April 2002 | News of the Earth
U.S. Public Lands are Open for (Oil) Business
by Dave Aftandilian
Several summers ago I visited Utah’s magnificent redrock wilderness, including Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. The colors were incredible — sandstone cliffs, spires, and arches in every shade of red, pink, brown, and cream, along with more vegetation than I ever expected. The sounds astounded me too, from the shushing of wind-blown sands to the liquid echoes from foot-taps on the stones beneath Double Arch.
Naturalist and writer Terry Tempest Williams had a very different experience when she recently visited redrock lands leased for oil and gas exploration and drilling by Eclipse Exploration of Denver, just outside these national parks. Hiking across a pristine country filled with sandstone formations, piñon and juniper forests, and fragile alkali desert, she encountered four huge trucks sent out to locate underground pockets of oil and natural gas. Writing in the New York Times, Williams described what she saw:
"Up close, the thumper trucks creeping across the desert, following a path of fluorescent pink ribbons, looked like gigantic insects, gnawing and clawing, articulating right and left as they balanced themselves across the rugged terrain. Fumes from hydraulic fluid stung our eyes, and the noise threatened to blow out human eardrums.... At the designated stops, each truck in the convoy lowered a steel plate onto the desert, clamped tight, applied some 64,000 pounds of pressure against the sand and then sent a jolt of seismic waves below to record density. The ground went into a seizure. Sand flew and smoke obscured the horizon where Skyline Arch and Sand Dune Arch — the Windows section of Arches National Park — stand. We were only four miles from Delicate Arch.... When the steel plate lifted, the once supple red sand had turned to concrete."
Not exactly the scene you’d expect to see just outside of two of our most popular national parks, is it? The energy plan that Bush’s cabinet put together with the advice of Enron, Shell Oil, Anadarko Petroleum, and other specialists in resource extraction — advice shared in a series of secret meetings, the details of which Vice-President Cheney has so far refused to release — called for expanding oil and gas exploration and drilling in wilderness areas; Gale Norton and the land management agencies she heads have been happy to oblige.
A January memo from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) supervisors instructed their field officers to tell staff in Utah "when an oil and gas lease parcel or when an application for permission to drill comes in the door, that this work is their number one priority." So, although people visiting a national park or wilderness area are warned not to go off already established trails to avoid damaging fragile desert soils, trucks are free to snake their way across thousands of acres, tearing new roads in roadless areas, and leaving ravaged vegetation and cemented soils in their wake. As U.S. Geological Survey soil science expert Jayne Belnap wrote to BLM officials last year, the damage caused by this heavy exploration equipment will take up to 250 years to heal, mainly because of its destruction of the "cryptobiotic crust" — a delicate layer of "hidden life" composed of cyanobacteria, blue-green algae, moss, fungi, and lichens that helps the dry desert soil hold moisture and nutrients, making it easier for plants to grow and also preventing erosion.
In addition to this biological devastation, the oil and gas drilling would have an impact on everyone who visits the nearby national parks, according to the chief of resource management for Canyonlands National Park, Bruce Rodgers, because "you would be able to see these roads, platforms, and pumps from the park." Bill Stringer, deputy field manager of the BLM office in Utah, has a ready answer: "You won’t see it looking like West Texas with oil pumps everywhere. The drilling will be spread out, and in some cases we’ll get them to turn the drills sideways so you can barely see them from the parks." This sounds similar to a practice used by logging companies, which often leave a "beauty strip" of trees alongside roads or watercourses to hide the clearcuts from public view.
How do George W. Bush, Norton, and the oil and gas industry think they can get away with raping public lands so close to national parks? According to Bush, drilling in public lands west of the Rocky Mountains — as well as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and areas off the shores of California, Florida, and other states — is crucial to our nation’s security; it’s the best way to free us from our dangerous dependence on Mideast oil supplies.
While it certainly makes sense to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, there are quicker, more efficient, and less dangerous ways to do it besides digging up our nation’s few remaining wilderness areas. Let’s consider the case of Bush’s proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Union of Concerned Scientists estimate that at peak production, the refuge would only produce about 500,000 barrels per day. That’s just a little over 2.5 percent of the 19.45 million barrels Americans use every day, and it would not hit the market for at least a decade, even if drilling started tomorrow. Also, oil transported from Alaska to refineries in the continental United States would have to travel the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, an above-ground (difficult to repair in winter) 800-mile-long target that the U.S. Army, the U.S. General Accounting Office, and the Senate Judiciary Committee have found indefensible. Last October a drunk shut the pipeline down for sixty hours with a single rifle shot.
According to Amory B. and L. Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge "would undercut the anti-terrorist goals of the Defense Authorization Act. It would make the pipeline the fattest energy-terrorist target in the country." Instead they recommend raising the fuel efficiency of America’s vehicles by just three miles per gallon, which would eliminate the need for Gulf oil, without drilling in pristine wilderness. A study released last October by the World Wildlife Fund showed that implementing energy-efficiency policies and developing renewable energy resources would create thousands of jobs (750,000 by 2010; 1.3 million by 2020) and increase the U.S. gross domestic product (by $23 billion in 2010; $43.9 billion in 2020).
So here’s the choice: destroy our wilderness areas to drill for oil and gas — or make our homes, cars, and businesses more energy efficient now, and work on developing renewable power sources over the long term. We know the path Bush and his cronies would like to take. It’s time for us to demand they choose a better one. Another way to protect the wild lands of Utah would be to pass America’s Redrock Wilderness Act, a federal bill that would permanently protect the redrock lands by designating them as wilderness.
Illinois Wetland Protection Act
In January 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court significantly weakened federal protections for wetlands under the Clean Water Act. The court ruled that state and local governments had the authority to regulate isolated wetlands (ponds as opposed to marshes, which are called contiguous wetlands). Because Illinois has no statewide law in place to protect isolated wetlands, the court’s decision made a third of Illinois vulnerable to draining, filling, or other destructive activities, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Between the 1780s and the 1980s (the last time a statewide survey was conducted), Illinois lost nearly seven million acres of wetlands; more than 85 percent of the wetlands that were here in the 1780s are gone. Wetlands protect us from floods by absorbing heavy rain and runoff. They filter pollutants out of our water supplies; help maintain healthy water levels in our rivers, streams, and underground aquifers; and provide public recreational opportunities ranging from fishing to bird watching. They also serve as critical habitat for many types of animals and plants; fifty-seven rare animals and eleven rare plants in Illinois depend on wetlands for at least part of their lives, including the Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid and the Indiana Bat. On the basis of these and other services they provide free of charge, the Clean Water Network estimates that Illinois’ remaining wetlands are worth at least $7.5 billion.
To protect these wetlands, the Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Openlands Project, and others have banded together to support a statewide Illinois Wetland Protection Act. Introduced in the Illinois House as HB 6013, this bill would require anyone intending to drain, fill, or otherwise damage an isolated wetland to apply for a state permit. If the applicant proved that there were no reasonable alternatives to destroying the wetland, and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency determined that the proposed activity would not violate Illinois’ water-quality standards, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources would issue a permit. Exemptions that used to be provided under the federal law would be continued in HB 6013; any activities for which a federal wetland permit had already been issued would also be exempt. Finally, counties with their own wetland permit programs could choose that the state delegate wetland permit authority to them (provided their wetland permit programs were at least as protective as the state’s).
If you want to support the Illinois Wetland Protection Act, ask your representative and senator to sign on as cosponsors to HB 6013, and to vote in favor of the act. To find out who your state representatives are, and how to contact them, click here.
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