Sign the Petition – Protect Otero Mesa

In Otero Mesa, the Bureau of Land Management is soon going to make a decision on whether to open up the Mesa for oil and gas development. This development would threat wildlife through the loss of quality habitat, fragmentation from energy and residential development and a misguided movement to sell off our public lands.

Places like Otero Mesa represent a unique opportunity to reconnect the American public with its own wild lands. Otero Mesa is a place where hunters, hikers, campers, wildlife watchers, and other recreationists can still enjoy solitude and silence in a world grown both crowded and loud.

Protecting Otero Mesa helps conserve extraordinary wildlife habitat from the impacts of surface disturbance associated with energy development and transmission, maintain public access, focus management on the conservation, restoration and enhancement of key habitat and sustain traditional uses of the land.

New Mexico’s Otero Mesa is the largest and wildest Chihuahuan Desert grassland left on public lands in America. The area is located southeast of Alamogordo, west of Carlsbad and straddles the Texas border.

At over 1.2 million acres in size, Otero Mesa is home to diverse native and non-native wildlife species, including mule deer, elk, oryx, Barbary sheep, pumas, black-tailed prairie dogs, golden and bald eagles, over 200 species of migratory songbirds and boasts the state’s healthiest herd of pronghorn antelope. Otero Mesa is able to nourish such a wide variety of species because of the expansive black grama grasslands.

Otero Mesa sits above the Salt Basin Aquifer, which is suspected to be the largest, untapped, fresh water aquifer left in the state of New Mexico. Preliminary findings suggest that there are at least 57 million acre feet of groundwater and that due to the fractured nature of the geology, the aquifer could be vulnerable to the rapid spread of contamination.

Now is the time to protect this unique place. Please sign our petition today saying you want to protect Otero Mesa!