Heath Haussamen
We’ve had more than a dozen days so far this spring in Doña Ana County where wind picked up massive amounts of sand that isn’t being held down by grass and carried it away.
The resulting haboobs have created conditions worthy of an apocalypse movie: Walls of brown moving ominously towards communities, visibility near zero, closed roads, vehicle accidents, and air that’s unhealthy to breathe without a mask.
It’s one of the most tangible signs of the impact our reckless and shortsighted policies — like overgrazing and reliance of fossil fuels — are having on the lands that sustain us.
The Trump Administration is doubling down on the use of fossil fuels and other things that are causing climate change. There’s little we can do about that as long as Trump and his allies control all branches of the federal government.
But we can defend our land. We’ve already agreed in this region to protect much of it from further drilling, mining and other destruction by creating a national monument of almost half a million acres in Doña Ana and Luna counties.
The Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument was the culmination of years of collaborative work. It resulted from a thoughtful effort to build consensus in our community around preserving areas that make our region special, protecting our local ecosystems, and building a vibrant outdoor economy.
Now it’s one of six monuments across the West the Trump Administration is considering shrinking, the Washington Post reported last week. Officials at the Interior Department, according to the Post, are “poring over geological maps to analyze the monuments’ potential for mining and oil production.”
We cannot allow this. The fight starts now, and all of us who support our national monument must stand up for it.
A thriving outdoor economy
We’ve worked hard since 2014 to build a regional economy based on outdoor recreation. Our monument attracts visitors to the area. It brings money into businesses. It creates jobs. It also gets our residents outside, which increases the health and wellbeing of our population.
The mountains around Las Cruces are becoming well-known for hiking, camping and biking. We have a 250-mile route connecting the various areas in the monument that’s being used for bikepacking.
A 2023 economic impact report commissioned by the Las Cruces Green Chamber of Commerce found that the monument has had a substantial and positive impact on the local economy. Its cumulative impact from 2014 to 2023 was more than $234 million, including $35 million in 2022.
The monument supported 305 local jobs in 2022, the study found. It generated $1.9 million in tax revenue for state, county and local governments that year, compared to $0.8 million from those areas in 2012, just before the monument was designated.
Visitation more than tripled in that time, from 183,900 people in 2012 to 612,781 in 2022. The study found that 73 percent of non-local visitors said the monument was the reason for their visit to the area.
The designation as a national monument matters, as it’s more of a draw than any other designation except national park, according to the Green Chamber study. The trio of monuments and parks in this region — Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks along with White Sands and Prehistoric Trackways — bring people here.
One of the primary reasons for the monument’s value is how much work the local community has put into it. The City of Las Cruces has capitalized with lots of promotional work and events, the study found.
As a journalist, I covered the debate over protecting land in Doña Ana County for many years. It was controversial and at times combative. But once the monument was created and people saw the benefits, our community, with support from the state, really came together to invest in an outdoor economy.
Now that economy is one of the best things we have going for us in Southern New Mexico.
Not our first battle
Our monument has been on the chopping block before. Ryan Zinke, then President Donald Trump’s interior secretary, came to Las Cruces in 2017 to investigate the possibility of shrinking it. Many suspected his visit was a formality and Trump would scale back the monument.
Zinke met with ranchers and other stakeholders. He hiked with folks in the Organs. People agreed his review was fair. He saw the value of what we were building and recommended not shrinking the monument. Trump left it alone.
It wasn’t the first time we had to fight off efforts to open land for development. Former U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce twice pushed proposals that would preserve smaller areas of land and eliminate wilderness study areas to make way for other uses. He failed.
This time may be different. The opinions of local communities seem less important to Trump 2.0. He’s charging ahead with tariffs even though Americans can already see the harm they’re causing. He’s daring the U.S. Supreme Court to stop him from eliminating our due-process rights even though we cherish those protections. Trump’s approval rating is in the dumpster and he doesn’t seem to care.
For what it’s worth, we have Zinke as an ally. Now a member of Congress from Montana, he’s co-sponsored, along with our own U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, legislation to ban the sale of most public lands.
“I have made clear: There are some things I won’t do,” Zinke told Politico’s E&E News. “I will never bend on the Constitution, and I won’t bend on selling our public lands.”
Regardless of party, most folks in Montana and New Mexico understand the value of our public lands. We must stand together.
‘Greed and disregard’
After President Barack Obama designated 496,591 acres as our national monument in 2014, Congress extended wilderness protection to approximately half the land within the boundaries of the monument, doubly protecting those acres. We’re fortunate that even if Trump shrinks the monument, nearly 250,000 acres, including most of the Organ Mountains, would retain protection from drilling and mining.
Ironically, it was Trump who signed the legislation that designated ten separate wilderness areas in Doña Ana County in 2019. Now that his administration is considering shrinking the monument, it’s worth noting that it would take an act of Congress to undo the wilderness protection.
But it’s critical that we defend the other half of our protected land, which is essential to our local economy and way of life.
There may be mining potential in the Organ Mountains, on the north and west boundaries of the wilderness area. A 1988 report from the U.S. Geological Survey found a high potential for copper, gold, silver and molybdenum on the northern edge of the Organs. It also identified a moderate potential for lead, zinc, copper, silver, gold and fluorspar along the western edge.
But conservation groups say there’s little demand to drill within monuments, where local communities support protecting the land, the Washington Post reported.
Tracy Stone-Manning, who is president of the Wilderness Society and ran the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden, pointed out that after Trump shrunk monuments in Utah in 2017, “the coal market did not rush in, the oil and gas market did not rush in, nobody rushed in.”
“There are plenty of minerals elsewhere. This is about an ideological battle,” Stone-Manning was quoted by the Post as saying.
The Washington Post has an AI feature that summarizes comments on articles. On the article about the possibility of shrinking monuments, it states, commenters “overwhelmingly criticize the potential reduction of national monuments for energy development.”
“…There is a strong sentiment that these actions are driven by greed and disregard for the environment, with some commenters drawing parallels to historical acts of cultural destruction,” the AI summary states. “The overall tone is one of frustration and opposition to the perceived prioritization of corporate interests over public and environmental welfare.”
There’s no way Las Crucens would support mining along Baylor Canyon Road, in between the mountains and the city.
We rely on this land
The wind picked up on Sunday and another haboob descended on Las Cruces. I live on the east edge of the city and can normally see the Organs rising above homes in my neighborhood. Sunday’s brownout obscured the mountains entirely. We couldn’t even see the outline.
I have spent years documenting ecological collapse in the desert east of Las Cruces. Deer and mountain lions have all but vanished from this area. Coyotes and jackrabbits are still there, but their numbers are a fraction of what they were in 2019. Grass hasn’t grown for years, so we’re having a historic haboob season.
Our communities may not be able to stop the things that created these conditions. But even if humanity continues on this path, we must care for our land and the life it supports.
Javelina are doing just fine in this uncertain climate. Creosote is, too.
There is an ecosystem that will thrive on the land in our national monument. We must fight to make that future as healthy and vibrant as we can.
Our river may vanish completely in the coming decades. Our agricultural traditions, our chile, pecans and alfalfa, may disappear. That will put immense strain on communities like Hatch and Mesilla, in addition to Las Cruces.
But the Organ Mountains will remain. So will the Doña Anas, Robledos, Potrillos and Uvas. So will the lava flows. The land will support life. It will bring in tourists. Our monument will become even more integral to our cultural and economic identities.
We rely on this land. We must defend it fiercely.
