A Great American Wilderness Set to Test George Bush - April 24, 2001

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BBC note: This transcript has been typed at speed, and therefore may contain typographical mistakes.

JEREMY VINE:
Wyoming makes immediate peace with its visitors. This is the state of empty spaces. The wild stallion and his mares have every right of way. There is such a thing as American wilderness and they guard it. The sandhill cranes can't even remember what a tourist looks like. The only passers-by are pronghorn antelope. The people in these parts are few and far between. Winter blocked off every track through the Red Desert and Jack Morrow hills, known as the Wild Heart of the West. It's an extraordinary place, whose beauty is almost forbidding. In fact John Mionczynski is one of few people who know the way in. As horses raced our jeep, he told me how he'd spent months living here in the wild.

JOHN MIONCZYNSKI:
There's a recharging of the soul that I've found. I was living off what I could hunt and gather. In that way I wasn't much different from the antelope that were all around.

VINE:
He takes me into the Honeycombs, a towering multi-coloured rock formation. For John, this place is close to heaven.

MIONCZYNSKI:
This is part of a turtle shell carapace. It's 50 million years old.

VINE:
But now he fears it won't be fossils he discovers next time he's here, but the beginnings of the oil and gas operations the Bush administration wants to expand. How, he asks, can the government even consider it?

MIONCZYNSKI:
This is a fine place to meditate, to come and divorce yourself of the ordinary daily problems and feel connected to the Earth. You do feel like you're a member of the planet. The opportunities to see antelope, elk and other animals interacting in a wild way is truly unique. When they put in oil rigs, there's noise, there's people running around and it loses that sense of wildness and solitude.

VINE:
But the rigs run to a different rhythm. With the government warning the US faces an energy crisis, Wyoming's workers can't drill fast enough. President Bush's promise to consider all public lands for development is their meal ticket. The Jonah fields didn't even exist five years ago. Today they are the beast to Wyoming's beauty, but officials here stress nobody has forced this on the state.

SUSAN DAVIS:
BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT WYOMING
It brings them income and jobs. It pays taxes in Wyoming. They're very important to the people here. They get very testy when you want to take them away.

REPORTER:
Can you balance the jobs here with all the environmental concerns?

DAVIS:
Yes, you can. Jack Morrow Hills is in my back yard. I was born there. I hunt there. I recreate there. I believe you can control the drilling to where it isn't going to hurt the environment.

VINE:
Fine, so long as the government is seeing straight when it came to oil and gas. These wells may look very messy in the Wyoming landscape, but the way the oil and gas companies have played the politicians has been very neat indeed. In the run-up to the election, President Bush was given millions of dollars by oil and gas. In fact, 15 times as much as Al Gore received from them. And the Vice President, Dick Cheney, has just declared $37 million in earnings this year mainly from firms like this. The bumper sticker war has begun. For Senator Craig Thomas, this could be a bracing encounter. He's a Republican, one of Dick Cheney's pals, and this office is full of environmentalists who want him to explain why he's supporting new drilling. Mac Blewer is on the left, from the Wyoming Outdoor Council, which is campaigning to stop the rigs spreading across the Red Desert. But they know the senator does not want there to be no-go areas.

CRAIG THOMAS:
US SENATOR WYOMING
You're inferring that all the Red Desert is environmentally sensitive. I don't agree with that. We have opportunities to drill in a much more sensitive way. You can go out there and use those lands, use them sensibly. When you are through, you can replace them. So yes, they are available and should be available for multiple use.

VINE:
Do you think drilling can be done in a sensitive way?

THOMAS:
Absolutely.

VINE:
But how can people trust Mr Bush to act in the best interests of the environment when he took so much money from oil and gas companies in the run-up to the election?

THOMAS:
I don't think that makes sense at all. He's not doing that because he took money from the oil and gas people.

VINE:
He took so much.

THOMAS:
So what? That does not mean he's going to vote that way or that his policies go that way.

VINE:
He seems to be.

THOMAS:
Well, that's your view and it's not mine. I think he's seeking to develop a policy for multiple use, where we can save the environment, protect those areas which should not be multiply used, use them multiply and still protect the environment. I think you can do that. We have evidence of that all over our state.

VINE:
But as soon as the senator is gone, the campaigners are stuffing envelopes with letters. They believe the so-called energy crisis is nothing of the sort, and they reckon the public aren't buying the government's line.

MAC BLEWER:
WYOMING OUTDOOR COUNCIL
The majority of lands out here are federal. They belong to everybody. They don't belong to big oil. They don't belong to the corporations, they don't belong to BP Amoco, nor to Texaco. They belong to the American public. The majority of the American public don't want to see wild lands like the Red Desert, the Arctic refuge and Greater Yellowstone area drilled.

VINE:
So for the environmentalists the picture is devastatingly simple. How, they ask, can anyone even consider drilling here. But while they send their campaigning literature to all points west, the oil and gas companies are posting pay cheques to their workers. And in this state, the money is talking. In this bar, the drilling team has become the drinking team. Rick slides me a beer.

RICK MCCOLLUM:
We don't hurt nobody.

VINE:
You aren't hurting anybody?

MCCOLLUM:
We hurt no animals, no nothing, man.

BENJAMIN COTTERELL:
Most environmentalists I've seen drive SUVs which are the biggest gas-guzzlers on the road. Where do you think that comes from? Where do you think that comes from? Who drills for it?

MCCOLLUM:
They don't live out here, they don't work out here. How can they tell us what's going on when they sit there in an office on their fat ass and don't do shit?

ROYCE UMBDENSTOCK:
A geographer found a big reservoir of oil out there in the Red Desert. It don't matter if the last species on Earth of the rare bird, five left in the Red Desert, is out on that plain, they are going to go and drill it. Does that make me wrong for going out there and making my living? No.

VINE:
Which sums up what the environmentalists are up against. It's been a long day for Mac Blewer and he didn't get much change out of the senator. Arriving home, he just has to hope the government, and especially Vice President Cheney, are starting to hear the arguments.

MAC BLEWER:
I hope when he looks at Wyoming and sees that we are providing energy security for America, I hope he would see that we don't need to sacrifice everything. We don't need to drill in his home state any more than we already are.

VINE:
The White House view may be changing very slowly. Mr Bush is reportedly unnerved by the critics who say he feels a warm glow towards business but not to his own planet. That is nowhere near good enough for Mac. In his cabin he's writing a book about the fight to save the Red Desert. It's not over yet. In fact, it's barely begun.

BLEWER:
Some places should be left alone, places like the Red Desert. Once you have a wild land destroyed, you can't go back.