By Donna Kemp Spangler
Deseret News staff writer April 21, 2002
Just four days before Earth Day 2002, the U.S. Senate put its green foot forward by killing a White House proposal to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Bush administration has responded by announcing it will instead focus on oil exploration in the Rocky Mountain states, including Utah.
And that has Utah environmentalists seeing red.
"Bush is a dark cloud," said Denise Boggs, executive director of Utah Environmental Congress. "We're simply going to have to fight vigorously to protect these pristine places."
Environmentalists, who find little to celebrate about Monday's 32nd annual Earth Day, were not all that surprised by Bush's new tack, but they still feel like they have been kicked in the gut.
"A lot of us throughout the Rocky Mountain states have felt that was the target all along," said Heidi McIntosh, issues coordinator for Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "They were just greasing the skids of the oil companies to come out West and drill for oil and gas."
Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clarke, a Utahn, has announced that the BLM will accelerate develop of known oil and gas reserves in the West.
Environmentalists wonder how much faster can it go. Last year, Utah saw a record number of oil and gas leases with 880 approvals — four times as many as in 1990. And it's not looking like it will slow down anytime soon.
In a Jan. 4 memo from the BLM's Washington headquarters to the bureau's land managers in Utah, the state BLM office was told that "when an application for permission to drill comes in the door," that work should be "their No. 1 priority."
Bush cites an energy crisis to promote oil and gas drilling in wilderness areas.
But that has critics puzzled.
"This aggressive move to drill our public lands everywhere for a little bit of oil here and there isn't really going to make much difference in terms of our energy independence," said Lawson LeGate, southwest region director of the Sierra Club.
What it will do is forever scar the landscape, environmentalists argue.
"Even though the desert looks like a harsh environment, it's actually fragile," McIntosh said. "The one thing that knits the ecology together is the soil. And once crushed under the wheel of thumper trucks it takes 300 years for the crusts to regenerate."
Is the future filled with seismic-testing thumper trucks creeping across the red-rock desert of southern Utah?
"I think you don't have to have much of a crystal ball," McIntosh said. "Some nightmare scenarios have already come to play. We are seeing oil and gas exploration on the doorsteps of our national parks and proposed wilderness areas."
Environmentalists point to a controversial oil exploration project in Utah's Dome Plateau, which covers some 23,000 acres next to Arches National Park. Parts of the plateau have been proposed for wilderness designation. Yet the BLM approved seismic tests on the plateau.
Attempts to reach BLM officials for comment were unsuccessful.
While environmentalists will mourn on Earth Day, the BLM plans to mark the occasion in a more traditional fashion: Picking up trash along Fivemile Pass in western Utah County.
Environmentalists say not all hope is lost.
"Whenever public lands are under siege," she said, "people wake up and see what is at risk and become energized."
