Changing Landscape

There are two things you can't miss on a drive through southern Wyoming. The first is the thousands of pronghorn, a graceful, fast-moving animal that largely disappears into the flat, high desert scrubland that seems to go on forever. The second is the gas pumps and holding tanks and occasional rigs that dot the otherwise vacant landscape. Southwest Wyoming, an area the size of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined, is estimated to contain more than 85 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas -- nearly four times the amount used annually across the United States.

For an agency such as the Bureau of Land Management, which controls much of the land-use planning and energy development in the West and whose mission is to balance multiple uses for the benefit of present and future generations, those competing images represent a growing challenge.

"In addition to world class energy, we also have some of the greatest big game habitat in the country," says Bob Bennett, BLM's state director for Wyoming. "Wyoming has more pronghorn, elk, moose and mule deer than any other state. It's all here, and it's here because the habitat is here. We have to weigh preserving that and ensuring that's going to be here for the future with what we're doing today," he says.

Two years ago, Bennett, along with a handful of other federal and state wildlife managers, decided their agencies needed to more formally coordinate and prioritize plans for conserving crucial habitat in the face of unprecedented energy development. With passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act a year earlier, Congress and the Bush administration had put BLM under enormous pressure to reduce the backlog of energy company applications for drilling permits -- the law required BLM to create and staff interagency pilot offices to speed the review and permitting process throughout the West. It was clear to everyone involved that areas previously undeveloped would soon be at the heart of new energy production.

Conscious that such large-scale development would disrupt critical habitat, Bennett and his colleagues came up with the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative. It is essentially a multi-agency plan to manage habitat through collaboration with stakeholders, including ranchers, energy company operators, conservationists and government agencies at the local, state and federal level. By protecting and improving habitat in some areas, they hope to offset the inevitable damage caused in other locations, where development comes with hundreds of miles of new roads, and electricity and gas lines.

"On a pilot basis, we looked at the area west of the Continental Divide. We knew that in some places there was going to be demand for energy development, but we also knew there are vast areas of habitat there," says Bennett. "The idea was: 'What could we do to offset the development that's going to take place in those areas that are going to be disturbed? What we were looking for is: 'How can we have both?'" he said.

BLM got seed money for the program from the Interior Department, its parent agency, and enlisted the U.S. Geological Survey to help develop a science plan to monitor disturbances and measure the impact. "Our role is putting projects on the ground to benefit wildlife," Bennett says.

In 2007, the Wyoming BLM received $400,000 for the program and put the money toward such things as removing invasive weeds, restoring native plant species and replacing sheep fences with antelope-friendly fencing that allows pronghorn to pass through without cutting themselves on barbed wire. This feature is crucial in winter when the animals migrate hundreds of miles to find food and shelter from the high mountain snows to the north and east.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne supported the idea and, in 2007, expanded the program throughout the West by creating the Healthy Lands Initiative. The Bush administration requested $22 million for Healthy Lands this year, more than half of which was to go to the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (BLM was to receive $4.5 million, the U.S. Geological Survey $5 million and the Fish and Wildlife Service $2 million). But in December, Congress slashed the request, leaving the Wyoming conservation program with only $4.25 million total (BLM is to receive $1.25 million, USGS $1.5 million and FWS $1.5 million). The agencies now will have to scale back restoration and conservation programs while they work through their partners in state government and industry to try to raise additional funds.

State Role "One of the big strains right now is that it seems that [federal] resources are being dedicated to issuing permits to drill, but I'm not sure the resources are there to follow through on the monitoring and mitigation that will minimize the impacts," says Steve Furtney, a policy adviser to Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal. "We have a situation where the enormity of the activity is overwhelming the resources."

The state has embraced energy development, but as the royalties have accrued to the state treasury (last year Wyoming pulled in more than $925 million in payments for energy production on federal land alone), so have worries about the environmental costs of development, Furtney says.

"When we started into this, Wyoming had gone through a period of about 15 to 20 years of economic decline. People were pretty hungry just to have good job opportunities. As the local people have had those opportunities, then they start looking around at the other impacts on their quality of life. For example, wildlife populations have dropped off in certain areas and that's a phenomenon a lot of people don't like to see," Furtney says. He adds, however, that it's too simplistic to blame that drop-off on development alone when the region has endured several years of drought.

Many of the leases were sold years ago but are only being developed now, Furtney says. "What I see happening is all these leases were sold and now all of a sudden, with higher [natural gas] prices and new technologies, there's this huge scale of development going on that I don't think anybody anticipated would come at once."

Energy development isn't the only pressure on the land, and it might not be the worst, says Bennett: "Probably the worst thing that can happen to the landscape is the five-acre ranchette. We can develop an oil and gas field and 20 or 30 years from now put it back. But once it's been cut up and sold as a ranchette, the habitat and the value is forever changed. The access to land is forever changed. That's happening here just like it's happening in Montana, Colorado and other places."