By Jacob Tolk - LETTER TO EDITOR
September 29, 2007
Published in the Santa Fe New Mexican

The U.S. Senate is getting an earful from oil industry lobbyists who are out to get rich on New Mexico’s public lands at our expense.

They’re fixing to turn our Western public lands into an oil and gas pincushion. The more Senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici hear from these slick hired guns, the more likely it is that we will have to settle for watered-down energy legislation that doesn’t consider how New Mexicans want to use our land.

Like a lot of hunters and fishermen in New Mexico, I’m having a hard time seeing how our fish and game habitat can remain intact with all of the oil and gas drilling planned for our state in the years ahead.

The numbers are scary. About 126,000 new wells are planned on public land throughout the West in the next few years. Each comes with a razed “pad” the size of your average grocery store parking lot and an industrial-grade road that connects it to other wells.

With this in mind, I joined several other sportsmen from around the West earlier this month and visited Washington, D.C., to share my concerns with members of the Senate. The Senate is in the midst of drafting a new energy bill, but without input from sportsmen. The legislation could be seriously lacking issues like the impact oil and gas drilling has on wildlife and their habitat — and on hunters and anglers.

Clearly, oil and gas drilling is important for New Mexico and our neighboring states. Most reasonable people who hunt and fish in the West understand that drilling is one of many uses for our public lands. When we visited Washington, we asked our Senators to take a conservative approach to the management of our public lands. Our lands are finite, after all, just like the habitat that gets trashed when development is done irresponsibly.

When we met with members of the Senate, they seemed genuinely interested in our message. But let us be clear — most of them don’t live here, and they don’t have the on-the-ground perspective we do here in New Mexico. It falls upon all Western sportsmen who understand the connection between successful hunting and fishing and intact wild lands to help provide that perspective.

Congress must hear that rules requiring energy companies to comply with clean air and clean water regulations need to be restored.

They also need to know about the impacts we’re already seeing — declining deer herds, increased industrial traffic, tainted trout streams, and bisected migration corridors-are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to drilling on public lands in the West.

The House of Representatives has approved legislation that helps to balance the desires of an industry that is enjoying record profits and the rest of us who use public lands.

If we want to be able to take our children and grandchildren hunting and fishing years from now, we need to convince the Senate that there is a need for a more cautious approach to drilling in New Mexico.

Drilling responsibly does not cost the oil industry much at all, but drilling irresponsibly is costing our wildlife dearly.

As sportsmen, we owe it to future generations to protect the places where we hunt and fish. Please write or call our senators and ask them to help us.

Jacob Tolk is a sportsman and conservationist who lives in Santa Fe.