Editor’s note: This is adapted from a July 25 statement sent by Ms. Franklin, a Chestnut Hill landscape architect, to the federal Bureau of Land Management.

I am writing to register my strong opposition to the proposed full or partial revocation of Public Land Order 7923, which has protected 336,404 acres around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico from new mineral leasing and oil and gas development since 2023. I urge the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to retain the full 10-mile buffer zone and to reject the proposed revocation in its entirety.

I write not as a casual observer, but as a landscape architect, ecologist and educator whose life’s work has been the study and restoration of landscapes — natural and cultural, ancient and contemporary — that carry meaning beyond their economic use-value. I am a founding principal of Andropogon Associates, Ltd., a Philadelphia-based ecological design firm I helped establish in 1975, and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, recognized in 2018 with the Landscape Architecture Foundation Medal for career contributions to ecological design and sustainability. For 30 years, I taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, and in its graduate program in Historic Preservation. I have spent decades studying the relationship between human cultures and the landscapes they inhabit — how places form people, how people form places, and what is lost when that relationship is severed.

I know what it means to look at a landscape and understand the layers it holds. I know the difference between a site and a place. Chaco Canyon is a place in the deepest sense of that word, and what is being proposed here is not resource management. It is desecration.

Between roughly 850 and 1150 C.E., the ancestral Pueblo peoples built in Chaco Canyon something that has no parallel in pre-Columbian North America. Pueblo Bonito — the greatest of the canyon’s great houses — rose five stories and contained nearly 800 rooms. Its southern wall runs precisely east to west. Its interior dividing wall runs precisely north to south. At solar noon, the sun casts no shadow along it. This alignment is not coincidence; it is intention, expressed in stone, at a scale that required the organized labor of thousands and the accumulated astronomical knowledge of generations.

Stretching from the canyon across the wider landscape is a network of roads — some 30 feet wide, running in impossibly straight lines for hundreds of miles regardless of topography, carved into the earth with a purpose that is still not fully understood. They connect the great houses to outlying communities across the Four Corners region. Some appear to have been ceremonial rather than functional, oriented toward sacred directions, built to be seen from above rather than walked upon.

This is sacred ancestral territory to the Hopi, the Jicarilla Apache, the Navajo, the Ute Mountain Ute and the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona. Chaco is the origin point, the ancestral home, the living spiritual landscape of communities that are still here. The All Pueblo Council of Governors nominated Chaco for World Heritage designation. This is not an abstraction for them. This is their cathedral.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 — one of only 24 such sites in the United States, recognized alongside the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis and Yellowstone for what UNESCO calls “outstanding universal value.” The United States was the first nation on earth to ratify the World Heritage Convention. We invented the concept. To revoke protections from a UNESCO World Heritage Site in order to drill for oil is to renounce a commitment we made to the world.

The BLM’s own draft Environmental Assessment acknowledges that approximately 90% of the lands in the Greater Chaco region were already leased for oil and gas development before the 2023 protections were established. The buffer zone protected what remained. The surrounding landscape already bears the scars of nearly 40,000 existing wells — compromised air quality, contaminated groundwater, degraded soils and harm to the health of Indigenous and local communities that has been extensively documented.

The BLM estimates that full revocation of the buffer would result in up to 129 new mineral extraction wells and 14 new oil and gas wells over the next 20 years, affecting 2,723 acres. These wells would operate within direct sight of the canyon. Seismic vibration, wastewater injection and industrial light and noise would alter the physical environment that has held the great houses for over a thousand years.

I urge the Bureau of Land Management to reject all three alternatives that would reduce or eliminate the 10-mile buffer zone and retain Public Land Order 7923 in full; complete a full Environmental Impact Statement; honor the government-to-government consultation obligations the United States has to the Tribal Nations; and support the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would provide permanent legislative protection for this landscape.

I have spent 50 years learning to read landscapes. Chaco Canyon is one of the places on this earth that is irreplaceable not in the language of policy, but in the language of what it means to be human. It is a record of what people can build when they understand themselves to be part of a world larger than their immediate needs. To open it to drilling is to say that we do not.

The United States designated this a World Heritage Site because we believed it belonged to all of us — all of humanity, across time. I ask the Bureau of Land Management to act accordingly.

Carol Franklin is a co-founder of Andropogon Associates, Philadelphia. She was an adjunct professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, from 1972–2002.