Crossing the Great Divide
The Western Heritage Alternative calls for a balance between protection and development in the Greater Red Desert
by Molly Absolon
 As you drive I-80 across southern Wyoming, miles and miles of barren, sagebrush wastelands flash by your window. The wind howls, blowing dust, sand and snow across the highway. It’s a hard, deceptively blank place that’s difficult to love. There’s so much room, so little detail except endless sky.
It takes some exploration to recognize the land’s redeeming attributes. If you slow down from 75 miles per hour and get off the main road, you’ll find hidden draws where springs create an oasis of life. You’ll see towering hoodoos of sandstone twisted into fantastical shapes. You’ll find mountainous uplifts where the sagebrush is replaced by firs and pines and pockets of aspen. You’ll watch herds of antelope racing away from your car, or a group of wild horses grazing on the parched landscape. Raptors soar overhead, the stars light up the night sky, and the wind blows.
This part of Wyoming—loosely known as the Great Divide region—is vast and empty. It is empty because of its harshness. Much of the Great Divide is rugged desert, lands nobody knew what to do with. With the exception of a few hardy ranchers who ran their cattle here, prospectors who searched for gold, as well as some sheepherders, hunters, and a limited number of oil and gas operators, these miles and miles of open space so typical of the Great American West have largely been left alone.
Today, they are one of the few great expanses of untouched desert left in the United States. But that is changing. The presence of natural gas in the fissures and cracks beneath the Earth’s surface here is attracting people, and the empty, untouched character of the Great Divide will inevitably disappear.
“There is no place you can go in Wyoming—really in the United States except perhaps Nevada and parts of California—where you can see so far,” says Marian Doane, native Wyomingite, and the statewide organizer for Friends of the Red Desert. Doane first began rock hounding in the region with her father as a child in the 1960s and 70s. “This land makes me feel small and humble, and it gives me much-needed solitude,” she adds. “When you look across these fantastic, harsh, yet formidable vistas, you can see very little human impact.”
BLM developing management plan for southeastern Wyoming
Human hands are at work determining the future of this land, however. This winter, the Rawlins Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management is scheduled to issue a draft resource management plan for the entire southeastern half of Wyoming. The plan will determine how a total of eight million acres will be managed for the foreseeable future. This eight million is broken down into 3.5 million acres of “surface” or actual BLM holdings, together with an additional 4.5 million acres of federal mineral rights managed by the Rawlins Field Office. It includes the eastern and southern half of the Red Desert, Adobe Town, the Ferris Mountains, Wild Cow Creek, Bennett Mountain, and the Atlantic Rim. To give it perspective, the Jack Morrow Hills Plan, which generated such controversy, dealt with only 620,000 acres.
“This plan covers a vast area,” Doane says. “People don’t understand how massive it is and how important it is for them to be involved. This could be our last chance to keep part of Wyoming the way it is for our grandchildren.”
A total of 10,000 oil, gas and coalbed methane wells are proposed for the Great Divide region and will be considered in the resource management plan. That’s a lot of wells. It also means a lot of roads, people, infrastructure, and change for this untouched landscape. But it is hard to get people riled up about the Great Divide. The land is unknown and its beauty subtle.
“The Greater Red Desert is in my backyard,” says Mike Burd, of Green River. Burd is a trona worker for FMC and the vice-president of United Steelworkers of America’s Local 13214. He has been an active participant in his union’s Blue-Green Alliance—an effort to combine forces with Wyoming’s conservation community over issues such as the future of the Great Divide region.
“I don’t want to see the desert raped and scraped with no worry about the consequences,” Burd continues. “This is the only planet we’ve got. We can’t mess it up, then jump off and go somewhere else.
“We need to develop it at a pace that the land will take,” he adds. “There’s a balance. We all want to warm our homes and drive our cars, but there is a way to do it that is clean and safe and will keep jobs in Wyoming.”
Western Heritage Alternative calls for balance
Conservationists and labor are suggesting that way is what they call the Western Heritage Alternative. This alternative is not anti-development. In fact, under its proposed plan, 92 percent of the Great Divide Region would be available for some kind of oil and gas development. But the plan does insist that this development occurs in a way that is sustainable both for the land and its people.
“Everyone wants clean air and clean water, and they want to drive their car, hell I’ve got an RV out there in the driveway. I think we can have both, it just takes some sensibility and patience,” Burd says.
“I grew up admiring [former] Gov. Ed Herschler,” he continues. “And I agree with his position that Wyoming needs development, but that development must be done at Wyoming’s pace, for Wyoming’s workers and Wyoming’s land.”
The Western Heritage Alternative calls for such a pace. It strives to protect Wyoming from yet another boom-bust cycle through careful planning and conservation. It calls for the use of the best available technology, staged development, directional drilling, reinjection of water produced through coalbed methane extraction, no surface occupancy in areas where wildlife winter, buffers around grouse strutting grounds and nesting areas, care for sensitive cultural sites, and limitations on the number of roads built.
The goal of these objectives is to provide wildlife with sanctuaries during development, to lesson the physical impacts on the landscape, and to ensure the area’s human history remains in tact.
Critical places targeted with special attention
There are a few places in the region where the Western Heritage Alternative calls for additional protection. These are places that are particularly fragile, culturally sensitive or important to wildlife. They represent only eight percent of the total acreage involved in the management plan.
“When the people I talk to realize we are not here to shut down oil and gas, that we are asking them to do it correctly, to slow down development and create an extended, sustainable industry, they agree,” Doane says. “Even drillers agree.”
The boom has already started, however. Burd says hotels are full in Rock Springs and Green River and the cars in area parking lots carry tags from Oklahoma and Texas.
“These people are here to make a buck. They are not bad people, but they don’t share Wyoming’s values. This isn’t their home,” Burd says. “I’ve lived here all my life. I want to keep Wyoming clean for my grandkids. I want to keep the jobs in Wyoming so my grandkids can make a living.”
“We can have both,” says Christopher Boswell, Gov. Freudenthal’s chief of staff. “We’ll struggle with balance. We’ll be frustrated when so many policies are developed far from Wyoming, by people who may not have Wyoming’s interests foremost in their minds. We’ll screw up some of the development, and we’ll get much of it right.
“There’s a fair percent of the population both in Wyoming and nationally which believes development of the nation’s energy resources is worthwhile. Many also agree that it should be done with care. The debate is over the degree of “care” exercised,” Boswell concludes.
The Rawlins Resource Area Management Plan will be the BLM’s attempt to codify this degree of care for southeastern Wyoming. The plan is due to be released this winter. Members are encouraged to write letters to the BLM and to the editor of their local papers. They are urged to ask public officials to adopt the Western Heritage Alternative and make sure the pending natural gas boom looming over the Great Divide occurs on Wyoming’s terms.
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