Urge Your Elected Officials to Support Preservation of the Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape

The Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape is an interconnected living landscape that includes Chaco Canyon, which was designated as the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

The Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape has been sustained by Pueblo people for over a millennium, and it remains an ancestral homeland and place of ongoing cultural and ceremonial importance for multiple tribal nations.

The landscape holds remarkable examples of ceremonial buildings, distinctive great houses, and an elaborate network of engineered roads that link Chaco Canyon with outlying sites and reflect interconnected systems of migration, trade, ceremony, and governance that continue to shape Pueblo knowledge and identity today.

Enactment of legislation and the issuance of Public Land Order (PLO) No. 7923 in 2023 resulted from years of public engagement and advocacy and established a ban on new leasing for gas and mineral extraction outside the protected National Park Service unit boundaries of Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Unfortunately, in 2025 the Bureau of Land Management initiated a process to fully revoke PLO No. 7923.

Without this protection, lands outside the park boundaries could open to oil and gas development, risking irreversible damage to irreplaceable cultural sites and the broader landscape that gives them meaning.

The Greater Chaco cultural landscape was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list in 2011 and again in 2026 due to these significant ongoing threats.

Congress needs to hear from you. Please use this form to send a letter to your Members of Congress asking them to support the Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape.

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