Collide-a-scape

This story about the district manager of the Bureau of Land Management‘s field office in Farmington, New Mexico accepting gifts from oil and gas companies, resigning when the BLM found out and began investigating, and immediately going to work for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association (as president!) points out some of the persistent problems that some federal agencies have, partly on account of contradictory or incoherent missions.  This has come up most famously recently in regard to the Minerals Management Service, the fairly obscure agency tasked with both selling leases for offshore drilling and conducting regulatory oversight of drilling activities.  In that case MMS officials were literally in bed with employees of oil companies applying for permits, and the resultingly cozy relationship has been blamed in part for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  The fallout from that mess has included the renaming of the MMS as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and plans for further reorganization to clearly separate the functions of selling leases and enforcing regulations.

BLM has generally done a better job than MMS of acting as a regulator rather than a facilitator, but its official mission tasks it with administering an extraordinarily and increasingly complex mix of uses over an enormous amount of land using a “multiple-use” approach that results in “management of the public lands and their various resource values so that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the present and future needs of the American people.”  That’s pretty vague, and doesn’t give much guidance about how to resolve the conflicting priorities that will inevitably develop with so many possible uses out there, each with its own advocates.  In general I think the BLM has done a pretty good job of balancing the various uses, but some field offices have done better than others, and the Farmington office in particular has clearly made oil and gas drilling a high priority in recent years.

The contrast with the Park Service, which has a much clearer and more straightforward mission instructing it to manage National Parks “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations,” is instructive.  There is still quite a bit of room for different priorities and policies stemming from the tension between preservation and visitation embedded in the Park Service mission, but it at least rules out a lot of the priorities that can be pretty tempting to employees tasked with overseeing the very lucrative activities of certain industries.

You have to read this final report just issued by the Interior Department to appreciate the blatant disregard for the West’s air quality demonstrated by the Bush Administration in its final weeks.

First, some background. Late last year, I wrote a piece for High Country News that revealed the blistering critiques EPA’s Rocky Mountain office had sent to Utah BLM for its shoddy (and in many cases, non-existent) air quality analysis of gas drilling projects on federal lands. In essence, the BLM’s standard practice during the Bush Administration was to approve individual gas projects that numbered hundreds or thousands of wells without looking at the cumulative impact to air quality.

What made this especially egregious was the slate of huge drilling projects approved in the waning months of the Administration, which I wrote about here for Mother Jones magazine.

To many, the BLM’s controversial lease auction in Utah around Christmas time (later voided by Interior Secretary Salazar) served as a cruel coda to eight years of untrammeled energy development of western lands. As I also reported for Mother Jones, one distressed BLM manager in Utah unloaded all his pent-up frustration:

What can I say that has not already been said? Just more of the same from a Department of the Interior that has no sense of ethics and no moral compass. It is like we are playing in some reality game show where deceit is just part of the game.

And that’s exactly how it was played right up to Bush’s final days in office. The Interior report released yesterday is largely a rebuke to Utah BLM for the way it circumvented the concerns and advisory role of other federal agencies, such as the National Park Service and EPA, during the pre-auction review phase of those final leases.

Specifically, the Interior report also documents how the Bush Administration tried to ensure that those mounting concerns about air quality could not be acted on even after Bush’s term ended:

On January 15, 2009, a few days before leaving office, Bush Administration appointees representing BLM and the United States Forest Service executed a Memorandum of Understanding which asserted that quantitative air quality analysis would not be “appropriate” when making oil and gas planning decisions, or when undertaking “low-level energy development activity.”

How convenenient. And sleazy.

During Bush’s two terms, I wrote a bunch of magazine stories about oil & gas development on public lands. I never encountered so many pissed off people. Many of them felt steamrolled by the energy boom– ranchers in Wyoming and New Mexico, environmentalists in Colorado, and archaeologists in Utah.

Lots of career staffers in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) felt impotent too, and their anger built up over the years. Last December, one of them finally exploded, after I asked him what he thought about Bush’s last minute energy lease sales in Utah, ecologically and archaeologically rich land that abutted Canyonlands National Park and Dinosaur National Monument, among others:

What can I say that has not already been said? Just more of the same from a Department of the Interior that has no sense of ethics and no moral compass. It is like we are playing in some reality game show where deceit is just part of the game. Not good behavior for an organization that is managing the national heritage in trust for the public… Right now, BLM would make an omelette with California condor eggs if the oil and gas industry asked for breakfast. Everything including people, places, flora, fauna, art and history are mere impediments to energy production and most importantly corporate profit.

Well, not long after Obama took office, a new era for the BLM began and those leases got iced.

Seems like some Republicans just can’t stomach that, despite having gotten their way for the previous eight years. So this is how they channel their anger. It sucks being powerless, doesn’t it guys?

UPDATE: Ray Ring at High Country News has a sharp-eyed take on the Republican filibuster of David Hayes that places it in a larger political context.

Why do people get all misty-eyed over wild horses? I’m no exception. The times I’ve witnessed them galloping through Utah’s canyon country I immediately forgot that they are an exotic, habitat-killing species.

Several years back, Ted Williams in Audubon magazine wrote about the “ecological havoc” caused by the estimated 30,000 hoofed beasties that roam the West.

Now that’s an “inconvenient truth.” It’s also an issue so politically and emotionally charged that for years the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has effectively been hamstrung in its efforts to reduce the feral horse population (and the damage to native ecosystems) on public lands. Williams nicely captures all these swirling currents in his piece.

Everyone with a stake in the debate acknowledges that the current BLM policy–which consists of sheltering captive horses at enormous cost and trying to adopt them out–is not working.  To ease the burden, late last year the BLM floated the idea of eauthanizing some of the captive population.

Predictably, that didn’t go over well with horse lovers.

Yesterday, the wife of T. Boone Pickens tried riding to the rescue in Congress with an idea to build a sanctuary for the entire wild horse population that would then act as “living museum.”  As the AP reported, Pickens claimed that

her planned million-acre refuge in Nevada should receive a federal stipend of $500 per horse per year — or $15 million a year for 30,000 horses — in return for taking the animals off the government’s hands.

It’s not clear from the AP story why the BLM is balking at the scheme, since the cost of the current program far exceeds this. But there’s something about this notion of a “living museum” that fascinates me. It’s as if we have to find a way to keep the mythology of this Western iconic species from going extinct.

Remember those controversial Resource Management Plans in Utah that the BLM rammed through during Bush’s final months? I covered the story here.

The federal land plans must be on increasingly shaky ground because the Utah State Legislature has drafted a resolution expressing its strong support for the way BLM handled them.

My favorite line in the Resolution:

WHEREAS, there was no cutting of corners or abridgement of processes in preparing the resource management plans