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It's not hard to find the probable source. Inside a chain-link-fenced enclosure next to the school's tennis court, the pipes, valves and other equipment of a BP America natural gas well jut from the ground. Everything's painted gold and purple, the school colors, with "Wolverine Pride" emblazoned on a metal box. Like many of the 40,000 or so oil and gas wells here in the San Juan Basin, this one extracts natural gas from the Fruitland coal formation. The natural gas, which is largely methane, is gathered here, processed and piped to market. Or at least most of it is: Some of that methane is apparently leaking from the wellhead and drifting into the atmosphere, contributing in its own small way to the notorious Four Corners Methane Hot Spot, a highly concentrated plume of greenhouse gas that hovers over the region. When scientists first noticed the hot spot in satellite imagery captured nearly a decade ago, it was so intense that they thought their equipment was malfunctioning. But more satellite imagery from 2009 confirmed the anomaly's existence, and in 2014 a team of scientists published a paper on it that garnered widespread media attention.
The obvious suspect behind the hot spot is the vast oil and natural gas industry infrastructure, which is woven like rebar into the landscape here, and burps and leaks methane and other hydrocarbons from valves, pipes, compressors and newly fractured wells. Other known contributors include an underground coal mine, from which methane is vented for safety, and a few landfills and two coal-burning power plants, which emit relatively small amounts of the gas.
But there's a 155,000-ton gap between the emissions these facilities collectively report to the Environmental Protection Agency's greenhouse gas inventory, and the amount of emissions the scientists estimate is needed to produce a plume as concentrated as the hot spot. Petron, along with a swarm of scientists under the aegis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and NOAA, descended on the region this spring, using planes, satellites and automobiles to try to account for all that unaccounted-for methane. (See sidebar)
What they find could have wide-ranging implications. Natural gas emits about half the carbon per unit of energy generated as coal, and about a third less than oil, making it a good "bridge" fuel for transitioning from a coal-heavy energy system to one that's carbon-free. Yet the main ingredient of natural gas — methane — has 30 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide. If the scientists were to find that the natural gas industry is behind the extra emissions, it could further cloud the fuel's current climate-friendly status. It might also indicate how hard the region's oil and gas industry will be hit by regulations from the Obama administration as part of its strategy for reducing emissions from the industry by 45 percent.
The industry, however, blames the gap on another methane-spewing villain that lurks here in the San Juan Basin and in other coal- and natural gas-rich areas: geologic seeps, where methane leaks unbidden from the earth, as it has done for millennia. Environmentalists scoff at the theory, but researchers aren't discounting it. "The seeps are definitely a piece of the puzzle," says Devin Hencmann, with LT Environmental, the company that has monitored the seeps in the San Juan Basin for the last decade.
But just how big a piece? And where exactly does it fit into the hot spot puzzle?
A few hours before her stop at the school-grounds gas well in Bayfield, Petron and her research assistant, Eryka Thorley, who looks like she just stepped out of a Patagonia catalog in her skinny jeans, fleece jacket and white-rimmed shades, show a couple of journalists around what I've privately christened the Methane Mystery Mobile. On a cool, moist late April morning, it sits in the parking lot for a popular trailhead known as Carbon Junction. The Animas River — not yet polluted by the mining spill that will make national headlines later in August — runs by below, and just beyond it looms Carbon "Moving" Mountain, so nicknamed because, back in the 1930s, it grew violent for several months, shifting and sloughing and sliding for reasons unknown.
A computer monitor mounted on the van's dash, between the driver and passenger seats, reveals current concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide in the air around the vehicle. In the back are more instruments, along with burly black plastic boxes containing glass cylinders for capturing air samples at specific sites. Petron initially studied mathematics in France, but eventually switched her focus to the atmosphere. "The beauty of the air and the abstractness of it reminded me of math," she says. That very abstractness, unfortunately, makes it difficult for many of us to really grasp concepts such as climate change or greenhouse gases.
In pre-industrial times, the background level of methane on Earth was about 750 parts per billion. But beginning in about 1850, that level started shooting up, and now it's approximately 1,800 parts per billion, or 1.8 parts per million. Here in the parking lot, the methane line jumps up and down with shifts in the wind, but remains higher than background levels, occasionally rising to 5 or more parts per million.
I look around me. The nearest natural gas or oil well is at least a mile away. There are no coal mines nearby, no feedlots, wetlands, rice paddies, landfills or any of the other common sources of methane emissions. But then again, there doesn't need to be. The parking lot sits in a notch, formed by the Animas River, in the Hogback Monocline. If you think of the San Juan Basin as a lopsided bowl-shaped sandstone-, shale- and coal-filled layer cake, then the steep ridge of the monocline is the cake's outer rim, where the layers are exposed. Petron leads us up a little canyon and points to the critical layer of the cake, an outcrop of the Fruitland coal formation. It's the souvenir of a sultry swamp that lurked along the shores of a receding sea some 65 million years ago, and it's brimming with methane, some of which is leaking out here. Despite its apparent enthusiasm to escape the earth, this methane was economically infeasible to extract until, in the 1980s, government-subsidized technology and tax credits combined to make it a moneymaker. That launched a boom that would make the San Juan Basin the nation's number one coalbed methane producer.
In 1993, at the tail end of the first major wave of drilling, a resident of the Pine River Ranch subdivision north of Bayfield complained to the Colorado oil and gas regulators that, after 10 years of providing clean water, his well had begun spewing methane. Similar phenomena had been reported in other parts of the basin, but those had been traced back to particular wells that had bad casing, which allowed methane to migrate from the gas well into the aquifer. This one was different. Investigators couldn't find any leaky or badly cased gas wells nearby, but they noticed that the house and well were located along a low point in the Hogback Monocline, where the Pine River had eroded through it, right on top of the Fruitland outcrop. The methane, it appeared, was coming straight out of the coalbed.
Such natural seeps had been witnessed along the outcrop for a century or more, but it gradually became clear that they were getting more intense. Trees and bushes began dying off in places where they had long thrived, like Carbon Junction. Near Valencia Canyon Gap on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, where the glowing embers of an underground coal fire had become visible, methane emanated with enough pressure to fling grains of sand several inches into the air, and hydrogen sulfide levels, at a hazardous 200 parts per million, forced the closure of a nearby road.
Things only got worse. Within a year after the changes were observed, "a half-mile long by 50- to 75-foot wide swath of previously healthy piñon and juniper trees, sagebrush and saltbrush stood dead as stark testimony to recent environmental changes," lamented a comprehensive 1999 Bureau of Land Management report on the issue. Methane was seeping from some spots at 1 million parts per million, or 100 percent concentration. Back at the subdivision, methane invaded more wells and pooled in the crawlspaces of homes. Breathing methane poses no immediate threat to human health, but potential explosions were a serious concern. At the time, the methane's effects on the climate remained in the background.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission formed an investigative team, and in 1995, it concluded that the most likely explanation for the sudden increase in methane seep at the subdivision — and by extension the cause for the apparent exacerbation at the other "natural" seeps — was the vast "dewatering" of the coal seam. Unlike "conventional" reservoirs of oil and gas found in sandstone or shales, coalbed methane is adsorbed, or bonded, to tiny pores in the coal by water pressure. In order to "liberate" the methane, drillers must first pump out the water from the coal seam. By 1999, just a decade or so after the boom had begun, coalbed methane wells on the Colorado side of the San Juan Basin alone had produced over 10 billion gallons of water, freeing the methane to migrate up the coal seam and escape from the outcrop.
Amoco — now BP, the biggest operator in the region — pushed back, bringing in its own consultants, who dusted off every historic account of flaming streams and wells and presented them as proof that the problem had always been there. The stories were entertaining and sometimes dramatic: A group of kids on a camping trip watch as an ember from their fire sets the Pine River aflame; ranchers light methane seeps to serve as natural Christmas lights; a man who likes his drink finds himself locked out by his wife, so he ignites the water well vent in order to stay warm. The consultants even brought up Carbon "Moving" Mountain, and suggested that its perturbations were the result of subterranean methane seep explosions.
They posited other possible causes for the exacerbated leakage: Perhaps drought or an increase in domestic wells was drying up the coalbed and liberating the methane, or maybe an uptick in precipitation was causing more water to leak through the outcrops into the coal seam, thus displacing methane and pushing it to the surface. They introduced enough uncertainty to obfuscate the official findings.
But even when Amoco's consultants acknowledged that the industry, as a whole, might be to blame for the increased leakage, there was no way to pin a particular seep's behavior on any particular well or company. And since no baseline data existed, there was really no way to know, for sure, that the leakage had increased, dying vegetation notwithstanding. The uncertainty was enough to help Amoco dodge litigation; when the homeowners sued the company, they lost. The company did purchase four contaminated homes and bulldoze them, and it has continued to help fund a multi-agency effort to map, model, monitor and mitigate the seeps. (When I asked BP representatives what they're doing to mitigate leaks in their systems, they told me no one was available to speak to me.) As time went by, and no more homes were contaminated and the price of natural gas crashed, the issue faded from the public consciousness.
Until now.
Eric Kort, an atmospheric scientist with the University of Michigan, is the lead author of last year's hot-spot study, and on an April morning he is preparing to lead a forum on methane in Farmington, New Mexico. Kort, who is tall and lanky with a light beard, his hair pulled back into a little bun, is clearly amazed at the turnout. Some 200 people have crowded into a college lecture room to hear scientists talk for four hours about hyperspectral imaging, isotopes and teragrams.
There's a palpable tension in the room, hinting at what's at stake in this fossil fuel-heavy region. Shirley "Sug" McNall, a local who has been butting heads for years with the oil and gas industry over its impacts on air quality, is here, listening anxiously, as are members of regional environmental groups, such as the San Juan Citizens Alliance and Western Environmental Law Center. Officials from the two huge coal power plants west of town, which together with the accompanying coal mines employ hundreds of people, look on somberly. Most anxious, though, are the natural gas industry leaders present, recognizable in part by their uniform: jeans, button-up shirt, fleece vest with company logo.
For them, the hot spot is like a big bull's-eye, centered right over their heads, drawing unwanted attention to them and their industry. The San Juan Basin is one of the nation's most prolific natural gas fields, and the economy was built on the industry's shoulders. As goes national sentiment toward the fuel, so goes the financial fate of Farmington restaurants and Wal-Marts, schools and government. And for now, at least, it appears as if these scientists hold that fate in their hands.
Beginning a decade or so ago, environmentalists and politicians of all stripes began hailing natural gas as the most potent weapon to dethrone King Coal and reduce carbon emissions. From 2007 to 2010, in fact, the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign was largely funded by $26 million in donations from natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy. Not only does natural gas burn more cleanly than coal, emitting half the carbon and a fraction of the sulfur dioxide, particulates, mercury and other pollutants; it's also more versatile. Like coal, gas can be used to produce steam to turn turbines that produce round-the-clock baseload power. But gas can also be used to power combustion turbines — similar to jet engines — that can be ramped up to produce juice in a matter of minutes to provide backup for variable solar and wind energy.
As the so-called shale revolution yielded a natural gas glut and decreased prices, the fuel became affordable enough to compete with coal. After chipping away at coal's supremacy for several years, this April, for the first time, natural gas generated more electricity in the U.S. than coal. That same month, carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector reached a 27-year low, after steadily declining for the last several years. It was a big win for the climate. Or was it?
In 2011, Cornell University's Robert Howarth dropped a bomb on the natural gas party when he published a study suggesting not only that natural gas wasn't as clean as hyped, but that it may ultimately have a larger greenhouse gas footprint than coal, thanks to methane leakage. Though the study's conclusions and methods remain in dispute, it woke people up to the fact that, in addition to the on-the-ground environmental impacts of drilling, the fuel has a tender Achilles' heel when it comes to saving the climate. Methane has 86 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide over a 20-year span, and up to 30 times over a century. That means that for every 100 tons of carbon dioxide kept out of the atmosphere, it only takes three or four tons of methane leaking from a pipeline or other infrastructure to offset the gain. Howarth concluded that in order for natural gas to retain its greenhouse gas superiority over coal, leakage rates had to stay below 2.8 percent.
EPA greenhouse gas inventory data show that the national leakage rate is about 1.5 percent, which sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, several independent studies have found that actual emissions are often far higher than what gets reported to the agency. Petron and her colleagues, for example, found that oil and gas production in the Denver-Julesburg Basin in Colorado emitted three times more methane than the EPA inventory showed. And in 2014, Kort, Petron and others published a paper in Science documenting that, nationwide, measured emissions were 1.5 times higher than those in the inventory. Now they're trying to see if the same is true here in the Four Corners. To achieve concentrations like those found in this hot spot, says Kort, emissions would need to total about 590,000 metric tons per year. That's upwards of 150,000 metric tons more than the amount all the emitters in the region report to the EPA's greenhouse gas inventory.
Kort had speculated that the increase could result from fugitive emissions that the companies don't know about, like the apparent slow leak in the wellhead that showed up on Petron's monitor, or perhaps from known emissions from facilities that fall below the inventory's reporting threshold. Pipelines frequently rupture, releasing huge quantities of gas: A High Country News analysis of data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration revealed that ruptured pipes have leaked enough methane since 2010 to heat 170,000 homes for a year. Perhaps hundreds of abandoned gas and oil wells, leaking but unaccounted for, are to blame. If this is true, it could put the coalbed methane field's leakage rate as high as 8 percent.
Industry flacks balk at such hypotheses, though. "The San Juan Basin is well-known as a large area of natural seepage — when methane emissions are naturally occurring and not the result of energy development," writes Katie Brown for Energy In Depth, a PR outlet for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Such claims, however, are "little more than a bogus, rhetorical diversion to avoid responsibility and to undermine ongoing rule-making efforts," says Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center.
At the forum, Kort, Petron and other scientists assure the audience that they have no ax to grind, and that they will look at all potential sources, including geologic seeps. This, along with Kort's Zen-like demeanor, seems to ease the earlier tension. The scientists' analysis of what Kort calls a "fire hose of data" won't be published until next year, but ongoing research hints at what they might find. Monitored seeps along the Colorado side of the coal outcrop have leaked more than 45,000 metric tons of methane per year, which has the same warming potential as the carbon dioxide emitted from more than 200,000 cars annually. And still more methane is leaking from other parts of the outcrop that aren't monitored, in New Mexico, or on the Southern Ute Reservation, where data about the seeps has not been made public. The seeps are a significant source. But by its own count, ConocoPhillips' San Juan Basin operations collectively released six times that amount –– 277,000 tons –– in 2013, making it the largest such emitter in the nation.
Also lingering is the question of how much, if any, of the seeps' emissions can or should be attributed to the coalbed methane industry. A report published in 2000 as part of the multi-agency project to map, model and monitor the coal outcrop again established a link between drilling and the seeps, but some mystery remains. "How much is natural and how much is exacerbated," Petron says, "it's not something we understand yet." And we probably won't understand it anytime soon. While Hencmann and his colleagues continue to collect reams of data, the stats mostly fall into an analytic void. The researchers have found, for example, that the total emissions from the seeps in their monitoring zone has increased each year since 2007, yet no one is currently trying to determine why. It could be drought, it could be changes in the gas field, or it could be something else entirely. Hencmann hopes the attention on the hot spot will revive flagging efforts to decipher the seeps.
Without understanding the connection between the anthropogenic and the natural seeps, there's no real mechanism for encouraging or requiring companies to mitigate those seeps. Unless we know how much the industry is responsible for, we can't truly calculate the leakage rate of the region's natural gas systems and therefore can't ever really know how big its greenhouse gas footprint is.
A new round of research could have global implications. Similar basins, with similar geologies and seeps, exist all over the world, says Taku Ide, a petroleum engineer who studied methane-fueled fires in the coal outcrop on Southern Ute land. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, worldwide, geologic seeps could be emitting as much as 40 to 60 million metric tons of methane per year, putting them on par with landfills or coal mines. "The San Juan Basin is the most advanced in terms of work that's been done to serve as a model, to drive the conversation across the U.S.," says Ide. "It could be a model child." If, that is, the national conversation sparked by the hot spot kicks new studies into gear.
Just south of Farmington, white sandstone cliffs rise from the swatch of green along the San Juan River. From atop these cliffs, you can look out over a landscape that is beautiful and battered, sacred and sacrificed. You can see the nation's energy past, and perhaps its future, from here.
To the west, two massive coal-burning power plants stand in the high desert. Each kicks out more than 11 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, along with a soup of particulates, sulfur dioxide and mercury. When the wind rises, as it does frequently, a fine gray dust lifts up into the air from the multimillion-ton piles of coal-combustion waste piled near the Four Corners plant, its sooty gray stacks juxtaposed against the beige backside of the Hogback monocline.
Environmentalists and Navajo activists have struggled for years to shut down the plants, protesting and filing lawsuits, and recently their efforts have had some success. Four Corners recently shut down three of its five generators to comply with regional haze rules, and San Juan Generating Station plans to shut down two of four units and replace one with a natural gas-fired "peaker" plant –– if opponents don't succeed in retiring the plant altogether.
The victories have come in part with the help of an unexpected ally, also visible from this cliff-top vantage point: The coalbed methane and conventional natural gas fields that pockmark thousands of square miles here. Much of this gas is piped to California, where utilities buy it at a relatively cheap price to run power plants, thereby helping to wean themselves from the two coal plants here. President Obama's Clean Power Plan, released this summer, will likely tilt the nation's energy balance further away from coal and toward natural gas, at least until more renewables take hold. That could do more to clean up this area's coal-sullied air and landscape.
But it would also increase demand on, and activity in, the natural gas fields. More wells would be drilled and more pipelines built, providing more avenues for methane to escape, adding to the hot spot and further diminishing natural gas' green cred in the battle to curb climate change. Unless, that is, the gas companies can get a handle on all those leaks.
This summer, the EPA announced an overhauled program designed to get companies to voluntarily clean up their act, and industry officials have promised to comply, since it's in their best interest to keep their cash crop from slipping away. A spokesperson with ConocoPhillips says that the company has already reduced overall emissions by 48 percent on its own, mostly by using "off-the-shelf" solutions. But just 10 of New Mexico's 475 natural gas producers participate in the EPA's current EnergySTAR program, and with natural gas prices so low, there's little incentive to invest much into leak prevention. That's why activists are pressing for strong regulations that will push the entire industry to tighten up.
In August, the EPA released its new rules requiring operators to plug leaks of methane, ozone-forming volatile organic compounds and other toxics on new and modified facilities. They'll also require drillers to capture the methane that burps out of any newly fractured oil or gas well. Since the rules don't apply to existing infrastructure, they will do little to reduce the methane cloud already hovering over the San Juan Basin. But the BLM will hand down its own rules in coming months, and they are expected to apply to these existing facilities. The majority of the wells in the San Juan Basin are under BLM jurisdiction, so the new rules should have an effect on the hot spot. Indeed, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell invoked the Four Corners hot spot when announcing the need for such rules in March. The BLM regulations may resemble Colorado's, implemented last year, which require companies to install leak-detection and prevention equipment and take other measures to reduce emissions. Chris Colclasure of the Colorado Air Pollution Control Division says it's too soon to quantify the effects of the rules, but he believes they work and are not too onerous for the companies. In fact, several energy firms have endorsed the regulations, saying they're good for business.
While some oil and gas lobbyists have portrayed the new rules as an attack on the industry, the Environmental Defense Fund's Mark Brownstein says that compliance won't require that much from operators, many of whom say they're already doing what the regulations require. Whereas the administration's limits on carbon dioxide emissions make it virtually impossible to build a new coal-fired power plant, and are thus aimed at phasing out coal in the long run, the methane rules seem intended to sharpen up the natural gas industry's green credentials, making it more appealing in the future.
The scientists working to decipher the methane mystery remain mum when it comes to specific regulations, but they have discussed what they think needs to be done. "If natural gas is to be a 'bridge' to a more sustainable energy future," wrote Kort, Petron and several other researchers in a paper published by Science last fall, "it is a bridge that must be traversed carefully: Diligence will be required to ensure that leakage rates are low enough to achieve sustainability goals."
Back at the gas well behind the high school, Petron lets me flip the little switch that snatches an air sample from the breeze for later analysis. It will tell Petron and Thorley precisely what isotopes of methane are here, and, just as importantly, what other compounds may be seeping out of the well. Methane's not going to hurt anyone in the short term unless it builds up enough to explode, but benzene, another pollutant emitted by oil and gas wells, has both short- and long-term health effects and is a known carcinogen –– certainly not something you want your high-schoolers inhaling every day.
As we pull back onto the road and head toward another sample site, Petron reminds me of one simple, enduring fact of life here in oil and gas country: "Your air is being impacted," she says bluntly. "You live on the edge of the gas field."]]>
Wild Science is a High Country News original video series produced by filmmaker Dakin Henderson. The series explores current wildlife research by taking us into the outdoors and behind the scenes with field biologists. In Wild Science, HCN looks at the scientific processes that inform decisions about how to manage public lands and wildlife — decisions that shape the West today.]]>
Wild Science is a High Country News original video series produced by filmmaker Dakin Henderson. The series explores current wildlife research by taking us into the outdoors and behind the scenes with field biologists. In Wild Science, HCN looks at the scientific processes that inform decisions about how to manage public lands and wildlife — decisions that shape the West today.]]>
Aside from one spot two days in, where the road descends from the rims to touch the muddy Green River, for example, there is no water. This means you must carry nearly all you need — and fight the urge to guzzle it prematurely as the dry air sucks moisture from your body.
A friend had insisted we cache water along the route or enlist a support car — "so you can drink beers in your camping chairs at the end of the day." (The Park Service "highly recommends" the same, for soberer reasons.)
"No way," I replied. I wanted to carry everything in my bike's three small bags, following in the tracks of cyclists going back to the early 1900s. But where they mostly rode pavement on skinny tires, we journey over more rugged ground: The White Rim Road is high-clearance and so remote that a tow can cost drivers more than $1,000. This makes it perfect for bikepacking — a cross between classic bike touring and backpacking that opens up vast networks of underused national forest roads, ATV tracks and singletrack, often far from more conventional destinations.
Bikepacking was popularized in the early 2000s by mountain bike racers, who pedaled hundreds of miles over many days with little gear. By 2010, non-racers had picked up the minimalist ethic, and manufacturers began designing bags that were lighter and less cumbersome than traditional rack-and-pannier setups. New routes were pioneered and competitions created, including the unofficial 750-mile Arizona Trail Race and the 2,700-mile Tour Divide Race along the Continental Divide from Canada to New Mexico. In 2004, the Tour Divide's first year, less than 20 people entered. This year, there were 150.
Bikepacking's appeal is obvious to Cecilia and me. You can ride much farther than you can walk over the same timeframe, without heavy backpacks. And you see places in unexpected ways: The routes are often hybrids, linking singletrack with dirt roads and occasional stretches of pavement. Sometimes you have to drag your bike under a fence. The goal: Find those in-between places lying halfway between wilderness and civilization.
We pedal beneath crumbling red-rock towers, and stare into canyons that tumble away in sudden, stomach-turning drops, as if an angry god scooped out great chunks of earth. Spring moisture has carpeted rocky ledges with green; cactus flowers splash pink in a sea of reddish brown.
And we are alone, mostly; the park's permit system strictly limits backcountry campers. A few jeeps loaded with uncomfortable-looking passengers rattle by. There are some bikers, too, though all are on van-supported guided tours. "Need any water?" one driver asks, slightly incredulous when we shake our heads no.
Luckily, recent storms left pools of water in the rocks where we spend our first night. Otherwise, our 15 liters might not have lasted. Unluckily, dark clouds roll in the next afternoon, bringing thunder, lightning, and more rain. "I guess we should have brought the tent," says Cecilia; to save weight, I had left it behind. But just before the storm hits, we find a rock ledge to sleep beneath, sheltered from the rain. And what if we weren't so lucky? Well, I remind Ceci, at least we could get out of here faster on bikes than on foot.]]>
The number of visits to Arches, which for a decade grew slowly and steadily, by about 2 to 3 percent per year, has jumped by nearly 20 percent since the Utah Office of Tourism launched its "Mighty 5" national parks marketing campaign in the spring of 2013. At the state's four other national parks — Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce and Capitol Reef —thousands of tourists jam entrance stations, overwhelm visitor center staff and overrun the landscape itself in search of a place to park.
"This is not the experience people expect, nor the experience we want to provide," says Kate Cannon, superintendent of the Southeast Utah Group, which includes Arches and Canyonlands.
There's no denying that the "Mighty 5" campaign has been remarkably successful, introducing people from around the world to Utah's natural wonders and allowing the state to cash in on its scenic beauty. But the massive increase in tourism has left Park Service officials scrambling to manage the crowds without damaging the landscape. After all, the agency's mandate is to "conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects ... by such means as will leave them unimpaired for future generations," not simply to enable the parks to function as economic engines for nearby communities.
State tourism officials devised the "Mighty 5" campaign in 2012. As Vicki Varela, director of the Utah Office of Tourism, likes to say, "Mother Nature played favorites" with southern Utah's iconic red-rock landscape, and the state is eager to share it with the rest of the world. The award-wining campaign generated nearly 375,000 visits between March and December 2013 and saw a return of $126 for every dollar invested. For Arches, that translated to an increase from just over 1 million visitors to 1.3 million that year, a number that's expected to exceed 1.5 million by the end of 2015.
"It's been wildly successful," Varela says of the campaign. "In Europe, the Mighty 5 is now on everyone's bucket list."
The campaign has been a boon for the parks' gateway towns, many of which shifted from extractive industries to a tourism economy in recent decades. According to a 2015 study by the nonprofit Headwaters Economics, visitors to Arches and nearby Canyonlands generated over $145 million for Moab in 2014. That same year, visitors to Zion National Park spent over $170 million in the much smaller town of Springdale.
Zion National Park Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh acknowledges the park's importance to the local economy, but said that the increased number of visitors is straining park staff and infrastructure and threatening natural resources –– even creating a public safety hazard at some of the more popular attractions. At Angels Landing in Zion, crowds queue up along an exposed ridge crest while clinging to a safety line 1,500 feet above the canyon floor. At the Emerald Pools, people routinely step over one another vying for a spot to enjoy the scenery, and the park's shuttle system, implemented in 2000 to alleviate vehicle congestion in the canyon, is now regularly overwhelmed, with as many as 120 people packed into buses designed to seats 68.
"I don't think we are in a sustainable situation," Bradybaugh says.
State, local and federal officials agree that congestion is a problem, but argue that, from an economic perspective, it's better than having no visitors. Most favor finding better ways to manage the crowds rather than seeking to discourage them, and the idea of determining the parks' actual carrying capacity has so far proven unpopular.In Moab, where park officials have been asking the local community for suggestions, a range of possible solutions will be released for public comment later this month. In addition to building more parking lots, roads and entry stations, the proposal includes an innovative "timed entry" or online reservation system that would encourage visits at less-crowded times and draw more attention to some of the less-popular destinations. Cannon says that the system would take some getting used to, but that it would be better than spending an hour in line and then another hour looking for a parking space.
"Our main concern is improving the visitor experience," she says.
Colin Fryer, who owns the Red Cliffs Lodge and three other hotels in Moab, says managing people's experience isn't the Park Service's responsibility. He opposes the reservation system. "Anything you do to make it harder for people is just like putting up a barricade," he says. "It's an unwelcoming idea, and it wouldn't be good for business in Moab." Instead, Fryer advocates building more parking lots as well as paving the road out through Salt Valley, on the remote north end of the park, to accommodate more traffic and disperse use.
"They are just going to have to accept that it's not going to be a pristine experience," Fryer says. "People need to drive in, take their pictures, leave some money, and drive away. These are the people whose experience we need to improve."
Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, believes that national parks should not be used merely as local tourist traps. He supports finding alternatives to automobiles (a shuttle system was proposed, but deemed too costly) and implementing daily visitation limits. Paving the Salt Valley road is a bad idea, he says, and moving larger crowds into the backcountry would only fragment habitat and destroy solitude, all the while increasing management and rescue costs.
"Reining in the Mighty 5 promotion campaign is part of the solution, too," Groene says.
As scenic landscapes become more commercialized, and gateway communities continue to grow, the National Park Service may find itself in an impossible situation. Both Cannon and Bradybaugh say that protecting the visitor experience is of primary concern, and they understand the economic importance of national parks to local communities. "It really is a question of sustainability," Bradybaugh says. "We can't just always build more facilities." Bradybaugh says his staff will be considering possible solutions over the next year, seeking to determine what are the "desired conditions," without making any predetermined decisions.
Cannon notes the conflict often inherent between protecting natural and cultural resources and providing for visitor experience. "It's couched as a scientific question, but it's really a value judgment. How many people can be here and still enjoy the values that the park was established to provide?" she asks. "But it's so wonderful to have these phenomenally beautiful, culturally rich places for people to enjoy. It's well worth struggling with these questions."
Eric Trenbeath is a writer based in Moab, Utah. Graphics made with National Park Service data by Paige Blankenbuehler, an editorial intern for High Country News.]]>
We could see the La Plata Mountains, our "home" range, as well as Lone Cone and Mt. Wilson up by Telluride, a fact that amazed my two daughters. Then they started arguing, because they're teenagers, about how long it would take to walk back to Durango: A week? Two? And they marveled at how small the world of the Ancestral Puebloans must have been, maybe never leaving this mesa during a lifetime.
Actually, I said, their world probably extended at least as far as our view. Out there, just beyond that dark nub known as Shiprock, lies Chaco Canyon. And up here on Cedar Mesa, there are several Chaco "outliers" — pueblos that were linked, by architecture, maybe even Chacoan "roads," with the massive Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. It would only take a handful of signal fires atop strategically located stone towers to send a quick message from Chaco to here. And Puebloan ultra-runners surely could make the trip on foot in two days.
My family retreated behind the bug screen of the tent, but I stayed out in the swarm, sitting cross-legged on a rock, sipping the dregs of a box of wine and watching Earth's shadow spread across mesa, canyon and the sage plains. The silence was remarkable, interrupted only by the occasional boom of a nighthawk. As stars and lights flickered on in the sky and on the distant landscape, this hardly seemed like a place that's being "loved to death," nor one that was in need of protection from industrial invasion. But it is arguably both.
For me — and many others — this is personal. My father became aware of Cedar Mesa back when he was growing up in Dolores, Colorado, not far to the east. After that, he came here often, seeking solitude or solace, archaeological sites or hidden pools amongst stone and sage, bringing his family along. As such, it became an important part of my individual creation myth: My earliest memories are of running around on slickrock with my brother, of the smell of piñon burning in the campfire, of seemingly brutal hikes to cliff dwellings nestled high up in a canyon wall. Later, my friends and I headed to Cedar Mesa whenever we got a chance, backpacking into the canyons that didn't make it into the guidebooks, sometimes getting into trouble in the process — the fodder of stories we still tell today. The area lacked the drama of Canyonlands, but that made it more special.
My father was a writer, and Cedar Mesa was often his subject. But he always adhered to an ethic of secrecy, never revealing precisely where it is he wrote about. To do so exposes hidden places, while also robbing folks of the joy of discovery. That ethic has long since perished, killed by Google and blogs, YouTube and Facebook. GPS coordinates of Ancestral Puebloan sites can be found with the flick of a mouse, drawing looters and potsherd-hunters, alike. Websites give precise directions to and detailed descriptions of those canyons that were once blank spots on the guidebooks' maps, turning even short segments of slots into playgrounds for "canyoneers."
Archaeological sites that were largely ignored for years are now written up by travel writers from the LA Times and other national media. ATV trails have been cut where once were only walking paths. And a designated tar sands area lies under spectacular canyons a couple dozen miles west of where I sat.
Environmentalists, historic preservationists and Native American groups have long fought to preserve what's left, with efforts reaching a crescendo over the last couple of years. Friends of Cedar Mesa, Utah Diné Bikéyah, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and others recently joined up as the Bears Ears Coalition. (The Bears Ears are two buttes that overlook Cedar Mesa and a regional landmark). They've proposed putting a huge swath of land, stretching from the San Juan River in the south, encompassing the Abajo Mountains to the north, and reaching almost to Lake Powell in the west, into a national conservation area, with various areas within protected as Wilderness. Under the Diné Bikéyah proposal — which has the support of the Navajo Nation government — the southern portion would be co-managed by the tribe and the feds, in a way similar to Cañon de Chelly in Arizona.
As Earth's shadow spread across the land that night, I left my perch on the rock and headed toward the tent, ambivalent about these efforts to protect this place. But that ambivalence vanished when I noticed an odd silhouette protruding unnaturally above the shadows of the forest. It was an exploratory oil drilling rig, on the other side of the canyon, on land abutting a Wilderness Study Area.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor of High Country News.
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Colonies of burrows and tunnels have spread not just across natural habitat and public lands but also onto lawns and backyards, golf courses, cemeteries and the local airport, causing problems for private landowners. Locals say the ESA prevents them from controlling colonies by killing – or "taking" in ESA parlance – prairie dogs in problem areas.The battle over the prairie dogs is the latest in a decades-old movement to gut the ESA and federal species recovery. The issue might even be headed to the Supreme Court. After a federal district judge ruled that the prairie dog and other listed species should be excluded from federal protection on private lands last year, the government is now appealing that decision to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Attorneys general from nine states, including Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Arizona and Alaska, signed onto a brief supporting Cedar City and Pacific Legal. Several environmental groups penned their own brief backing the federal government. A hearing will likely occur later this year or in 2016.
In the lead-up to recent events, Cedar City locals organized as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Property Owners (PETPO, a play on PETA), and sued the federal government in April 2013, represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation. The local group argues that the Utah prairie dog listing is unconstitutional because it goes against the Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate interstate trade, but leaves intrastate trade to the states. Since the species only exists in one state and has no commercial or trade value, the ESA, a law founded in Commerce Clause logic, doesn't apply. In other words, if a species or the species' economic impact doesn't cross state lines, PETPO argues, the ESA shouldn't have jurisdiction to protect it.
"This is a prime example of the type of species the Constitution entrusts to the states to protect," says Jonathan Wood, the Pacific Legal attorney who argued the case for PETPO. "It's found only in a small region of southwestern Utah, it's locally abundant, and it has absolutely no serious connection to the nation's economy."
Federal district Judge Dee Benson agreed with PETPO's interpretation in a ruling last November. Utah wildlife managers relocated from private lands or killed about 6,000 prairie dogs after the decision.
If applied to other species located in a single state and without commercial value, Benson's ruling would roll back ESA protections for up to 70 percent of the plants and animals covered by the law.
Jason Rylander, senior attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, says Benson's decision is out of step with previous outcomes. Five other appeals courts have upheld the constitutionality of the ESA for species whether they're in a single state or lack economic value. "The district court's decision is an aberration and goes against, not only those other circuits, but also Supreme Court precedent" related to applications of the Commerce Clause, Rylander says.
For those reasons, Rylander is "pretty confident" the Tenth Circuit will reverse Benson's ruling. But if it does affirm Benson's view, the prairie dog could end up before the Supreme Court, with the fate of the ESA on the line.
That's because the high court is more likely to hear a case when circuit courts have issued conflicting decisions, says Eric Biber, an environmental law professor at University of California, Berkeley.
The courtroom drama, however, is only "part of a much bigger campaign of people who really want to rein in the federal government's powers and environmental laws," adds Rylander. Defenders has catalogued more than 50 proposals introduced in Congress, just this session, meant to "cripple endangered species conservation" and weaken the ESA.
For instance, the Native Species Protection Act, introduced by Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, and others, would revise the ESA to reflect Benson's ruling. Other efforts, all penned by Republicans, would automatically remove species from the ESA after five years, require governors or Congress to approve new listings, and elevate the role of local and state governments and research in listing decisions. Currently proposed bills are also trying to postpone listing decisions or withhold recovery funding for specific species, including the West-wide greater sage grouse, which could be added to the ESA later this year.
The Obama administration produced its own ESA reform rule this May, a preemptive strike to head off fiercer assaults on the law. Environmentalists were tepid toward that proposed change, too.
Meanwhile, should the case make it to the Supreme Court, all eyes will likely be on Justice Anthony Kennedy, Biber says. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Kennedy has broken ranks with other conservative justices and been a swing vote on several key environmental decisions.
Joshua Zaffos is an HCN contributing editor. He tweets at @jzaffos.]]>
Unsurprisingly, they were caught.
But what might have been dismissed as a youthful infraction instead took a serious turn: both boys were referred to law enforcement for theft.
Their story, which comes from a report released by the University of Utah Friday, is not unusual. The study, conducted by researchers at the university's S.J. Quinney College of Law Public Policy Clinic, found that Native American students in Utah are disciplined far more harshly than their peers. They're almost eight times more likely to be referred to law enforcement and six times more likely to be arrested than white students, far out of proportion to the size of the population.
The result is a phenomenon known in education circles as the "school-to-prison pipeline," whereby zero tolerance disciplinary policies that disproportionately target minority students funnel them out of school and into juvenile justice programs.
"A lot of these policies have the best intentions," Vanessa Walsh, the report's primary author, said. "We have to keep our schools safe. But it's having consequences that I don't think anyone anticipated."
The next stop for many students is often the adult prison system, which can have devastating impacts on already-vulnerable youth and their communities, she said. (In the case of the soda-drinking boys, the school district doesn't track what happens once students are handed to police, but they could have been charged with a crime, arrested, fined or forced to appear in court.)The U.S. education system has an especially tortured relationship with Native American students. Until just a few decades ago, many American Indian students left or were taken from their families to be educated in boarding schools, as part of the government's forced assimilation policy. The schools had a reputation for strict and often abusive disciplinary policies that are still remembered vividly by those who attended.
In recent years, states and the federal government have tried to do better, including incorporating tribal languages and culture into public schools and relinquishing more control to tribes. Still, changes to school discipline have been slow to follow. Nationwide, Native American students receive the second highest rate of out-of-school suspension of any ethnic group and are disproportionately expelled.
According to Walsh's report, the harshest discipline for Utah's American Indian students today takes place in rural areas and in the schools closest to the state's eight reservations. For example, in the San Juan School District, where the two boys were caught stealing soda, more than 10 percent of American Indian students have been referred to law enforcement, compared with less than 2 percent of white students. One high school in the district referred almost a third of its American Indian students.
Other Western states face similar disparities and are grappling with how to respond. In 2007, a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union forced one South Dakota school district to reform its policies to protect Native American students. In Colorado, American Indian students are nearly three times more likely to be referred to law enforcement than their white peers, according to a report released last summer. In Montana, Native American students are almost five times as likely to be expelled as white students.
As for Utah, Walsh has reported her findings to the ACLU and met with state officials and representatives to discuss the issue. So far, she said, she hasn't been able to get support for a legislative task force or policy changes.
"It's hard to get policymakers to take this on and champion this," she said. But she doesn't intend to let it rest. "I have to just keep knocking on their door, sending them an email every couple weeks."
Kate Schimel is an editorial intern at High Country News.]]>
The Utah-based American Lands Council, or ALC, is mostly funded by memberships, the majority of which are county commissions—that is, taxpayer-funded dues. In 2013, the last year for which records are available, the non-profit raised around $200,000 in contributions. About $157,000 of that came from memberships; $134,000 of that came from the coffers of counties. (Much of the rest comes from contributions from individuals and corporations, including Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing think tank supported by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.) Membership ranges from a "bronze" level, which costs $1,000 a year, to "platinum," which costs $25,000 a year.
"ALC comes in and offers counties this incredible-sounding deal: 'We'll get you these lands with minerals and timber and resources,'" Jessica Goad, advocacy director for conservation group Center for Western Priorities, said. "A lot of counties are very taken with this notion, but when you pull back the curtain a bit, (the ALC) is selling an idea that is actually a waste of their time and (their) limited funds."
According to the Center for Western Priorities, after ALC representatives pitch the cause, county commissioners are left to make the decision; no vote is put to county taxpayers.
So where does this money go? Essentially, to a few salaries, and to lobbying for the pro-transfer movement.
Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory and Nevada County Commissioner Demar Dahl founded the ALC in 2012, the same year Ivory launched H.B. 28 — the bill that created Utah's Transfer of Public Lands Act, which seeks a transfer of 20 million acres of federal public land to the state. The mission of the ALC, according to its website, is to "secure local control of western public lands by transferring federal public lands…by giving leaders the knowledge and courage to battle..."In 2013, ALC spent most of its income, about 60 percent, on salaries (40 percent of its total income went to Ken Ivory's salary, and another 10 percent to his wife's, according to the ALC's 2013 tax forms). Of the remaining expenses — travel, advertising, conferences, taxes, and so on — the largest expenditure was lobbying, which used about 10 percent of the ALC's income. In addition to its lobbying at the state level, the ALC has increased its lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. Since September 2014, the ALC has paid lobbyist Michael Swenson about $35,000 to reach out to federal legislators in the capital.
"We believe this will be a political solution ultimately resolved by Congress," Swenson told E&E News this spring. Ivory did not respond to HCN's requests for comment.
Meanwhile, the group has recently stirred some controversy over its lobbying at the state level.
In February, William Richardson, an aide to Montana State Sen. Jennifer Fielder, registered as a lobbyist for the ALC. Other lobbyists, concerned about the conflict of interest of being both a lobbyist and an aide, alerted Sen. Tom Facey, a member of the Senate Ethics Committee, and Richardson was ultimately asked to leave his post as legislative aide.
In April, the nonprofit Colorado Ethics Watch filed a complaint against the ALC with the Colorado Secretary of State, accusing the ALC of lobbying without registering as a lobbyist group. The ALC had sent an email to Coloradans, urging them to contact state legislators and support S.B. 232, which called for the study of a transfer of federal lands in Colorado to the state. (The bill failed 18-17 in the Senate in late April.)
Under Colorado state law, contacting legislators to push for the passage of a particular bill is considered lobbying, and such action must be preceded by registration with the state, which costs a nominal, though waiveable, $50.
Luis Toro, director of Colorado Ethics Watch, says the ALC needs to disclose its activities, "like every other group, so legislators and the public alike can know who's spending money to influence legislation."
Toro was not familiar with the ALC before the complaint, and when asked about the ethics of using taxpayer dollars to fund lobbying, he said that it's not illegal to do so.
While it's not illegal for taxpayer dollars to fund lobbying, he said, "this case is tricky."
"It's missing a layer of justification," he said. "It's taking money for a political agenda that has nothing to do with the county's agenda. Why should a Utah county pay to lobby in Colorado?"
Given this concern, it's important for ALC to be transparent about its actions, he said. "People who support nonprofits benefit from knowing what their money is used for."
Below here is a list of counties where taxpayers have helped support the American Lands Council's agenda — whether they know it or not:
Kindra McQuillan is an editorial intern for High Country News.
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Set against a backdrop of a few difficult drought years, reservoirs dropping and some communities overpumping aquifers, the scenario can seem a pretty compelling argument for two massive and controversial water projects that the state wants to build: A 6-foot-diameter, 140-mile-long pipeline that would allow Utah to draw its remaining share of Colorado River water from Lake Powell and pump it to Kane and Washington Counties; and a new dam on the Bear River system, which feeds into the Great Salt Lake, that would supply 220,000 acre-feet of water to surrounding communities.
Trouble is, that scenario may be flat wrong, or at the very least overstated.
On May 5, Utah's Legislative Auditor General released a damning (damming?) report revealing that the water agency's forecasts are based on unreliable data and failed to adequately account for the possible contributions of conservation and irrigation water freed up as new homes consume farmland. "By excluding this added water supply," the auditors write, "the projections accelerate the timeframes for developing costly, large-scale water projects." Zach Frankel of the Utah Rivers Council, which opposes the pipeline and stumped for the audit along with several other groups, puts it more bluntly: "We are not," he says, "running out of water."
The data problems are partly driven by inefficiency and inadequate resources. The division obtains information about water use from 468 local water providers secondhand through another agency. Just one staffer is devoted to this task, and though that person attempts to verify data by calling local officials directly every five years, errors slipped through. Sometimes, water providers made mistakes because they weren't properly trained or didn't understand the instructions or purpose of the data. One city even reported water use for 2012 by submitting data from a city in New York with an identical name.
"We agree with many of the audit conclusions and recommendations and believe that (they) will enable us to strengthen our processes," Division of Water Resources Director Eric Millis told lawmakers at a hearing the day the report was released. "We tried to do the best we could with what we had available."
The audit's conclusions about conservation are even more troubling. Despite being one of the nation's most arid states, Utah consistently tops nearly every other state in per capita water use. And yet the division assumes that conservation can only drop statewide consumption by 25 percent. Its projections have water use flatlining at 220 gallons per person, per day after 2025 – still much higher than current use in many other Western states.
"We find one regional comparison that is insightful," the auditors write. "The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves the Las Vegas region, has a goal to reduce water use to 199 (gallons per person per day) by 2035. In contrast, the communities in Southwestern Utah, which have a climate similar to that of Southern Nevada, have a goal to reduce water use to 292 by the year 2060."
That's the area that would be served by the Lake Powell Pipeline. Given the project's expected cost of $1 billion to $3.5 billion, Frankel calls southwestern Utah's conservation goals "appalling for a state that claims to value water and fiscal conservatism."
The audit identifies numerous areas for improvement, not least of which are Utah's incredibly cheap water rates, which are heavily supported by property taxes. "We subsidize water more than any other state," says Republican state Senator Howard Stephenson, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association. "When my neighbor is running his garden hose down the gutter while he's washing his car, there's no impact to his pocket book because he's socializing the waste among all of his neighbors. If people actually bear the cost of their choices, you'd assure more conservation." The state could also implement tiered rate structures in which heavy users pay more, and actually meter "secondary" — or outdoor — water systems, which, unlike several other Western states, Utah has yet to tackle.
And though much of Utah's expected residential growth will gobble up farmland on the Wasatch Front, the Division appears to vastly underestimate the amount of freed up irrigation water that would be shifted over to residential use. In the Weber River Basin, for example, the auditors found that 52,000 more acre-feet would be available than the state has projected. That's roughly equivalent to the share of water that communities there would receive from the $1.5 billion Bear River Project.
Department of Natural Resources Executive Director Mike Styler, who oversees the Division of Water Resources, told lawmakers at the May 5 hearing that the audit was "a great help" for predicting future water use and that his staff was already looking into implementing recommendations. If anyone should be nervous about the report, he added, it's "you in the Legislature. (This audit) is suggesting that you look at ways to alter water demand. That's saying, 'Folks, we want you to consider changing your way of life.' … That will take great courage."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman
Homepage image of Salt Lake City courtesy of Skyguy414, Wikimedia Commons.]]>
The charges, filed last October, stemmed from a May 10, 2014, group ATV protest ride, organized by Lyman, down a closed-to-motorized-vehicles trail in Recapture Canyon in southeastern Utah. The prosecution leaned its case on media reports and social media posts leading up to the ride, and on widely disseminated post-ride photos clearly showing all four of the defendants riding ATVs in the closed area. The defense argued that the defendants had permission, from the county water master, to ride down the trail in question, which is used for water line inspections and maintenance.
The protest ride's genesis appears to have been a February 2014 community meeting, organized by Lyman to give locals an opportunity to air their concerns about perceived overreach by the federal government, particularly the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees much of the land in southeastern Utah. The county has long butted heads with the feds, but tensions climaxed in 2009, when heavily armed BLM agents raided homes and arrested citizens for pot-hunting (collecting ancient artifacts from the landscape, which is illegal on public land). The 2007 closure to ATVs of the trail in Recapture due to potential damage of archaeological sites has also been a local sore spot. And at the meeting, a participant suggested using Recapture as a "stage" on which to air their griefs.
Lyman announced plans for the ride in an op-ed in the Deseret News last April, even as Cliven Bundy and heavily armed supporters were in a southern Nevada showdown with BLM agents who had tried to round up Bundy's cattle, which had been grazing illegally on public land. So it was inevitable that in the days leading up to the ride it was touted as the "next Bunkerville," the town closest to Bundy's ranch, and as the latest flareup in this version of the Sagebrush Rebellion. Indeed, Lyman implicitly invited the Bundy crew to the ride via social media, and a contingent of the crew, including Bundy's son, Ryan, accepted, showing up with ATVs, guns, Gadsen flags and a hearty dose of anger.
But the solidarity between the two crowds — and the comparison — only went so far. Prior to the ride, when Lyman was expected to be firing up the troops with defiant prose, he actually struck a more conciliatory tone, urging his followers to ride down the canyon only to the closure point, and stop there. "My fear is that this event is looking like conflict for the sake of conflict," he said then. "I think we do more harm than good to actually cross that line today."
It was a sharp contrast to what happened in Bunkerville, and reaction from the Bundy crowd in Blanding verged on the hostile. Lyman ultimately acquiesced to the bullies, to a degree, leading riders beyond the closure point but stopping at the end of the road used for pipeline maintenance. Ryan Bundy and a handful of others, mostly non-locals, continued onward onto a more primitive trail, where the chances for environmental and archaeological damage was much greater. It was an uncomfortable scene to behold, the leader of this act of civil disobedience ignored by a notably uncivil group.
It then became clear that, similar ideologies aside, Lyman was no Bundy, after all. Bundy broke the law for years, first failing to pay the pathetically low grazing fees for running his cattle on BLM land, then ignoring outright grazing prohibitions on the same land. Only when it came time to face the consequences did he play the protest card as a cover for his unlawful acts. Lyman's act, on the other hand, was one of civil disobedience, first, and lawbreaking second. Bundy's civil disobedience was in service of his illegal act; it was the other way around for Lyman. And, of course, Bundy has yet to be charged with anything, despite his obvious crimes and the sheer incivility of his "civil disobedience."
In that respect, perhaps it makes more sense to compare Lyman to Tim DeChristopher, the activist who bid on (and won) oil and gas leases that he never planned on paying for, in order to keep them from falling into industry hands.
After DeChristopher's trial, in which he was found guilty of violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act and making false statements, DeChristopher said:
"This is really the heart of what this case is about. The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law … (the prosecution) claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I 'obstructed lawful government proceedings.' But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding."
While Lyman's defense didn't rely on such a thesis, he has argued that the Recapture trail was closed unlawfully and that the BLM has committed "unconscionable" acts in San Juan County. And in the days leading up to the protest, Lyman's rhetoric was every bit as lofty as DeChristopher's. In the aforementioned February meeting, he told the crowd that they needed to "send a message that we do live here, that this is not a remote, desolate place, but it's actually our home." The guilty verdict, Lyman told the Salt Lake Tribune after the trial, "is a shout-out to county officials that they do not have jurisdiction in their counties. It is a federal jurisdiction state, or a territory. I don't know if you can call it a state." In the op-ed announcing the ride, he quoted Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau, the grandfather of American civil disobedience, who went to jail for not paying taxes that support slavery and war.
Thoreau — a naturalist — might have rolled in his grave if he knew his words were being used as a rallying cry in the fight for the liberty to ride one's ATV wherever one chooses, and to get the federal government off of industry's back. And surely DeChristopher, whose civil disobedience was a last-ditch attempt to slow the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, thus averting global catastrophe, might also balk at the comparison. But that Lyman's ride was an act of civil disobedience, that he broke the law, mostly in a peaceable manner (Bundy's armed hangers-on notwithstanding) as a means to bringing attention to a higher ideal, is clear.
But again, the comparison only goes so far. Neither Thoreau nor DeChristopher tried to deny that they had broken the law. Rather, they argued that they had to break the law, and in doing so chose a lesser wrong in order to try to prevent a larger one. The illegal nature of their acts, the disobedience, and the stiff consequences thereof are what gave the acts power. Lyman seemed to embrace this notion in the weeks leading up to the ride, knowing that a bunch of people carrying signs and legally riding up and down an open county road would be meaningless. But the defense in his trial abandoned the initial principles behind the act. In attempting to dodge the punishment, Lyman also succeeded in weakening the power of his protest. Perhaps that's why there were no protests at the courthouse, as there were during DeChristopher's trial; the Oath Keepers and so-called militia and patriots appear to have abandoned Lyman, who just a year ago seemed poised to lead the new Sagebrush Rebellion.
Lyman's backpedaling didn't save him, obviously, and now he'll have to face the consequences. DeChristopher spent nearly two years in jail, and had to pay a hefty fine. Lyman and Wells each face up to as much as one year in jail and $100,000 in fines. Sentencing is scheduled for July 15. Whatever the punishment, Lyman's message will be better received if he follows Thoreau's lead and embraces the punishment. Thoreau was thrown behind bars for an indefinite period of time, only to be bailed out by his buddies, much to his chagrin, after one night. When Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, "Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau replied: "Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?"
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
Nestlé, the candy and drink giant, has been pumping water in southern California, for more than a century, to bottle and sell. Now, it turns out their permit to transport that water expired more than two decades ago and what's more, there are hundreds in a similar state in California and likely even more across the West.
Permits like Nestlé's fall into a category of Forest Service authorizations known as "special use," a designation that covers everything from water pipelines to highway maintenance stations, ski areas, and mailboxes. Nestlé has been pumping water from San Bernadino springs since at least 1906 and the current permit was issued in 1958.
According to the Desert Sun, which first reported on the expired permit in March and uncovered the other expired California permits, Nestlé pumped around 25 million gallons out of Strawberry Canyon, in the San Bernadino National Forest in 2014. That's roughly 68,000 gallons a day. For some perspective, the state's daily water use is almost 56,000 times that: 38 billion gallons a day. And Nestlé estimates that all of its pumping for bottled water (which includes other permitted springs) makes up less than 0.008 percent of the state's total water use.
So why does it matter if they're pumping without supervision? Location, says Ileene Anderson, of the Center for Biological Diversity. The forest's springs and the riparian habitat they support are important to ensuring species survive. If the forest's streams are dewatered, the impacts are more acute than further downstream.
"The streams at the lower ends are so fragmented," said Anderson. "The water in the forest is a public trust resource and they have a mandate to protect the species as well."
But it's also the fact that Nestlé's permit hasn't been revisited since it expired in 1988. Since the pipes were first installed in the early 20th century, there have been substantial changes to the environmental review process and the state's water situation has deteriorated. Gary Earney, who used to oversee special uses permits in the San Bernadino National Forest, says the Forest Service now does a much stricter review of potential fallout from permitted uses.
"When a permit is issued nowadays, an environmental assessment of some type has to be done," Earney says. "Permits that have expired have uses in place that, in all likelihood, haven't been assessed for impacts."
Nestlé's permit isn't the only expired water use permit. The Desert Sun found 1,108 water-related permits for use in California national forests and over half had passed their expiration date. On average, the expired permits had an end date of over a decade ago.
And it's not just California's national forests that are facing a backlog. I contacted regional offices and found that Region 4 of the Forest Service, which includes Utah, Nevada and parts of Idaho and Wyoming, has, in total, 1,524 water-related permits. Of those, 241 have expired. For Region 3, which encompasses Arizona and New Mexico, roughly one-sixth of the 591 water-related permits were expired.
Earney, the former forest manager, says that backlog is thanks to decades of slashed budgets and staffing shortfalls.
"The Forest Service doesn't have this mess because it's negligent," Earney says. "It has this mess because of budget cuts."
A 2011 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General came to the same conclusion. The report's authors laid the blame for deficient supervision on insufficient funding and staffing. The Forest Service "lacks the resources it needs to properly manage the Special Use Program," the inspectors wrote. The report acknowledged that was in part due to legislative budget cuts, but it also took the Forest Service to task for failing to charge market rates for land use authorizations or even adjusting for inflation. Similar issues have arisen for grazing and oil and gas on federal lands.
Inspectors found that more than 5,900 special use authorizations nationwide, including ones not related to water, had expired but were still listed as active. And few of the permits had been inspected since they were issued. When inspectors from the Department of Agriculture Interior visited sites themselves, they found a host of violations, including one instance where a permit-holder had diverted an entire stream, rather than a small portion of it.
As for Nestlé's permit, the onslaught of public attention has forced Forest Service officials to revisit its authorization. Nestlé objects to the characterization of "expired," since the permit will remain in effect during the reauthorization process. And as for the rest of the backlog, it's not clear when and if it'll be addressed.
Kate Schimel is an editorial intern at High Country News. Follow her @kateschimel Homepage photo courtesy of Doc Searls/Flickr]]>
These efforts and studies refuse to go away, despite the unlikelihood of their ever going anywhere. They arose concurrently with a larger movement to actually enact those land transfers. The latter movement began when a number of Utah legislators, dissatisfied with the federal government's management of lands, passed Republican Rep. Ken Ivory's 2012 Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding that the federal government hand over more than 20 million acres to the state. Ten other states have considered similar legislation since then. The argument for transfer is legally dubious, but western politicians have commissioned studies to ask if transfers are logistically feasible, and whether they could benefit their states' economies.
The effects of a transfer would be different in every state—and each state that's studied the idea has done so in a slightly different way. Utah commissioned university economists to look at potential economic outcomes of a transfer; Wyoming tasked local politicians to gather testimony on what effects a transfer would have. The studies use a diverse set of approaches—but critics of the movement maintain that misguided conservative politics power them all.Some legislators are trying to distance themselves from the larger movement, at least on the surface, to prove that the studies they're commissioning will be neutral. Rep. Kerry White, R-Montana, introduced House Bill 496, which called for $35,000 to study transfer feasibility. After the bill was tabled in March, the original transfer language was replaced with a call for a general analysis of federal management of Montana lands. In a hearing earlier this month, disagreement erupted over the purpose of the bill—whether it was meant to solicit neutral research, or simply to push forward the land transfer agenda.
In Utah, University of Utah economist Jan Stambro does not consider the bill that commissioned her study, An Analysis of a Transfer of Federal Lands to the State of Utah, merely a political push for land transfers. "The study was commissioned just to give answers," she says. The bill called on neutral economists to conduct the study thoroughly, and the conclusions Stambro and her colleagues arrived at appear to be neutral, too. "Forecasting the full economic effects...is simply not possible," the study conjectured, but it may be feasible, under certain circumstances, for Utah to profit from managing its federal lands. The study concluded that in some scenarios, in which Utah increases oil and gas development and negotiates high royalties, the state could likely cover management costs—if oil and gas prices remain high.
Here's a rundown of the Western federal land transfer study bills and initiatives that have been proposed, passed or tabled since 2012.
Arizona: HB 2658, sponsored by Republican Rep. Brenda Barton, passed in March. It creates a committee of legislators to study impacts of a land transfer through consultations with experts and surveys of county commissioners. The cost of the study process is unspecified.
Colorado: HB 232, sponsored by Republican Rep. Randy Baumgardner, failed this week. It would have created a task force of Colorado county commissioners to study the transfer.
Idaho: Republican Rep. Lawerence Denney commissioned a legislative task force in 2013 to undertake a $20,000 feasibility study and a $61,000 legal study. The former investigated whether the state could generate enough income off the lands to manage them; the latter investigated the legal case for the transfer. The committee concluded that economically, the transfer might be feasible, though the legal case would be tricky. A minority of the task force dissented, arguing that a transfer would not be economically feasible based on the gathered evidence, and that it would be unconstitutional. This year, a resolution to continue the task force and charge it with looking further into how to take title of public lands, was tabled.
Montana: In 2013, the legislature commissioned an interim study on land management problems, one of which was dissatisfaction with the federal government, to be done by a council of legislators. The council's report recommends better collaboration with local agencies and managers. This year, Rep. White's bill, which asks for $35,000 to form a task force to focus a study on federal management problems, has passed the House and awaits the Senate vote.
Nevada: A $66,241 feasibility study taken on by county commissioners in 2013 found that a transfer could be very profitable for the state—in some scenarios, earning the state more than $200 million annually. However, an investigative report by Nevada television news station 8 News Now found their study to be politically biased.
New Mexico: This year, three study initiatives were killed in the legislature.
Oregon: Republican Rep. Wilson's HB 3240 is on the table this year. The bill asks for the creation of a task force of legislators to gather testimonial research on the feasibility of a transfer. Its cost is unspecified.
Utah: In 2012, Utah passed Ivory's study bill attached to the Transfer of Public Lands Act. It commissioned the nearly-800-page, $550,000 study by economist Stambro and her colleagues. Last year, Utah legislators established the Commission for Stewardship of Public Lands and funded it with $2 million to build a legal case and public relations campaign for a transfer.
Washington: Two transfer bills were killed this spring.
Wyoming: An $18,000 task force of legislators formed in 2013 gathered testimonial evidence on two occasions before recommending the state move forward with a transfer. The task force did not offer a formal report to support their conclusion. In March, Senate File 56 passed, which will give the Office of State Lands $100,000 $75,000 to identify which federal lands could be transferred.
Kindra McQuillan is an editorial intern at High Country News.
Follow @KindraMcQuillan]]>
That job is one of the biggest, most complicated, contentious positions in any public lands agency. Utah's public lands encompass a sensitive, arid ecosystem, unparalleled geological resources, centuries upon centuries of cultural treasures, and some of the most iconic scenery in the United States. All these things are affected by the multiple ways humans use the land, from energy development, to agriculture, to outdoor recreation. Just negotiating the political minefields laid by competing interests across Utah's public lands would be challenging, to say the least.
Juan Palma is noted for finding balance in working with the various interests. Most notably, he helped pioneer a new movement towards long range, landscape-wide planning that considers the multiple ways that people use the land. He was the force behind a pending draft Master Leasing Plan for the Moab area, where he garnered the participation of oil and gas developers, ranchers, and the outdoor recreation community.
When I asked him how he got everyone to the table, his answer was straightforward. "Collaboration," he said, adding, "We must meet face to face in order to see eye to eye."
More than just a little dicho, or "saying," those simple words seem to be Palma's guiding principle. "I put a lot of miles on my vehicle," he said, "and sat down with some of the most ardent critics of the BLM. I sincerely wanted to know what they think, even if I disagreed with them."
And the BLM does have ardent critics. The most ardent may very well be those who believe that federal public lands shouldn't exist at all. In Utah and many other western states there is a movement afoot for state governments to take over federal lands -- and now they have some key allies on the hill, including Utah Representative Rob Bishop, Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who, in a recent interview, indicated his interest in transferring federal public lands to states.
Although I spoke to him before the Bishop interview appeared, Palma brought up the controversial congressman. "I know Rob Bishop. I talk to Rob Bishop. At the end of the day I often disagree with him, but I want to understand where he is coming from." On the particular issue of federal land transfers, Palma believes "it isn't going anywhere." The public will eventually realize that land transfers could translate into decreased access to public lands.
Palma went on to explain that his own perspectives on public lands and his approach to managing them have a lot to do with his personal history and culture.
As a child, he traveled with his parents, working fields from the San Joaquín Valley northward into Washington. His family eventually settled in beet farming and fruit-growing country in Toppenish, Washington, on the Yakima Reservation. "Those were my most formative years," he said. During his time in the fields, and coming of age in a rural community, Palma was always surrounded by open spaces, yet his family lived in close quarters with other farmworkers, so community was integral to daily living. He grew up a communicator, and as he would realize later, becoming a conservationist was also natural to him.
"It wasn't until I was in my 30s, that I began to pursue a career in the public lands, first with the national Forest Service." Like many people who work for public land agencies, Palma had to start at the bottom, working as a typist, and eventually moving to the BLM, where he would work his way up through the ranks to lead the agency in Utah, which manages nearly half the land in the state. While he is known for saying that "only in America" can a migrant kid grow up to be in charge of so much land, he also acknowledges that growing up working on the land is the reason he came to appreciate and care for public lands so much. "Our culture is tied to the outdoors. It has been for centuries," he says.
Palma's first month of retirement saw some big news coming out of the BLM and Department of Interior, and the coming months will likely see more big news. For people who enjoy the outdoors, the news is much more hopeful than February's Record of Decision on the Tres Rios Resource Management Plan, which could open over 90 percent of BLM land in southwestern Colorado to potential oil and gas development.
However, the newly announced Dinosaur Trail Master Leasing Plan in Colorado will protect Dinosaur National Monument from oil and gas development, as well as protect important wildlife areas. The draft Moab Master Leasing Plan will also likely be released in the spring, capping Palma's career with a hard-won success.
I asked Palma about the Master Leasing Plan (MLP) process, and why he supports it. "It's the way things should be done, now and into the future," he said. The process is inclusive, bringing more than just one interest into account, and gives various communities affected by development more say in how and where development should occur, and which resources, including recreational and cultural resources, should be protected.
In Moab, Utah, an MLP spells continued success for the recreation and tourism economy by protecting parks and public lands that are valuable to people who enjoy the area's broad range of recreation opportunities, cultural resources and natural scenery. Hiking, mountain biking, Jeeping, river running, and rock climbing are among the most popular activities that fuel Moab's economy. Canyonlands and Arches national parks draw hundreds of thousands of people every year.
"I see a new BLM in the future," Palma said. With new, landscape-wide planning processes like Master Leasing Plans, management decisions in areas are not necessarily left solely to a single field office. The BLM has generally run its planning processes through field offices in particular areas. More inclusive, regional planning could break that pattern, by creating a better public process as communities are engaged, and establishing more consistency throughout the system. "I think the BLM will be a better agency," he said.
Before I closed our conversation, I wanted to know what the future holds for Juan Palma. "I have a positive outlook," he said. "I won't be doing this work anymore, but I still see myself being involved, somehow." The outdoors and public lands is definitely in Palma's blood, and he returned to the idea of Latino values for the outdoors and conservation. "We need to keep getting our youth out there," he said. "It was easy for us to be connected to the outdoors as we grew up. But now it's easy to just stay indoors all the time. We need to keep those connections to the outdoors alive, so we don't lose our public lands."
Rod Torrez is the communications strategist of HECHO, a community of Latino sportsmen and women committed to bringing a Latino voice to conservation.]]>
That's why Korenblat — a longtime mountain bike advocate who runs Public Land Solutions, a Moab-based nonprofit that advocates for recreation planning — was surprised to receive a letter in which Bishop proposed a truce: "I believe Utah is ready to move away from the tired arguments of the past," he wrote to environmental groups, mountain bikers, off-roaders, energy producers and everyone in between. "We have a window of opportunity to end the gridlock." Bishop's solution, which Greg Hanscom wrote about for HCN in 2013, was to think of wilderness-quality lands as "currency" that could be used to bargain for development elsewhere.
Bishop's first order of business was to ask county officials across Utah to submit proposals about how to best manage the public lands within their borders. The hope was that locally-crafted agreements — swapping development here for wilderness there, human-powered recreation here for motorized recreation there — would help mitigate the lawsuits and bitter political fights that have long marred Utah's canyon country, as well as prevent President Obama from declaring broad swaths of the state off-limits through national monument designation. Officially, Bishop called the idea his Public Lands Initiative. Colloquially, it became known as the Grand Bargain.
Everyone involved was optimistic. "In some places, you see these bills and ask yourself, 'What's the threat?'" says Korenblat. "In this place, there truly is a threat in the form of energy development that we need to do some zoning for. To me, the fact that the need is real gives me hope that this'll pass."
Yet for a while, it looked like the Grand Bargain might fall victim to Western politics as usual. Deadlines came and went, and counties remained locked in the same tired battles. Wayne County dropped out of negotiations. A sparsely-populated corner of northeastern Utah called Daggett County was briefly touted as a "model for the nation," after it became the first to submit an agreement, but then the commissioners who drafted the plan were voted out of office and their replacements reneged. Things were not looking good.
But Bishop remained patient. Now, more than two years after sending the letter, his efforts are paying off. San Juan and Duchesne counties have jumped on-board and are working on proposals. Emery, Summit and Uintah counties have either submitted or are close to submitting proposals. And on April 10, the Grand Bargain got a big boost when Grand County, Utah, submitted its proposal.
Grand County surrounds Arches National Park and the Moab area, spanning 3,694 square miles of mountain-biking, climbing, backpacking, ATVing, desert rat paradise. It's also one of the most hotly contested parts of the state: Though its economy over the last 30 years has largely shifted from resource extraction to recreation, the county currently has almost no designated wilderness and some 800,000 acres of land open to oil and gas leasing. If a deal can be struck here, where old-school, conservative Utah butts up against more liberal newcomers, then perhaps a Grand Bargain for the rest of the state — and even elsewhere in the West — is also possible.
So what's in store for Grand County's famed red rock landscapes? The final package calls for the creation of up to 514,000 acres of wilderness, mostly in the Book Cliffs area, which county council member Chris Baird calls "one of the best examples of what Utah looked like before it was settled by Europeans." (The final amount of wilderness depends on land swaps with the state. Areas near the Book Cliffs, in Uintah County, could be opened to limited drilling in exchange for wilderness protection in Desolation Canyon.)
Grand County also requests the creation of a 159,000-acre National Conservation Area in its southeastern corner; Wild and Scenic River suitability on the Dolores, Green and Colorado rivers; and a 2,900 acre expansion of Arches National Park. Offroad vehicle groups successfully fought for a zero net loss deal, so for each mile of off-road vehicle trail closed, another will be opened elsewhere. The plan doesn't call for specific zoning for new oil and gas development, but any acreage not protected for recreation or conservation would be potentially available for drilling, in addition to some 30,000 acres of tar sands development. (Some recreation areas will also be available for energy development.)
Altogether, the proposal conserves around 60 percent of the land once slated for protection in America's Red Rock Wilderness Act. But it doesn't please everybody. Three out of seven county council members voted against it, and Scott Groene, of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, says the outcome favors off-road vehicles over hikers and wildlife. Labyrinth Canyon, a remote canyon popular with multi-day river runners that Groene, Baird and Korenblat all hoped would be protected as wilderness, remains a point of contention. The plan calls for the benches above the canyon to remain available to energy developers, while canoeists and off roaders will continue to share the canyon itself (though motorized users will be shut out during peak river-running season).
Plus, the recommendation is simply that. The ball is now in Bishop's court, and he's faced with the unenviable task of wrangling agreements from the remaining counties and molding them into a single, passable bill. Phase One of the Public Lands Initiative — convincing stakeholders to participate — is done. Phase Two — collecting county-crafted agreements — is nearing completion.
Now, the delegation is about to enter the third phase — "where we take a bit more control," says Fred Ferguson, Bishop's former legislative director and current chief of staff for Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. As Ashley Korenblat explains it, "The counties don't vote on the bill. Yes, we need their input, but this is federal land and it's going to be decided in a U.S. Congress." If there are places where local consensus can't be reached, Bishop and the rest of the Utah delegation will take matters into their own hands.
In his new role chairing the House Natural Resource Committee in a Republican-controlled Congress, Bishop is in a strong position to pass a bill. And though some conservationists quietly question whether the Congressman — who has publicly supported efforts to force the federal government to transfer its land to western states — will be as open to new wilderness designations as he claims to be, no one is willing to say anything that may jeopardize what's slowly, painstakingly becoming the biggest reshuffling of the public lands checkerboard that the West has ever seen. As SUWA's Groene succinctly puts it, "the punchline is still coming."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent at High Country News.
Follow @kristalanglois2]]>


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