By Cecilia Rosacker, RGALT Executive Director
I don’t know about you, but I have been at a loss for words. Each day we are bombarded with “breaking news” one after another, I’m left feeling overwhelmed with many emotions – anxiety, frustration, anger, fear, and grief.
When the federal funding freeze was announced, we felt paralyzed. How will we move forward with achieving our mission? Our mission to protect land and water, depends on federal funding programs. Over ninety percent of our conservation easements have been accomplished through either the USFWS North American Wetlands Conservation Act Standard grant or the NRCS Easement programs. While many land trusts serve a demographic of landowners who are in a financial position to donate an easement, RGALT has focused on serving the historic, agricultural landowners, many of whom have had their land in their families for generations. They are land rich and cash poor and without these federal funding programs, they cannot afford to protect their land and water.
In 2024 RGALT was awarded an NRCS-Equity in Conservation Opportunity grant. Following the funding freeze, the program page disappeared along with numerous government pages with DEI in the title. This award provides organizational capacity funding for RGALT to provide technical assistance to landowners interested in accessing NRCS programs. Our January grant invoice was recently paid; however, the grant administrator is not certain if the award agreement will continue for the entire term. RGALT also submitted several NRCS-Agricultural Land Easement applications to protect farmland and appurtenant water rights. Some of the applications were for easements supported through the IRA funds. The Trump administration is not allowing any IRA agreements.
For decades RGALT has successfully established public and private partnerships, working closely with diverse partners to accomplish landscape conservation in NM’s Middle Rio Grande. The success of our work has depended on federal partners such as NRCS and USFWS. We are currently working on federally funded projects and each time we don’t receive an immediate response to our emails, we fear the people we work with have been fired. We fear the long-term impact of losing these people, the relationships that will be broken, the transfer of knowledge lost, and the huge amount of work and the time it will take in the future to rebuild all we’ve established. Building trust and relationships, community knowledge takes years to establish in order to get the workload back up, much less continue projects underway.
The last few months there have been numerous “emergency” webinars as organizations face the nation’s state of chaos and uncertainty. Rapid fire changes imposed by the government leave organizations faced with a plethora of new challenges. We are all stunned and trying to find a path forward for continuing our work to serve the needs of our communities. Recently I participated in a Land Trust Alliance webinar to discuss the impacts of the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze, federal employee firings, “woke” words, program uncertainty and the impacts it will have on conservation, communication, fund raising and organizational sustainability.
We discussed the challenge of conducting outreach in an atmosphere of political opposition, something RGALT has always navigated in our efforts to serve diverse communities. We’ve accomplished our work by listening and identifying our common ground. As divided as our country seems right now, we all still have a lot of common ground. We all cherish our land and water, not only do they nourish our bodies, but they are what keeps us grounded and connected to nature and wildlife, our beautiful, vast landscape and one another. These connections feed our spirit and give us hope for the future. The work we do to protect land and water has never been more critical. RGALT’s conservation easement work is forever, making our work to protect land and water even more important for all of us – people, wildlife and future generations.
A few years back we held a barn dance hosted by a Socorro farmer. We had a diverse group of attendees, including local farmers, agency and foundation partners, conservationists, politicians, children, grandparents, and even a few dogs. Following the event, a few people contacted me to ask about the Trump flag hanging in the barn. My response was, “Isn’t that beautiful that we can all come together – a diverse community of people – to celebrate our common ground?” Love of our land and our water has no political boundaries, it is something we all share. We ended the barn dance event with the song – “May the Circle Be Unbroken”. Everyone – young and old, even some in wheelchairs gathered in a circle, holding hands and dancing as one.
May we gather as a community to protect our land, our water, and the people that make up New Mexico’s diverse beauty that we all love and cherish. May we remain as one nation- the circle unbroken – in these chaotic, confusing, and trying times.