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New West Book Review

“Otero Mesa” Captures the Rugged Beauty of the New Mexico Grassland

By Jenny Shank, 2-16-09

Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grassland
By Gregory McNamee with photographs by Stephen Strom & Stephen Capra
University of New Mexico Press, $24.95

Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grassland is a plea for its subject’s preservation and a collection of beautiful photographs that document Otero Mesa, a rugged 1.2 million acre stretch of grassland in southern New Mexico.  Gregory McNamee writes, “It is a strange and empty place, a place whose contours suggest that those who do not know it would do best to leave it alone.” In 2005, the Bureau of Land Management leased part of Otero Mesa for oil and gas exploration, but environmental groups have taken the matter to court, and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson opposes the plan to allow the construction of over a hundred wells.  He writes in his introduction to the book:"…when I entered the statehouse, I told oil and gas people that my door always would be open.  But I also said that drilling wasn’t an unfettered right, even in a business-friendly administration, and that there were lines I would not cross.  One of them was on Otero Mesa.”

Richardson notes that the area “is environmentally important for several reasons, not least because it carpets a vast groundwater system that should not be exposed to the risks of contamination.”
The book, a collaboration between McNamee, who wrote the text, and photographers Stephen Capra and Stephen Strom, seeks to make the case for leaving Otero Mesa alone.  McNamee writes about the natural history of Otero Mesa, its flora (including an agave named lechuguilla that is only found there) fauna (including bighorn sheep, lark buntings, and the aplomado falcon), and human interaction with the land.  Over the years, human contact with Otero Mesa has included a few hardscrabble ranchers who live in the area, nuclear tests completed nearby, and now the threat of oil drilling.

McNamee argues that because of these incursions, the land isn’t “pristine,” but that it needs protection to prevent further damage to its fragile ecosystem.  He writes passionately about Otero Mesa, as in this descriptive passage:

“This is a land of sky, a sky so vast and blue that it dwarfs the tallest mountains and broadest valleys.  Here it is hard to see not the forest for the trees, but the horizon for the firmament: other places have sky, but here the land seems but a thin strip of dirt under the hugeness of the heavens, that great endless openness punctuated only by clouds.  And contrails, of course, for we are in the twenty-first century, so that planes and satellites scream distantly overhead, reminding us of modern realities and appetites that have everything to do with this quiet, distant place.”

In some ways the photographs make an even stronger case, documenting the land’s beauty, and in a few photos, the ugliness of oil seeping from storage tanks into the ground.  McNamee’s text tells a story that is common to many threatened wilderness areas—how oil exploitation would harm it irrevocably—but the photographs show Otero Mesa’s unique character.  Strom’s images often focus close in, such as on the luminous flowers of prickly pear and claret cup cacti, and Capra captures the grand sweep of the land, such as one of the Guadalupe Mountains, and another entitled “grass in seed, autumn,” that shows the palette of the season, with whispy white tufts of grasses rising up amid little yellow wildflowers.

McNamee notes that Cormac McCarthy set a portion of his Border Trilogy in Otero Mesa, and includes a quote from Cities of the Plain in which one of the characters looks out on the land and thinks, “No rain.  Maybe in the eastern sections.  Up in the Sacramentos.  People imagined that if you got through a drought you could expect a few good years to try and get caught up but it was just like the seven on a pair of dice.  The drought didnt know when the last one was and nobody knew when the next one was coming.” The land is both inspiring and forbidding, and as Bill Richardson notes, “the fate of Otero Mesa rests with the courts.”

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