The Board of Directors and staff of Earth Works Institute are gravely concerned with the proposed plans for oil and gas exploration in the Galisteo Basin. We believe that oil and gas exploration and future production will lead to severe and perhaps irreversible ecological damage, insufficient land stewardship actions, and increased pressure from other extractive industries in the Galisteo Basin and its surrounding areas, and to serious stress on many sectors of the Santa Fe County economy. We anticipate that oil and gas exploration and future production will undermine Earth Works Institute's mission to help communities build capacity to protect, restore and live in harmony with the natural environment. Therefore, Earth Works Institute is in favor of regulatory action that will keep oil and gas exploration out of the Galisteo Basin.

The Galisteo Basin is rich in ecological, hydrological, cultural, and scenic resources, while the condition of these resources is extremely fragile upon disturbance. The Galisteo Basin is a landscape of important ecological diversity in the region as it is the nexus of four of eight eco-regions in the State of New Mexico. Beside its richness of wildlife habitat and species diversity, the Basin also serves as a crucial migration corridor of wildlife between the four eco-regions. Water is the source of all life in this basin and pollution, flow modification, or severance of relationships between water sources and plant, wildlife or human users will greatly upset the ecological and social fabric of the area. Additionally, the soils and hydrology of the Basin are very fragile and upon disturbance will take many decades to rehabilitate, while some disturbances have proven to be irreversible.

After centuries of human disturbances, which have accentuated the regular but extreme natural dynamic disturbances in this landscape, the ecosystems of the Galisteo Basin and people's stewardship relationships to the land have seriously declined and are at a very fragile state. Aware of this critical condition, County, State, and Federal agencies have invested many millions of dollars in the past decade to rehabilitate streams, wetlands, and upland ecosystems and to preserve open space values for generations to come. These investments were matched by also many millions of dollars worth of private donations and initiatives of time and effort.

In particular the Galisteo Creek, along with its contemporary and historical flood plain of Quarternary Alluvial soils and its tributaries and their alluvial fans, exhibit the greatest existing and potential ecological diversity and surface water storage capacity in the Galisteo Basin. Much of the biodiversity, wildlife migration patterns, wetlands, and domestic shallow wells rely on these alluvial soils. Any form of development, and in particular the impacts of oil and gas drilling, will weaken this crucial ecological system in the Galisteo Basin. It is our experience that mitigation work is typically insufficient and that even ecological restoration techniques require many years for true healing of the system. Therefore, it is essential to establish a system of critical or restrictive management areas with buffer zones that include these alluvial soils, stream corridors and wetlands through the watershed, and by extension entire Santa Fe County, where oil and gas drilling is off limits.

We anticipate that oil and gas exploration and any following oil and/or gas extraction will disrupt and destroy the fragile ecosystems and many loved landscape resources that remain in this precarious dynamic equilibrium in the Basin. Oil and gas exploration and extraction will also undermine and nullify the great investments made by people and government agencies in the past to rehabilitate and protect the public values recognized in this area.

For more information, please contact Jan-Willem Jansens, Executive Director of Earth Works Institute at jwj@earthworksinstitute.org or 505-982-9806.