Drilling Jeopardizes Potential Wilderness Areas
The federal government is issuing oil and gas leases at a reckless pace, jeopardizing vast stretches of the mountains, deserts, streams, and forests owned by the American people. At particular risk are landscapes in Alaska and five Rocky Mountain States.
“This aggressive effort to open more environmentally sensitive lands to drilling is an unnecessary sacrifice,” says Ann Morgan, who directs our Public Lands Campaign. The damage caused by this unbalanced policy was documented last year by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s increased permitting “has lessened BLM's ability to meet its environmental protection responsibilities.” Other reviews show consistent failures to protect wildlife and fisheries and to control air and water pollution.
 To make more Americans aware of what is happening to their land, The Wilderness Society issued a report, “Too Wild to Drill,” in October. It identified 17 places, all with wilderness qualities, that the Bush administration wants to develop. “There are places where it is appropriate to drill, if done at the right pace and with appropriate practices,” says Morgan. “But the areas identified in our report are high-profile examples of treasured public lands that should not be developed.”
As it is, only 12 percent of federal natural gas resources in the Rocky Mountain States are off-limits to leasing. On Alaska’s North Slope, home to the Arctic Refuge and Teshekpuk Lake, nearly nine million acres of public land and coastal waters have been leased.
Yet the industry, with more than 74,000 oil and gas wells already in operation on the public lands, is pushing hard to lease in those few remaining areas. In Utah, the BLM has tried to lease on the perimeter of both Dinosaur National Monument and Arches National Park. The agency also is permitting the industry to broaden its assault on Nine Mile Canyon, home to one of the nation’s most significant collections of Native American petroglyphs. The Bush administration has been so eager to facilitate drilling that the industry cannot keep up. In 2004, the BLM issued 6,130 drilling permits nationwide, but industry drilled fewer than half of them.
“Full-field oil and gas development degrades the environment with hundreds of miles of pipelines and roads, production facilities, staging areas, and drill pads,” notes Dave Alberswerth, a senior policy analyst for The Wilderness Society who spent seven years at the U.S. Interior Department dealing with energy and other issues. A recent Wilderness Society analysis, released with the report, documented that the administration plans more than 110,000 new wells in Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana, which would more than double the current number of producing wells on public lands in the Rockies.
Four sites in Wyoming and five in Colorado, including Vermillion Basin and Roan Plateau, were among the 17 places described in “Too Wild to Drill.” The other eight were in California, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Utah. Read the full report.
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