During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rev. Andrew Black said he loaded his baby into a pack and hiked with her in the Caja del Rio almost every day.
Black’s daughter, now 5, returned to the area Friday to attend a news conference on recently introduced federal legislation that would designate more than 67,000 acres in the Santa Fe National Forest and roughly 18,000 acres owned by the Bureau of Land Management for special management and protection.
The Caja del Rio sits west of Santa Fe at the crux of Cochiti, Santo Domingo, Sal Ildefonso, Pojoaque and Tesuque pueblos. Tribal leaders at a Friday news conference emphasized the area is a “living landscape” and called for its protection for future generations.
“Out there, on the landscape, there are Puebloan footprints,” Tesuque Pueblo Gov. Mark Mitchell said at Friday’s event at La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs. “We are the direct descendants of those people, our people. And we want to make sure that we pass on the information to not only our current children, but yet generations to come.”
The legislation, which has the support of New Mexico’s all-Democratic congressional delegation, was introduced April 30 and endorsed by the All Pueblo Council of Governors. It would create a Special Management Area in the Santa Fe National Forest and a National Conservation Area in parts owned by the BLM and require consultation with local tribes and historic communities on land management plans. It would also restrict new roads, mining, or rights of way while preserving existing and traditional uses like hunting, grazing and gathering.
It would also add protections to an additional almost 21,000 acres of BLM lands adjacent to the protected area, including withdrawing them from mining and barring their sale, for a total protected area of about 105,000 acres.
The Caja del Rio has been subjected to vandalism, damage from off-road vehicles, and illegal shooting, according to advocates. Sen. Martin Heinrich, who introduced the version of the bill in that chamber, said it would limit threats to the landscape, including preventing the sale of the public lands and making recreation uses more “responsible.”
The legislation, however, will not impact the construction of a third power line to Los Alamos that will cut through the Caja or other existing uses. The power line, which federal and lab officials have said are needed as existing infrastructure reaches capacity and supercomputing needs grow, drew protest and prompted calls during the last year of the Biden administration to designate the Caja del Rio as a national monument. Black and others formed the Caja del Rio Coalition, which pushes for protections for the area.
“The electric lines are existing uses,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, whose district includes the Santa Fe area and who introduced the House version of the bill. “Los Alamos needs to get that, but ... that piece is going to now be governed by, I think, the collaboration that you see in the legislation ... and I think we’re very honest about it, [the legislation] does not resolve it, but it sets up a collaborative way of addressing it and making sure that all of the players are involved in that conversation.”
Heinrich added, “I wish we would have had this sort of formal structure for collaboration even earlier, but we have to work with what we have.”
At a Tuesday meeting of the Los Alamos County Council, deputy laboratory director for operations Mark Davis said work on the Electrical Power Capacity Upgrade Project, which started late last year, was going “quite well.”
“It’s a huge project for us,” Davis said. “It’s bringing a third power line up to Los Alamos, which will enable a lot of our [artificial intelligence] efforts going forward ... with the two lines we have now, we’ll be nearing capacity by 2028 so we need that third power line to really take us to the next level.”
Both the House and Senate have Republican majorities, making it unlikely a Democratic-sponsored bill extending environmental protections will pass. Heinrich and Leger Fernández both decried the current climate in Congress but expressed optimism about the bill’s future nevertheless.
“The current gridlock will pass,” Heinrich said. “One of the things I’ve learned in being in Washington, D.C. as a representative now for well over a decade is that there are windows when Congress has the opportunity to really move legislation like this.”