Mission of Conservation Organization Has Evolved
TAOS — The handful Taos area residents who formed the river conservation group Amigos Bravos 20 years ago shared a love of the Rio Grande and a taste for whitewater. “In those days, we had lots of kids, and we were on the river every weekend,” recalled Charlie Anderson, a pediatrician and founding member of Amigos Bravos. As the nonprofit celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend, the original members who first grew acquainted along river banks and on cross-country ski trails are reflecting on the early days of Amigos Bravos, as well as the battles ahead. The group made its debut at the 1988 Wild Rivers Festival near Questa, selling posters and T-shirts that raised $12,000. “We were all pretty much freewheeling folks,” said executive director Brian Shields, who had spent his youth bumming around the lower Rocky Mountains leading outdoors courses.
The formation of the group, first known as Friends of the Wild Rivers, was partially a recognition of the limits of what government could do. Federal agencies at the time were facing budget cuts under the Reagan administration, and a number of volunteer outdoors group sprung up in the state to lend a hand.
“Some things can only be done by citizens working together,” said Peggy Godfrey, then a Taos rancher.
Initially the group set out to help the Bureau of Land Management protect a 48-mile stretch of the Rio Grande designated “wild and scenic” by Congress in 1968.
But it soon became clear that the biggest threat posed to the river came from a decision the BLM itself had made. The agency had given permission to the Molycorp molybdenum mine near Questa to build a toxic waste holding pond above Red River, a major Rio Grande tributary.
“Ironically, instead of helping BLM, we sued BLM,” said Shields, describing the lawsuit brought with the Sierra Club and the Mineral Policy Center.
The litigation marked a rapid expansion of the group’s mission from not just river cleanup and cottonwood planting to engaging in citizen activism. The shift was reflected in the group’s new name, Amigos Bravos, meaning wild — or even feisty — friends.
BLM eventually rescinded its decision, and Amigos Bravos had its first big success.
“With a victory like that we felt really empowered,” Shields said during a recent interview in the group’s Taos office, squeezed between art galleries just off the town’s plaza.
Group members said the work was also personally transformative.
“For a lot of women raised in the south, we did not trust our judgment about things,” said Godfrey, who grew up in the deep South. “You were not taught to honor or identify as a woman, nor acknowledge the truth that you recognized.”
“Experiences like (those with Amigos Bravos) have given me a sense of my own identity that has served me well,” said Godfrey, who today is a rancher and cowboy poet in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.
Amigos Bravos started small, with office space in the Des Georges Mall equipped with a phone line, answering machine and Macintosh Classic computer.
Shields and Sawnie Morris, the group’s first director, spent countless hours meeting with people in farm fields and apple orchards up and down the Rio Grande talking about the river.
The group’s budget more than doubled during its first three years of incorporation and today Amigos Bravos boasts 1,500 members and a budget of more than $500,000.
As it celebrates its achievements, Amigos Bravos is laying the groundwork for what could be its most ambitious campaign yet: amending the state constitution to give citizens the right to a clean and healthy environment.
Godfrey said she’s not surprised to see such big plans from a group founded with more modest goals. “When the lion cub grows up,” she said, “it’s a full-grown lion with a lot more power.”
Mining reform
The open pit and hulking hills of waste rock at the nearly century-old Molycorp mine remain a major target for Amigos Bravos.
“We weren’t naive, but none of us thought back in 1989 that now in 2008 we would still be dealing with Molycorp,” Shields said.
Repeated spills and toxic seepage from the rock piles have left miles of the Red River near the mine biologically dead, according to the group. Amigos Bravos has sued both Molycorp and the Environmental Protection Agency to force the two to treat polluted ground water.
The efforts lead to a new EPA permit in 2000 aimed at stopping more than 15 million pounds of pollutants from entering the river. Amigos Bravos is now calling on the mine’s new owner, Chevron, to install water recycling and treatment facilities and begin early reclamation work.
Amigos Bravos’ belief in the need for mining reform led it to join other Westernstate environmental groups in 2005 in forming a company that staked mock mining claims near Valles Caldera National Preserve and Bandelier National Monument — a way of highlighting how easy it was to stake claims in sensitive areas.
In carrying out its campaigns, group members say it’s been important to counter the idea in local communities dependent on logging and ranching that Amigos Bravos was a bunch of “enviros” that threatened jobs.
The tensions that boiled over in the 1990s over protection of the Mexico spotted owl prompted Amigos Bravos to launch a project called Somos Vecinos — We Are Neighbors — to facilitate dialogue between acequia associations, pueblos and environmentalists.
That sort of collaboration brought about the unlikely alliance of sportsmen, businesses, governments and environmentalists in the Coalition for Valle Vidal in 2003.
Amigos Bravos launched the coalition when word got out that the Forest Service intended to approve natural gas exploration inside the Carson National Forest’s Valle Vidal, known for its alpine meadows and pristine creeks.
The campaign to protect the area relied on traditional strategies such as information tables in front of area stores and flooding the Forest Service with more than 60,000 letters. The coalition also loaded media and policymakers onto airplanes for a birds-eye look at the Valle Vidal. “There was a lot of legwork on the ground getting that done,” said Rachel Conn, an Amigos Bravos policy analyst. The initiative brought success in just three years. Soon after Democrats seized control of Congress in the 2006 midterm election, Republican Sen. Pete Domenici announced his support for legislation to put the area permanently off limits to extractive industries. Domenici’s support ensured the bill’s eventual passage.
Down river
Anderson, the Taos pediatrician, credits Amigos Bravos with being the first in New Mexico to draw attention to the state’s waters.
“I think as public awareness gets raised, big corporations have a hard time just doing what they want,” Anderson said.
While Amigos Bravos was the first statewide group in New Mexico with a mission centered around river and watershed protection, numerous other local groups have sprung up in its wake. Amigos Bravos also has an office in Albuquerque with programs that include water monitoring and helping to re-establish historic acequia associations.
Anderson says the success is due largely to Shields’ desire to hold Amigos Bravos to a clear, precise focus that steers clear of political mine fields, such as whether Los Alamos National Laboratory should manufacture plutonium bomb parts.
The group planned to announce its next big initiative — a drive for a constitutional amendment — during an anniversary party at a Taos gallery Saturday.
A major shortcoming of the environmental laws passed in the 1960s and ’70s, Shields said, is that they’re focused on specific issues, such as air and water, while overlooking more complicated systems of pollution that can make residents ill.
“People are getting sick despite all these regulations, despite all the great laws,” he added.
Shields said a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a clean and healthy environment would allow citizens to take polluters to court instead of waiting for regulators to step in.
Similar amendments have been adopted in a handful of other states including Montana, Shields said. While it could take several years just to get the amendment campaign off the ground, Shields says it will eventually act as a litmus test to determine whether state lawmakers stand for polluters or the public.
Amigos Bravos this year also joined in a citizen lawsuit against LANL for allegedly failing to prevent Cold Warera contamination from washing into the Rio Grande. The suit came two years after the state issued a do-not-eat advisory for fish in parts of the river because of industrial pollutants.
News like that, as well as recent regulatory rollbacks under the Bush administration, can make it seem to Amigos Bravos staffers like they’re always swimming upstream.
But along the muddy banks of the Rio Grande where Amigos Bravos’ feisty friends first came together, the group sees reason to hope. This fall, Amigos Bravos and other partners plan to reintroduce the river otter to New Mexico after a 55-year absence.
