Director’s Message

“Perfect Storm” Leaves No Safe Harbor for Wildlife

The “perfect storm” is building over Wyoming. Large and lucrative reserves of oil and gas underlie critical habitat and migration corridors for wildlife already stressed by drought and subdivision encroachment. Meanwhile, the agency responsible for assuring that our public lands’ multiple resources are protected — the Bureau of Land Management — is focusing on one goal: speed up and increase energy development.

Nowhere is the conflict between oil and gas development and wildlife more sharply focused than in Sublette County. Here, in the Upper Green River Valley, sensitive world-class wildlife are battling frenzied oil and gas development, tossed and disregarded like a small ship caught in a storm at sea, tumbling from wave to wave, with no safe harbor in sight.

The Trapper’s Point bottleneck is a microcosm of the larger conflict, and has become a test case for federal land managers and the Freudenthal Administration. (See article)

Fortunately, unlike so many other high- profile conflicts involving competing uses of public resources, such as the spotted owl and old-growth timber in the Pacific Northwest and irrigation in Oregon’s Klamath Basin, the solution to the Trapper’s Point conflict is neither complex nor costly. Professional wildlife managers agree on what needs to be done to protect the integrity and functionality of the migration route — the longest big-game migration corridor in the lower 48 states. Further, because these lands are currently mostly unleased for oil and gas, no party need forfeit existing rights. Neither is the potential for oil and gas high, but rather low to moderate.

Wyoming Representative Monte Olsen has demonstrated vision and will by bringing together key stakeholders to form the Trapper’s Point Working Group, tasked with finding consensus on how to protect the bottleneck’s viability. Not surprisingly, positions differed. Conservationists, relying on professional wildlife scientists, advocated a combination of no leasing and no surface occupancy on approximately 12,000 acres, while petroleum industry representatives agreed to only 2,240 acres of no leasing or no surface occupancy.

Unfortunately, working under inflexible and fast-tracked BLM timelines imposed by the Bush Administration, initial efforts to gain consensus were unsuccessful. Another contributing factor was Wyoming’s long-standing pattern of favoring energy development over all other uses of public lands. (Approximately 95% of the 18 million acres of public lands managed by the Wyoming BLM is open to oil and gas development.) Consequently, the energy industry is accustomed to calling the shots, and it saw no reason to accept a situation where its access would be restricted to anything more than a token amount of public land.

Since the BLM has foreclosed this unique effort to build stakeholder consensus, it now falls to the agency to summon the vision and will to manage its lands and resources according to the multiple-use mandates the laws require. Currently, the entire 1.2 million-acre Pinedale Resource Area (excepting the 7,700-acre Scab Creek Wilderness Study Area) is available for oil and gas leasing and development, with over 90% of the land already leased to energy companies. Because the BLM has legally committed this land to development at a level that is shockingly out of balance, and wholly inconsistent with the concept of multiple use, the continued availability of wildlife habitat, open space and recreation — important multiple uses of our public lands — is threatened.

Given the overwhelming dominance of one use — oil and gas development — over the entire resource area and the critical importance of the Trapper’s Point bottleneck to migrating big game, it is of utmost importance, and no great sacrifice, that the BLM do the right thing and protect the corridor.

Meanwhile, state and local officials, including Governor Freudenthal, must fight for this quintessentially Wyoming resource by demanding that the federal government manage our public lands for the benefit of all resources and all Wyoming people who value those resources…not just for multi-national energy companies seeking unprecedented profits. Industry and private citizens too must take the initiative by refusing to allow wildlife to fall victim to this sudden, perfect storm. We need to join together to extend a lifeline to this key element of Wyoming’s natural heritage.