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| A thumper truck grinds its way through sensitive desert soils. |
What you see on this sheet of paper is, quite simply, a tragedy in the making. In February 2002, while the world had its eyes fixed on Utah as the host of the Winter Olympics, the Bush Administration authorized an energy firm to begin exploration for oil in the proposed Dome Plateau Wilderness immediately adjacent to Arches National Park in southeastern Utah. The work was approved rapidly without adequate environmental review. So far, the damage from this project has been done just outside the proposed wilderness. As of late February, the project has been halted pending further review, but could start up again and enter the proposed wilderness if environmental organizations that have filed an appeal are unsuccessful.
Bear in mind, the damage depicted in these photos comes from merely looking for oil. In a recent operation near Arches National Park, workers drove four 50,000-ton "thumper" trucks in a roughly straight line across the pristine landscape. Now and then the trucks send a seismic wave through the rock strata in the search for pockets of oil. Noted Utah author Terry Tempest Williams described the damage in a commentary in the New York Times:
...a 15-foot swath of beaten down and broken junipers, blackbrush, rabbitbrush, squawbush and cliffrose. The delicate desert crust that holds the red sand in place from wind and erosion, known as cryptobiotic soil, was obliterated. Replacing it, in effect, was a newly crushed road. In January Jayne Belnap, a United States Geological Survey expert on soil damage, submitted an official comment letter to the Bureau of Land Management about the fragility of desert crusts, warning it could take from 50 to 300 years for the dry soil to recover from the damage incurred by heavy equipment.
Federal officials could have required the oil explorers to use old seismic lines near the new work. Instead, they merely decided to approve the project just as the energy company requested.
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| Ruts several inches deep left by thumper trucks. BLM officials are supposed to halt operations when the ground is this soft. |
Still more extensive damage will result if oil wells are actually developed. And, in the case of the Dome Plateau, such oil development would be visible from Delicate Arch, through which the Olympic flame passed when it entered Utah just prior to the opening of the Winter Games.
Southeastern Utah has experienced frenzied oil exploration before. Miles of seismic lines were scraped across the landscape and numerous oil wells were drilled. In the end, only a handful of wells produced oil in commercial quantities.
This destruction is the result of a deliberate policy in favor of aggressive energy development on America's public lands. The national BLM Office issued a memo to the Utah State BLM Office stating, "Utah needs to ensure that existing staff understand that when an oil and gas-lease parcel or when [a drilling permit] comes in the door that this is their No. 1 priority." In essence, the BLM is saying that there is a front seat, and there is a back seat. In the front is the oil industry. In the back are the public land values that Americans hold dear: wildlife, clean water, unmarred scenic vistas stretching to the horizon, and so much more.
Proponents of the "drill everywhere" policy cite the nation's dependence on foreign oil. The United States consumes about 25% of the world's petroleum resources. The problem is the U.S. has only 3% of the planet's known oil reserves. We could drill every square inch of every national park, existing and proposed wilderness, wildlife refuge and scenic shoreline, and it would hardly make a dent in the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
There are alternatives to putting at risk the special places of our public lands.
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| This could be the view from Arches National Park if oil development goes forward in the proposed Dome Plateau Wilderness. |
Care about America? Then let's care for America by protecting the wildlands that shaped our nation's character ... for our families, for our future.