EDITORIALS.(Evening)

Otero Mesa deserves second look by BLM

Westerners no longer regard desert moonscapes as wastelands they can improve only with bulldozers, drilling rigs and irrigation.

They've come to accept, in growing numbers, that the sparse, scraggly ecology has a value in and for itself. Unfortunately, the federal bureaucracy doesn't count itself among those numbers at least not in the case of New Mexico's Otero Mesa, which is owned and managed mostly by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The feds are preparing to open this largest remaining untrammeled, contiguous expanse of Chihuahuan Desert grasslands in the United States to oil and gas development.

Gov. …