Inside New Mexico’s Oil and Gas “Sacrifice Zone”: The Fight to Protect Greater Chaco

For decades, Cheyenne Antonio’s grandfather has gathered plants used in traditional medicine around their family home in Pueblo Pintado, New Mexico. But, with oil and gas development encroaching on the area, Antonio worries about his safety. 

“My grandpa is an herbalist and he can’t find the sacred plants,” Antonio told Inequality.org. When he tells Antonio that he needs to return to a particular place to gather them, she tries to warn him away from areas near drilling. But, she said, he has little alternative: “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Now, the Bureau of Land Management is considering a plan that could make matters even worse by revoking a 20-year mineral withdrawal on new oil, gas, and mining leasing on federal public lands within a 10-mile radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The land is currently protected by the Biden Administration’s Public Land Order 7923.

For people like Antonio, a member of the Navajo Nation and organizer with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment (Diné C.A.R.E.), this isn’t a hypothetical environmental threat. It comes after decades of oil and gas development have already transformed the landscape — and, residents say, brought widespread costs that fall disproportionately on the communities closest to the wells.

New Mexico has built one of the country’s more ambitious systems for capturing oil and gas wealth, channeling a portion of the industry’s revenues into public services and long-term savings. But the Chaco Basin reveals a central limitation of that model: the state can redistribute some of the wealth generated by extraction while leaving the most immediate environmental and social costs concentrated in the communities closest to the wells.

There has been strong pushback to this most recent threat of expanded oil and gas development. During a 14-day comment period in July, over 200,000 comments were submitted.

“It’s tough to get public comments,” Robyn Jackson, Executive Director of Diné C.A.R.E. told Inequality.org. But in this case, “the public spoke very loudly in favor of protecting Chaco.” 

The costs of extraction

For more than a decade, Kyle Tisdel, a senior attorney and Climate and Energy Program director at the Western Environmental Law Center, has worked on environmental issues in the Chaco Basin area. He told Inequality.org that the introduction of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies around 2010 allowed companies to reach oil formations in the southern portion of the basin that had previously been less accessible to conventional vertical drilling.

That shift brought industrial development closer to the inhabited communities — including numerous Navajo Chapter Houses and tribal allotments — and historic cultural sites surrounding Chaco. 

Antonio has watched that transformation unfold in Pueblo Pintado, where her family has lived for generations. She remembers thousands of trucks moving through the landscape during the expansion of hydraulic fracturing, along with methane flares burning and drilling infrastructure littering the landscape. New extraction technologies can require up to 4,000 truck trips per well, according to the research group FracTracker Alliance, bringing additional traffic risks and air pollution to the region. 

Antonio said these changes have directly impacted the health of community members: “I’m just watching my people get sick,” she said. 

Her concerns are not isolated. A 2021 health impact assessment of oil and gas development in the Greater Chaco region found alarmingly widespread health issues among residents surveyed: more than 90 percent reported sinus problems, while nosebleeds, shortness of breath and nausea were also common. The assessment linked those concerns to elevated levels of pollutants detected in the region.

The burden extends to education. According to recent Associated Press reporting, there are 694 oil and gas wells within a mile of a school in New Mexico. At the 74 schools located near these wells, the student populations are disproportionately Native American and Hispanic — highlighting how the consequences of extractivism intersect with existing racial inequalities. 

The concentration of these costs in communities surrounding oil and gas development reflects what environmental justice advocates, such as WildEarth Guardians, have long called a “sacrifice zone”: a place where the environmental and social consequences of resource extraction are disproportionately borne by the people who live there.

From Tisdel’s legal perspective, the problem is not any single well in New Mexico. It is what happens when hundreds of wells are considered together.

“There have been hundreds of oil and gas wells that have been approved without ever considering the cumulative impacts of that development on the climate, on the environment, and on the people and communities living in vicinity to those oil and gas wells,” Tisdel said.

That gap has become a central focus of Tisdel’s litigation with the Western Environmental Law Center. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, federal agencies must take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of major actions, including their direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts.

In a 2019 case, WELC challenged the Bureau of Land Management over its failure to adequately account for cumulative impacts from oil and gas development — including water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and hazardous air pollutants. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with WELC, finding that the agency had failed to adequately consider the combined effects of extraction.

And the consequences extend beyond pollution to social and cultural practices. One drilling site, Antonio said, is near her great-grandmother’s grave, where her aunt lives. At the Nageezi Chapter House’s Saturday flea market, spaces where vendors once set up are now fenced off for drilling activity, according to Antonio. 

As another key indicator of inequality, the infrastructure built for the oil and gas extraction has also created stark contrasts, Antonio said, at a time when the surrounding communities are experiencing severe drought.

“At times we see industry have water while next door there are Diné residents that don’t have water.” Antonio said.

Taken together, the result is a familiar pattern in sacrifice zones: the consequences of extraction remain local, while the resources flow outward. For Antonio, the contradiction provokes a broader question about who benefits from the region’s natural resources and who is left to live with their costs. “A lot of that money doesn’t come back to our communities,” she said.

Who benefits?

Oil and gas development in New Mexico has generated substantial wealth for the state government, which is on track to amass over $100 billion in its sovereign wealth fund by 2030 — which would be the largest in the nation. For decades, the state has relied on revenue from extraction to fund public services and build long-term savings. In recent years, the state has also used that revenue to expand roll out universal childcare and tuition-free public college.

According to a 2025 report from Resources for the Future, New Mexico captured roughly 20 percent of the value of its oil and gas production in 2023 through a mix of production taxes, state royalties, and federal land distributions. The state saves approximately half of those collections in funds designed to support public services. That system allows New Mexico to convert part of an exhaustible natural resource into long-term public wealth.

The state’s 20 percent capture rate is a comparatively large percentage among top oil-producing states — Texas collects roughly 10 percent of production and Pennsylvania collects just 3 percent — but it also reveals the limits of relying on extraction as a public finance strategy: while New Mexico captures a significant share of the value generated by oil and gas, the majority accrues to the companies and investors that operate the wells. And those financial returns are not necessarily staying in New Mexico.

A 2019 master’s thesis in community economic development quantified exactly what happens when oil and gas production intensifies in New Mexico. The study analyzed the Counselor Chapter — a rural Navajo community directly adjacent to the Chaco region. 

The findings are stark: from 1998 to 2017, nearly $600 million in oil and gas value was extracted from the specific study area. Yet from 2009 to 2016 — during the boom of horizontal drilling, which increased monthly oil production 34-fold — per capita income in the community actually dropped by 14.1 percent. The poverty rate stood at 67.7 percent, unemployment at 42.2 percent, and median household income at just $14,375 per year.

The patterns documented in Counselor aren’t an anomaly, but rather reflect “structural exploitation” where the federal and state government prioritize oil and gas revenues over community well-being, according to the report.

Crucially, the same lands in Counselor that yielded hundreds of millions in value extend directly into the protected Chaco region — and companies have already proven willing to extract from Navajo lands.

One of the companies poised to benefit from new leasing opportunities is Denver-based Enduring Resources and its subsidiary DJR Operating. According to permitting data from New Mexico Oil Conservation Division, nearly 70 percent of Enduring’s existing wells are located on tribal lands in the state.

Enduring operates roughly 1,500 wells, according to company reporting, which use “the latest operational technologies to optimize underdeveloped resources, creating value for our stakeholders and investors.”

Those stakeholders can include some of the country’s wealthiest financial institutions. A 2022 investigation by Searchlight New Mexico found that eight of the then 10 largest companies active in the Chaco region, including Enduring Resources, were owned by private equity firms. By prioritizing financial returns over service quality, private equity firms generally serve “the ultra-wealthy and large institutional investors” — not local communities. 

The concentration of ownership means that the financial returns from extraction can travel far away from the communities where drilling occurs.

Enduring has also faced scrutiny over the environmental costs of its operations. In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency fined Enduring and DJR more than $600,000 for Clean Air Act violations involving unauthorized emissions in the San Juan Basin. In 2022, the company also faced legal challenges over proposed oil-waste infrastructure near the Navajo Nation.

Hilcorp Energy Company, another major operator in the region, has likewise drawn criticism. Searchlight New Mexico documented complaints from residents about the company’s encroachment on rural communities and described Hilcorp as a private company known for both high profits and high methane emissions. The company currently operates more than 12,000 wells in New Mexico. 

The state’s revenue system therefore presents an imperfect bargain. New Mexico can successfully channel a portion of oil and gas wealth into public services while communities living closest to extraction continue to experience its immediate environmental and infrastructure costs. In other words, the result is a geographic mismatch: the revenue generated by extraction can be captured at the corporate and state levels, while many of its most immediate costs remain concentrated around the Greater Chaco region.

For those on the frontlines at Diné C.A.R.E., that trade-off is not worth it. Jackson described oil and gas development as, “short term economic gains that come with a high cost to the environment, the people, and the land.”

Building power on the frontlines

The Trump administration’s proposed revocation of the current moratorium on extraction around Chaco Canyon has hit local activists hard. For residents already living with the consequences of oil and gas development, the prospect of reopening protected lands to new extraction. When BLM released its environmental assessment, Antonio said she struggled to process what came next.

“I just went into a void,” Antonio said. 

But with encouragement from her sister, Antonio organized a July 26 community cookout with a teach-in and public-comment writing event. Hundreds of people attended, lifting her spirits and energizing her for more action. She began collecting public comments, speaking at protests, and working with fluent Navajo speakers to translate and explain the environmental assessment for community members. 

The community response reflects what Jackson described as an unusually strong coalition of grassroots and political opposition at this moment.

“It means a lot to have the energy and solidarity from the public,” said Jackson, who hopes the community could use a continued ban on extraction as an opportunity to build a local economy beyond fossil fuels.

While Tisdel feels that organizing public opposition is most important at this moment, he said his organization will consider legal action to block the Trump administration proposal if necessary. WELC has a successful history of litigation efforts in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to limit oil and gas expansion. 

“There will be options to challenge an unfavorable decision in federal court. We’ll be evaluating that, but I think more than anything, this is a moment to build power and to try to hold the line.”

For Antonio, the fight is ultimately about something more immediate than federal policy.

“I need a place to live. I want to know that I can have kids and that my kids will have [land].”

Her grandfather’s search for sacred medicinal plants is, for Antonio, inseparable from the larger fight over Chaco. He knows the plants, the weather, and the land through generations of experience. She worries that continued extraction will leave the next generation with fewer places to learn those traditions.