For a Week’s Worth of Gas

Avid sportsman Stoney Burk of Friends of the Rocky Mountain Front—a coalition of hunters, anglers, ranchers, and business owners trying to control the gas rush across wild country in northwest Montana—told me this: "God knows how many deer and antelope drink from these toxic water pits and run off and die. Look at the network of roads that disturb habitat and break migratory patterns, and put that together with the potential to destroy the whole fish population; I consider the administration's behavior criminal.

"I'm angry about this," Burk continued. "The public is being cut out. I voted for Bush. Now I'm ashamed I did. They have betrayed the confidence of millions of people.... We're talking about an invasion of our last remaining wildlands, destruction of our last remaining fish and wildlife habitat. For what? At the very most a week's worth of gas."

"Are drastically altered and industrialized landscapes places we want to hunt and fish?" asks Trout Unlimited's David Stalling.

Field & Stream—one of the oldest, largest, and most conservative hook-and-bullet publications in the nation—used to devote oceans of ink to the alleged threats of "anti-hunters" and gun-control advocates. Now it warns its readers about the Bush administration's assault on fish and wildlife habitat. In the March 2004 issue, for example, Ted Kerasote blasted the administration for issuing gas-drilling permits before planning and public comment. "With deep ties to the oil and gas industry," wrote Kerasote, "Bush and Cheney have unleashed a national energy plan that has begun to destroy hunting and fishing on millions of federal acres throughout the West, setting back effective wildlife management for decades."

I saw what Kerasote is complaining about when, on my way to observe gas drilling in New Mexico last December, I stopped to check out the "gold medal" trout section of the Animas River, a stretch I had long wanted to fish. As I neared the bank I was clobbered by the stench of rotten eggs—hydrogen sulfide venting from gas wells. But rotten eggs is what you want to smell in gas fields. The human nose reacts differently to hydrogen sulfide in higher concentrations—so if you smell frying honey, hold your breath, hit the dirt, and crawl away fast or, with the next breath, you're dead.

In New Mexico's part of the San Juan Basin there are already 18,000 operating gas wells just on federal land. At pad after pad I found major violations—broken fencing around evaporation ponds, sediments bleeding into trout streams, inadequate or nonexistent replanting, junipers and pinyons burned during gas flaring and killed with coal dust. Because BLM lacks the staff for adequate enforcement, a local public interest outfit called the San Juan Citizens Alliance decided to produce a guide to help the public identify violations. BLM officials expressed grave reservations. Such information, they explained, might encourage hikers, anglers, hunters, birders, and the like to venture onto their land, where they might be exposed to deadly fumes leaking from all the gas wells.

Rancher Chris Velasquez of Blanco, New Mexico, showed me gas wells on his BLM grazing allotment, where pumps, extracting groundwater to aid gas flow, were leaking antifreeze. In this arid landscape, standing liquid is swilled by wildlife and livestock. Deer and small mammals travel a few hundred yards before they die, but cattle often don't even make it off the drill pad. Velasquez lost eight cows in seven days.

Tweeti Blancett of Aztec, New Mexico, loses cattle, too. "This whole county is a disaster area," she told me. "Our water is polluted, our air is polluted, our ground is polluted. They've ruined our ranch." Blancett, northern New Mexico's campaign coordinator for George W. Bush in the last election, isn't about to stump for him again. She used to fight with environmentalists. Now she speaks at Sierra Club meetings and has joined the San Juan Citizens Alliance.

What industry and the administration call "impediments" to energy extraction others call environmental regulations. For example, for almost two decades BLM's Pinedale field office has forbidden gas drilling during times of critical stress for big game, sage grouse, and raptors. Seeking relief, companies request "exceptions," and under the Bush administration they are rarely disappointed. During 2003 and up through June 29, 2004, the office acted on 120 requests for sage grouse exceptions, denying 8 and granting 112; it acted on 78 requests for mule deer, pronghorn, elk, and moose exceptions, denying 10 and granting 68; and it acted on 52 raptor requests, denying 5 and granting 47.

Pauline Schuette, one of three agency biologists who monitor the resource area's wildlife habitat, explained to me that only if a consulting biologist hired by a company finds no active leks (courtship-display areas) within a quarter mile of the drilling site are exceptions for sage grouse granted. Still, Schuette allowed that she was concerned about sage grouse. "There's not a lot of data collected about them," she declared. Even with limited data, BLM was aware—as it stated in its 1999 draft environmental impact statement for gas development on the anticline—that "of leks with at least one well within a 0.25-mile radius, four times as many are inactive than active."