TeaThe driving rain turned the dirt roads into muddy rivulets, the bus’s wipers swept the torrent back and forth across the windshield, and Don Schreiber handled the wheel like Sandra Bullock in Speed, speaking cheekily from beneath a big gray mustache. The vehicle twisted and slid in the storm, lightning flashed on the horizon, the air shook with thunder. Whether or not the old yellow bus would make it back to the ranch house, get stuck, or skid and flip over depended on his driving.
Don, in his white Stetson and blue-and-white checked Western shirt, was our tour guide on this land in northwestern New Mexico that he knew intimately and that he had devoted his retirement to protecting. When he and his wife, Jane Schreiber, bought a ranch about 200 miles northwest of Santa Fe in 1999, they — like many Westerners — discovered that they owned the land but not the rights underground. The fracking boom came, and gas companies began digging holes for gas wells, laying pipelines and building roads over the fragile desert soil. Huge trucks roamed the land night and day to service the wells that dotted the landscape. The well we stopped at had a broken pressure gauge.
Now in their seventies, Don and Jane Schreiber have turned their pastoral retirement of riding the range on horseback and practicing small-scale sustainable ranching into environmental advocacy. Jane prefers a quieter approach, but Don is perhaps the most high-profile opponent of fracking in the San Juan Basin and one of New Mexico’s most outspoken climate activists. With articulate eloquence and humor, his first-hand experience of the consequences of fracking, his lifelong roots in the region, and his mastery of the science, geography, and laws behind the fracking boom and the troubles it has caused, he is a strong voice on social media, in public hearings, in interviews, and in editorials.
My New Mexico friends had come with me to get a first-hand understanding of the fossil fuel industry we so often read and talk about. We had spent the afternoon taking a long drive through beautiful landscapes, including the bare red rocks and silhouetted mountains that Georgia O’Keefe loved to paint, vast expanses of forest and land like the Schreibers’ farm that looked flat from a distance but when seen up close had ripples and streams descending into small valleys. Red soil was visible, studded with rabbit brush, sagebrush and other hardy dryland plants, even where a light cover of dry grass spread. Blue mountains bordered the horizon and above it all was the vast and turbulent New Mexico summer sky.
San Juan County and the surrounding area is the world’s largest known coalbed methane region. There are 122 fracking wells scattered on and around the land owned by Don and Jane, and there are more than 20,000 in the region. Each well presents a threat to the long-term well-being of the land, water, and life in this place. “It’s like a different world to sit in the center of an arid place like the high desert of New Mexico and watch millions of gallons of water being pumped out of our aquifers or rivers or our lakes to build a gas well,” Don told me. Water is as precious as it is scarce here, with annual rainfall and snowmelt averaging about 10 inches, some of which is in monsoon storms like the one we were driving through.
As Don drove, we could see the erosive force of the roads slicing away at the dry, fragile soil held together by a surface layer and an underground network of roots. Swift currents, somewhere between the color and consistency of chocolate milk and New Mexico red chili sauce, swept that liquefied topsoil into gullies and ditches, deepening them. The roads got worse as we moved faster over them.
Fracking wells and their infrastructure of pipelines and roads pose one kind of threat when they’re pumping and another kind once corporations have finished extracting the gas and using scarce local water — the threat of abandoned wells and roads that continue to spew pollution and destroy the landscape. The benefits are short-term, burned off; the losses are long-term. The region — whose largest city, Farmington, reflects its agricultural roots — has the highest concentration of methane pollution in the United States, and methane is a far more potent, though short-lived, greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
We had gotten stuck in that rain because I wanted to see the ruins Don had mentioned, and despite the ominous sky, had driven a little further instead of turning back. At the end of our journey across the Schreiber ranch grounds, we reached a spot where an orange-red sandstone cliff paralleled the rough road. High above it was a stone structure built many hundreds of years ago by the Diné (Navajo) inhabitants of the area. Flat stones the same color as the surrounding stone were piled in neat walls on one side, halfway up the cliff. We got out and stood admiring it until the increasing rain forced us to try to get back to the ranch house.
But the memory of that structure stayed with me. It says that this place, even though it was dry, has nourished humans for thousands of years (archaeologists say more than 10,000 years), and can probably do so for many more. It speaks of deep time. The wells speak of the opposite, what we might call shallow time. The fossil fuel industry pursues short-term profits and leaves behind long-term debris, in the form of specific damage to extraction sites, which can be dug up or poisoned or both, and climate chaos. It’s like that all over the world.
For example, in Germany, a private company is mining low-grade lignite coal for which it is digging up a lush countryside, mile for mile, digging up land where farms, villages, churches, cemeteries have existed for centuries. The advantage is that the dirty coal can be burned once. The disadvantage is that farmland that has fed humans for 1,000 years and can probably feed for 1,000 more is being burned.
What will be left behind is some profit in shareholders’ accounts, some emissions from the dirtiest fuel on Earth, and a giant crater that will fill with water and become a man-made lake. Anyone standing by that lake a century or five from now will not see any benefit from coal. They can feel the impact of the farmland, the 1,000-year-old church, the continuity of the surface of this particularly fertile part of the Earth, and the carbon dioxide released by burning coal. They can feel the harm that coal will cause, in the form of climate chaos or the destruction of its remnants.
On the same scale, no one will benefit from the methane extracted from the place where we stand looking out over the ruins of Diné 50 or 500 years from now, but the landscape may still be more eroded, more arid, more contaminated, more impoverished because of the pursuit of profit in the early 21st century. We have been making short-term decisions for too long, and the consequences have arrived with the decision about whether it is time to commit to the long-term future and the long-term survival of the places that fossil fuels have and will ruin.
The truth about fossil fuels is that the process of moving away from them is already underway. Already underway and profitable – solar and wind power are cheaper than fossil fuels for electricity generation in most places – and beneficial to all of us. Electrifying almost everything and getting power from renewable sources is not just about climate, the composition of the upper atmosphere and the way the atmosphere shapes our weather, ocean currents and destinies.
We need to do so to avoid the many catastrophes that came with the fossil fuel age. This includes not only damage to water, earth, and air, but also damage to our politics, as dependence on unevenly distributed resources fosters tyrannical regimes that tolerate access to fuel and allows propaganda-driven corporations to intimidate and corrupt politics. Fossil fuels are now the worst way to power machines, in many cases when those machines could run on electricity from renewable energy.
On that hot summer day in northwestern New Mexico, we got back on track thanks to Don’s quick reflexes and decades of experience driving dangerous dirt roads. We weren’t sure we’d make it back until we reached the last climb and the stables and ranch house came into view amid the raindrops.
But in a way, we are all on a school bus traveling down a slippery road in a rainstorm. Climate activists are trying to snatch the wheel from the reckless drivers who are getting us all into trouble. We are trying to steer toward safety. We are trying to be good ancestors, trying to build a world in which the land that has fed many species in the past, including our own, will feed them in the future, trying to cross the fork in the road ahead that leads to well-being in the short term and the long term. Building better roads for the future instead of falling into the ditch.
