Under siege: the wonders of the West

Under siege: the wonders of the West

George Bush's environmental record is the worst in recent US history. Now the red-rock canyons of Utah, some of America's most treasured landscapes, are in danger. Andrew Gumbel reports from Moab


19 October 2004

You couldn?t ask for a more scenic oil well than the Long Canyon facility in southeastern Utah. In fact, if it weren?t for the stench of petroleum fumes, and the constant up-and-down whir of the pump jack, you might be tempted to disregard it altogether in favour of the breathtaking vista it affords across a layered red rock landscape out towards the ancient geological splendours of Arches National Park.

As it is, it sits like a great sore on the landscape, bleeding toxins into the ground, slowly killing off the ancient junipers that provide ground cover on the otherwise unforgiving desert terrain, and blowing ozone-depleting gas byproducts directly into the air.

An open sludge pit sits exposed to the elements right next to the pump jack. There used to be a second sludge pit, but it was buried in gravel a couple of years ago after journalists in Utah to cover the Salt Lake City Olympics started coming round and asking awkward questions. The poisonous chemicals still remain active underground, and one can see where they have travelled through the soil by the pattern of dead foliage extending downhill.

What could possibly justify such a blight on some of the most stunning scenery in the American West? A plentiful oil supply would certainly be one argument, but the scandal of Long Canyon, and dozens of wells like it, is that it is pitifully unproductive. Although its owners have sometimes claimed that it is the top oil-producing oil well in Utah, official statistics compiled by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmentalist group, show that it ranks number 209 in the state for oil production, and number 275 for oil and gas production combined. When one considers that Utah as a whole accounts for just 1 per cent of oil and gas production in the United States, one has to wonder what exactly it is doing there.

Government agencies insist the oil wells are temporary, and that once the ground has been fully exploited the terrain will go back to its previous pristine state. But conservationists point out that, in a desert environment, the roadways and dead trees and toxic leaching leave scars on the landscape that will persist for generations.

?You?re talking about a permanent destruction of the very places that make Utah and the West so special,? said Heidi McIntosh of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA. ?It?s really unconscionable.?

It is also, as the Bush administration envisions it, the wave of the future. The federal government?s Bureau of Land Management has been issuing oil and gas leases in western states at a record pace in the past three and a half years. It is not only their number that has gone up ? a 70 per cent increase since the Clinton administration. It is also the sensitivity of their locations.

In Utah, a court settlement reached last year between the state government and the Bush administration?s Department of the Interior lifted all restrictions on almost 3 million acres of wild red rock landscape that had previously been considered for wilderness protection. Much of the land is either in the immediate vicinity of Arches and the adjacent Canyonlands National Park, or else a little further north along the Book Cliffs mesa, the longest escarpment in the United States.

The upshot is that it is now open season for oil and gas leasing. At the last auction in September, 220 new parcels of land were handed over to energy companies, of which 28 were in areas previously considered for wilderness protection. Some of the proposed new drilling sites are downright shocking -- areas clearly visible from some of the most celebrated monuments in Arches and Canyonlands, for example, or a glorious stretch of the Green River in Upper Desolation Canyon, beneath the Book Cliffs, which has been popular for decades with wild river explorers.

A little to the south of Long Canyon is a popular tourist lookout called Dead Horse Point. The view takes in a gooseneck-shaped bend in the Colorado River and a breathtaking series of stratified mesas climbing thousands of feet over a vast horizon. Following the latest leases, one broad expanse of rock in full view of Dead Horse Point could soon be covered in oil wells.

It's the same story at one of the most celebrated, and most visited, monuments in Arches. Every day, hundreds of tourists make the stunning mile and half climb to Delicate Arch ? a fragile ring of sandstone standing on a slick scooped out rocky hollow, with extraordinary views of the snow-capped La Sal mountains. Directly in the line of this view is the Dome Plateau above the Colorado river. It, too, is line for development by the oil and gas industry.

?They?re taking away the last few truly remote and rugged places left in this country, and for what? The oil that?s here is a drop in the bucket,? said Liz Thomas, a staff attorney for SUWA based in Moab, the main tourist centre in southeastern Utah. She explained that the very act of violating a potential wilderness area makes it ineligible for future consideration for protection -- a bureaucratic Catch-22 that means any act of sabotage is, in all probability, permanent. ?We?re in the desert and things don?t grow very fast,? she added. ?The roads they build for seismic testing stay permanently, and they go through the middle of nowhere. We?ve seen several dry holes in this part of Utah in the last couple of years, but nobody comes to clean up the sludge pits and toxic chemicals. This administration is clearly anti-wilderness.?

The economics of the issue are so bizarre as to seem downright insane. Geologists know where the biggest oil repositories are in Utah, and they are not in the Moab area. They are around the well-exploited towns of Price, in the central part of the state, and Vernal, in the northeast. Even there, though, the quantities are less than overwhelming. According to estimates made by the US Geological Survey, a government agency, the amount of untapped, technologically recoverable oil and gas in the whole of Utah is probably enough to supply US oil needs for about three weeks and gas needs for about eight and a half months. Less than 10 per cent of the total is in areas once considered for wilderness protection ? enough to feed US oil demand for about four days.

No big oil company has expressed the remotest interest in setting up in business in this part of Utah. Rather, it is small companies who come hoping to find just one or two decent pockets of oil they can exploit before bailing out again. According to industry experts, small energy companies like to acquire leaseholds, whether or not they are likely sources of oil and gas, because they can use them to pad out their portfolios and attract investment capital.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the business model George W Bush followed when he went into the oil business in west Texas in the 1970s and 1980s ? a career that brought him lots of capital thanks to his family connections but almost no earnings. The big difference is that the Permian Basin of west Texas is an flat, arid place of little interest to geologists or nature-lovers. Southeastern Utah, on the other hand, is one of the great natural wonders of the world ? something the Bush administration either does not know or does not care about.

Internal government memos seen by the Los Angeles Times show that officials have pressured the Bureau of Land Management to accede to industry ambitions and have even chastised BLM employees seen as moving too slowly. In the corridors of BLM headquarters in Washington, the western states of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada are now nicknamed ?the OPEC states?.

The kowtowing to energy interests extends to state and local government in Utah itself, where elected officials are apparently seduced by the notion of striking it rich, irrespective of the natural landscapes that might get ruined in the process or the damage done to the more obviously lucrative tourism and outdoor recreation industries. ?It?s a lust, an addiction. These guys are hooked on oil,? said Peter Metcalf, chief executive of the giant outdoor equipment company Black Diamond who has thrown himself into the fight to save the wild landscapes of Utah.

Incredibly, as Mr Metcalf points out, 80 per cent of the economy in the Moab area is dependent on outdoor activities and tourism, and yet 80 per cent of the government resources go into propping up the energy industry, which yields next to nothing. Grand County, which includes Moab, justifies its support of oil and gas extraction with the promise of fat royalties for years to come. No doubt they have studied places like Beverly Hills, in the heart of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where the city has earned tens of millions of dollars from a much-contested oil facility on the grounds of the high school. In the absence of significant oil deposits, however the royalties in Grand County are only laughable. According to Liz Thomas, they earn the county around $50 per well per year.

The Bush administration?s record on the environment is widely acknowledged as the worst in recent US history. The White House has specialised in Orwellian initiatives like Clear Skies, which despite the name greatly reduces the burden on industry to cut down on air pollution, or Healthy Forests, which invites loggers to cut down previously protected old-growth trees in exchange for help clearing brush from forest floors near populated areas. An independent study released this month showed that the number of polluters taken to court by the government?s Environmental Protection Agency dropped 75 per cent between the last three years of the Clinton administration and the first three years of Bush.

Although oil and gas leases are far from new to Utah ? they have been granted since the 1940s ? they have become a far greater priority since the Bush administration took office. As early as 2001, the federal government authorised more than 300 miles of new roads for seismic testing of potential new oil reserves. Groups like SUWA organised protests as giant trucks started bulldozing their way across the wilderness, but were forced to back down after the 11 September attacks because anti-government dissent was no longer welcomed.

The Republican-dominated Utah government had been pushing for years to ease up the wilderness protection rules and allow more energy prospecting, and its wishes were granted in the legal settlement reached in April 2003 between then-Governor Mike Leavitt and Gale Norton, the Secretary of the Interior who is a noted apologist for mining and energy interests. SUWA had successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to consider up to six million acres of new wilderness areas in Utah; the Norton-Leavitt deal took roughly half of them off the table immediately, and offered no guarantees about the rest.

In what many environmentalists see as a sinister move, Governor Leavitt was appointed the new administrator of the EPA just a few months later. More recently, Secretary Norton engaged in what her critics saw as her own Orwellian manoeuvre. In September she signed a protective order banning hard rock mining along almost 200 miles of the Green, Colorado and Dolores rivers, proclaiming that this would ?ensure that the scenic and natural character of these special places is sustained for years to come?. That same week, however, the new oil and gas leases were granted, including parcels along the Desolation Canyon stretch of the Green River. The miners were ordered out only to let the oilmen move in.

It is hard to visit the Moab area without feeling that nature is under heavy siege. The approach road to the town on Route 91 was recently widened from two lanes to four (an idea originating with Governor Leavitt), and to achieve it the ancient walls of a red rock canyon were simply blasted away with jackhammers. Along the same road, an old uranium tailings facility sits ominously, awaiting a federal clean-up that has been years in the making.

Utah is the only western state authorising rock-crawlers and other off-road vehicles that do untold damage to the landscape. (Enthusiasts come in great abundance, because they are not allowed to play with their toys in nearby Colorado.) The Grand County commissioners, meanwhile, have approved project after project making a mockery of the natural landscape. Along Highway 91 is a failed restaurant development that has left an unused gondola-style cable car in plain view. The commissioners also have plans to build condominiums and a resort complex at Fisher Towers, a hitherto unspoiled rock monument just off Route 128, which skirts the Colorado River beneath the Dome Plateau.

The voices protesting against such developments are passionate, but few in number. (Grand County?s total population is just 7000.) Among the most powerful opponents are owners of the big outdoors and recreation-related companies like Black Diamond. Mr Metcalf recently threatened to take his industry?s annual trade show away from Salt Lake City if steps were not taken to mitigate the oil and gas lease mania. The trade show stayed after he received assurances that he could work quietly behind the scenes with the Bureau of Land Management to arrange land swaps and other deals to protect at least some of the wilderness areas.

The BLM, meanwhile, finds itself in an impossible position. Many career employees have quit in disgust at the Bush administration?s policies, while others soldier on, calculating that matters can only get worse if the industrial apologists are allowed to take over entirely. ?Our very real concern to protect the scenery. We love it too,? insisted Maggie Wyatt, the BLM?s field manager in Moab. ?Our critics may not like us, but they could do a lot worse than us.?

Ms Wyatt argued that many of the oil and gas leases won?t lead to drilling, so they are not as sinister as they seem. One industry expert, who did not wish to be identified, offered a gloomier assessment, however, saying that companies who have secured the right to drill almost always end up doing so once conditions are right because of the rewards they stand to gain if they strike it lucky. That?s not good news for admirers of Utah?s natural landscape. And with world oil prices at $50 a barrel, the energy companies might well feel there is no time like the present.