Chaco Canyon Comment

In the summer of 2019, my wife and I spent a day visiting Chaco Canyon, guided by a woman from a museum in a nearby city. Although we have spent considerable time in America's desert southwest, it was our only visit to that particular site. I am no expert, and I have neither the patience nor the expertise to read and understand the hundreds of pages of technical material that has been assembled to defend the proposal to free a surrounding 10-mile zone so that minerals and oil may be extracted from that area. My comments will therefore not be of the type you are asking for.

I think the reason this and many other actions by the present administration to remove protected lands from protection troubles me is the noise that will result. Put another way, you are waring against quiet, against silence, against those places remaining on planet earth where a person can sit and listen and hear beyond nature's quiet and perhaps learn that there are things more important that money, development, and exploitation. Such listening to silence is a threat to a culture of wanting it all and being willing to do whatever it takes to get it all. Such contemplation may raise a question about what really matters to our generation as well as to generations that will follow us.

You know that places such as Chaco Canyon and its environs are held to be sacred by native peoples. I contend they are sacred to all Americans because they give us a chance to let ourselves think and feel for ourselves. I fear that that is exactly what many political leaders, particularly the current MAGA political leaders, do not want us to do. If we were free of the noise of mining and drilling and burning, not to mention of crass political ads and unending ads to trick us into buying ever more stuff, we might think about who we really are and how we really are one humanity living on one once-beautiful planet.

I am not a total romantic about all of this. Nature makes plenty of noise on its own, and it is hard to call everything that happens in nature beautiful. And we do need materials and energy in order to live. But when is enough enough, or even too much?

Sites like Chaco Canyon invite us to strip our conception of what we really need down to the bones. We need such places to save us from consuming ourselves to death. Please let it be as it is. We can afford to do that.