Party Favors: Land Handouts Are a Gas

[OneBlueSky]

NEWS: A late-term ploy by the Bush team and its consultants is giving oil and gas developers right-of-way on millions of acres of public land.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/exit-strategy-party-favors.html

By Keith Kloor
Mother Jones, September/October 2008 Issue

"I just want you to know that I'm not here representing blm," archaeologist Blaine Miller reminds me as we drive along the coarsely graded road through central Utah's Nine Mile Canyon. Nestled into the rugged, sparsely populated Tavaputs Plateau, the canyon is a virtual museum of prehistoric art, with an estimated 10,000 images pecked and painted on its towering sandstone walls. I've come to view the dazzling millennium-old renderings of hunters, shamans, and animals before, as Miller fears, they vanish under a coating of dust and grime, thanks to decisions made by his superiors at the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department division that oversees some 262 million acres of federal land.

Miller has been with the bureau 33 years, but he hasn't worked on Nine Mile issues since 2004, the year he publicly griped that his bosses wouldn't let him adequately investigate a proposed gas-drilling project. Four years and some 200 wells later, this once-serene canyon has become an industrial corridor, and Miller, who wears large aviator glasses and speaks in a lazy cadence, is up in arms over a new blm-approved plan that would bring 600 more gas wells and up to 1,000 truck trips a day through Nine Mile. Although he's an expert on the canyon's history and the sole archaeologist in the bureau's local field office, Miller wasn't able to view his office's environmental impact statement for the drilling expansion prior to its public release in February, something Kevin Jones, Utah's state archaeologist, calls "incredible."

But Miller has agreed to meet with me as a "private citizen," and so we spend the day scrambling up to cliff ledges and examining art panels 100 feet above the valley floor—several as clear as the day they were etched, others barely recognizable. "I know this one is fading from all the dust, because I've seen it hundreds of times since 1982," Miller says, pointing to a faint image of figures with splayed hands, triangular bodies, and hunting bows. While his superiors discount his observations as "anecdotal," a recent blm-commissioned study concluded that dust raised by the trucks is indeed damaging the rock art. The Environmental Protection Agency also has raised concerns about the "physical integrity" of the art due to dust and unchecked ozone pollution in the canyon.

But what incenses Miller most is his office's new Tavaputs Plateau resource management plan, the master blueprint that dictates how the bureau will oversee the area for the next 15 to 20 years. Normally, these "rmps" take years to complete as myriad competing interests weigh in, but Interior has stamped as "time sensitive" nearly a dozen such plans in six resource-rich Western states—Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, and Alaska—and is rushing to finalize them before Bush leaves office.

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http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/exit-strategy-party-favors.html