Essay by Robert Rowley
Activisim – November 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
They’re calling the new subdivision “Desert Mirage.” I wish it were a mirage. Unfortunately, I see it each time I drive to the Organ Mountains of New Mexico to hike — another blemish on the Chihuahuan Desert.
Recently, I wrote a guest column for a local newspaper criticizing Las Cruces for sprawling toward our nearby mountains. Afterwards, I got telephone calls and letters from people wondering how to stop such “progress.” The response rattled me. They wanted a leader to follow into battle.
One caller, who confessed he wasn’t an environmentalist, was desperate. He owns a house in the foothills, and he’s anxious about development marching toward him. Did I belong to an environmental action group? I did not, but I recommended one I had heard about.
Another caller was a woman who sat on the Extra Territorial Zoning Commission, a group of city and county officials whose job it is to plan for urban expansion. She told me the ETZC had shot down one developer’s request to build near the mountains, but the denial was overturned. She invited me to the next meeting, citing the need for public input. I intended not to go because I have never had much faith in these kinds of forums.
I changed my mind after getting a letter from an elderly woman whose husband was born in New Mexico in 1923. “Over the years we have watched this kind of development in the Southwest,” she wrote. “It is so difficult to understand why our leaders would do anything other than promote controlled growth. Their children and grandchildren will never experience the joy of the Organ Mountains.”
As a frequent hiker in those mountains, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see if I could learn something about controlling growth. I attended the meeting. The first speaker — the county planner — said, “If you’re going to ask if growth can be controlled, the answer is, ‘No.’ The best you can hope to do is manipulate it in a positive way.”
I then watched the presentation of an urban consultant hired to project growth patterns for Las Cruces and environs through the year 2025. I was horrified by what I saw on those maps. Returning home that night, I thought, “This isn’t controlled; I’ve got to get out.”
When I moved here from El Paso, Texas, five years ago, I knew Las Cruces wanted to expand. What I didn’t know was how much or how recklessly. Despite examples from other sprawling Southwestern metropolises — Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso — Las Cruces seems hell bent on repeating the same mistakes. Developers are firmly ensconced in local government; zoning laws are often changed haphazardly, and even precious drinking water is used to establish new golf courses.
Unfortunately, Las Cruces, pop. 85,000, has plenty of open space to slop onto. The city is the fastest growing in New Mexico and one of the fastest growing in the country. A recent Forbes/Milken Institute study ranks the city as the “best small metro area for business and careers.” Money Magazine lists it as one of the Top 8 cities in which to retire.
New Mexico owns 10,000 vacant acres next to the mountains and is looking to sell to developers. Even the federal Bureau of Land Management aids and abets a sprawling city that will eventually crowd those mountains by swapping buffer-zone land with the state — land the state will eventually sell to private development companies.
I hope to be out of here before then, living in a smaller community less infatuated with growth. In the meantime, I am forced to watch Las Cruces destroy what made it livable: clean air, vast open spaces, and the spectacular Organ Mountains, part of the southern Rockies.
Friends and relatives still say I should take a stand. One Las Crucen — the head of a local environmental group — suggested I spearhead a movement to force the BLM to create a larger buffer zone around the mountains. But I want no part of such a fight.
The elderly woman who wrote to me closed her letter by saying, “We can write, and talk, and be unhappy about development — or we can try to do something about it. We would be interested in your suggestions.”
What can I tell this woman: If we band together and apply political pressure, we can prevent urban blight? Or should I tell the truth as I see it: It’s already too late for Las Cruces.
Robert Rowley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). For now, he lives and writes in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
