South of Carlsbad, New Mexico, rancher Alisa Ogden steered her pickup truck down a county road and pointed out batteries, pipelines, and power lines—the sprawling infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry, all of it constructed on public lands during the Permian Basin oil boom of the last decade. Before, she said, the same area was just open pasture. Today, it is crisscrossed by oil and gas lines and pipes carrying “produced water”—industry-speak for the toxic fluid that comes out of a well along with hydrocarbons. “You hope and pray” the extraction companies have done their due diligence to ensure the lines are properly buried and maintained, she said. 

Ogden, 64, is a fifth-generation rancher and farmer and a past president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association. Each winter, she still rides out to round up her cattle. “I’d rather be on a horse than a tractor,” she said. In recent years, she became concerned about how the oil boom has changed the agricultural nature of Eddy County, with less-profitable farmland turned into oilfields and sites for frack sand storage and water rights diverted from agricultural uses to fossil fuel extraction. 

In this arid southeastern corner of New Mexico, historic uses of “multiple use” state and federal public lands have been increasingly eclipsed by the oil and gas industry. Even protected public lands have been impacted, as oil production in Eddy County grew nearly fivefold and gas production tripled between 2010 and 2019.

Ogden has experienced this industrial transformation firsthand. Her 250 cattle range across thousands of acres of federal and state lands. While Ogden leases surface rights, most of the mineral rights are held by oil companies. But Ogden benefits from royalties she receives on some wells and said, “I dang sure can't pull stock trailers full of animals with a renewable energy vehicle.” But her support is qualified. “I am for energy independence. I just want it to be responsible.” 

In one of her pastures, oil and gas development quadrupled during the past 10 years and today includes saltwater disposal stations, tank batteries, eight compressor stations, and a massive plastic-lined frack pond nearly 30 times the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool that’s used to store freshwater before it is injected into wells. The fracking industry’s massive footprint means there is less grass available for her cattle, Ogden said. And even when the industrial infrastructure is removed once a gas or oil well runs dry, it can take a couple of decades for the land to be “reclaimed” and its vegetation restored.

As trucks bristling with equipment and heavy with oilfield fluids raced across a low cement bridge on the Black River, Ogden told the story of her great-great-grandfather, a white settler who homesteaded adjacent land in the late 1800s. In that era, the family relied on water from the river and a well, which today supplies the water she pumps through 50,000 feet of pipeline to cattle watering stations scattered across the ranch. 

In early spring, the Black River was thick with tall grasses and red-barked willows and swollen from recent rains. It is one of the last refuges of the endangered Texas hornshell mussel, which requires rivers with seasonal flows and a healthy population of host fish for its larvae to survive. The river is also a source of water for farmers downstream. 

Ogden worries about water availability—whether surface water managed for farming by the irrigation district or groundwater that is increasingly diverted for the more lucrative business of fracking. “Water is your lifeblood in agriculture,” she said, and it’s in particularly short supply in southeastern New Mexico.  

New Mexico just experienced its hottest decade on record, including a period of critical drought in 2018. And 2020 is on track for another record drought; in July, 11 percent of the state was in extreme drought and 47 percent in moderate to severe drought.

It’s estimated that anywhere from 1 to 3 million gallons of water are used to frack a single Permian well, about the same amount of water 10 American families consume in a year. While the recent pandemic-related oil market crash has led to a steep decline in drilling, oil production in Eddy County continues at a lower rate, including on Ogden’s grazing leases. 

Ogden knows that poor maintenance of fossil fuel infrastructure can lead to catastrophe. About 10 years ago, a produced water line burst, and she later discovered her cattle drinking the contaminated water. The water killed the beneficial bacteria they need to digest grass, and three died of starvation, she said. Also, produced water spills sterilize the soil.  

As her truck rumbled past snaking black pipelines, Ogden came to a sudden stop. On the shoulder of the road, a puddle of crude oil shimmered in the afternoon sun. A couple of miles down the road, Ogden took photos of another spill. She found small spills like this every week, she said. “There's no way to know who did it to get them to come clean it up,” she said. With the next rain the oil will just run off the road and into the grasslands, she said.  

Ogden is mostly resigned to the changes in her community. But she misses leaving her windows open at night. With whirring compressors and lit-up well pads, she said, “Where it used to be dark and quiet, it's not anymore.”

Even the wildest corners of the New Mexico Permian have been affected by development. 

On a clear winter day at Carlsbad Caverns National Park’s cliff-side visitor center, the views extended for over a hundred miles along a rugged, 4,000-foot escarpment south to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, and down a thousand feet to the flat Permian Basin to the east. Over 200 million years ago, this area was covered by an inland sea, and the escarpment was a reef. Over time, the sea’s ancient plants and animals were transformed into the park’s well-preserved fossils—as well as the basin’s rich lode of oil and gas.   

Rod Horrocks, a cave specialist and the park’s chief of resources, said the park’s mission is to “preserve everything” for future generations. In addition to protecting its massive caves sculpted by a unique sulfuric acid process, its wildlife, and its wildlands, the park’s mandate includes conserving the air quality, the night sky, and even soundscapes, all of which have been critically impacted by energy development. In 2019, the National Parks Conservation Association named Carlsbad Caverns one of the 12 national parks most threatened by oil and gas development. 

When Horrocks arrived at the park five years ago, the distant horizon was clear, he said. Now there’s often a brown haze. In 2016, park officials became concerned about degraded air quality as well as light pollution due to increased oil and gas development. The National Park Service began monitoring volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and ozone, byproducts of oil and gas. Horrocks called the results “alarming.” The predominant winds sweep north from the heart of the Permian Basin near the Texas border, carrying pollutants up the escarpment to the park, he said.

In 2018, the park registered 10 days during which it exceeded health standards for ozone pollution, which poses serious risks for people with asthma or respiratory disease, as well as people who work outside. On hazy days, visibility can be reduced to 50 miles. 

The park’s website includes concerns that cave formations adjacent to lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management could be jeopardized by the development. “Oil and gas drilling on BLM-managed areas could leak gas or fluids into the cave's passages, killing cave life, destroying the fragile ecosystem, and threatening the safety of people inside the cave.”

When visitors emerge from the caverns after nightfall, they’re disoriented, Horrocks said. During the day, oil and gas infrastructure is harder to spot. But at night, with the light from well sites and flaring, “it literally looks like you're looking at Denver out here,” he said. “There's just solid lights.” 

The light pollution means the park won’t have the opportunity to be designated a Dark Sky Park. “We've lost so much,” Horrocks said, “because you can't see the Milky Way now.”