that NASA found a methane cloud over the Four Corners the size of Delaware, from orbit. And Burgum looked at all that and decided what’s missing is fourteen more.His own agency’s analysis says less than one percent of that land has any real drilling potential. That number is in the document making the case for drilling it.“We are being asked to accept the permanent loss of a landscape our ancestors built, walked, and prayed in, in exchange for fourteen wells,” Governor Riley said.And the assessment promises the archaeological sites stay protected once the ban is lifted. Protected. While you bulldoze pads, cut new roads, truck in rigs and burn flares on ground never surveyed. Most of Chaco is still buried. The Chacoans built roads thirty feet wide, and archaeologists are still finding them. You cannot carefully avoid an ancient road nobody has mapped. And this stuff poisons the air. Seventy-five percent of the people in that county already live within half a mile of it, with the respiratory illness to match. Chaco also has some of the darkest skies left in America. People drive across the country to see the Milky Way there. Flares wash it out.Approving the protective ring took a year and a half. Six hearings. A hundred and fifty days of comment. A hundred and ten thousand people wrote in. Twenty-four tribal nations at the table. Erasing it gets fourteen days, and in April the first round got seven. Acoma asked Burgum to come see the place. Silence. The BLM’s own log gives them two meetings, both marked “informational,” which is government for leaving a voicemail. Seven of the twenty-four tribes got nothing.Public comment closes midnight July 29. Thanks to More Than Just Parks for their tireless reporting on these issues. Here’s where to submit:https://morethanjustparks.com/public-lands-action-network/4294https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-seeks-input-proposed-withdrawal-revocation-near-chaco-culture-national-historicalhttps://www.cibolacitizen.com/news-news-alert-newsletters/blm-proposes-full-revocation-chaco-protections-opens-14-day-public Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe