Linda J. Cooper

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has just issued the final environmental impact statement for the Pinedale Resource Management Plan with a preferred choice of direction in the form of Alternative 4, modified from its earlier draft.

This plan provides future direction for much of what this government agency does with and to the land, water, air and wildlife. With roughly a million acres of land and federal minerals in its portfolio, this agency can wreak havoc on the Sublette County landscape, change the patterns of wildlife it has taken millennia to produce even beyond the borders of the planning area, affect aquifer draw down in both the Green River/Colorado River Basin system and the Snake/Columbia River Basin system and foul what was once the finest air in a region of national parks, forests and wilderness areas.

In the past eight years the rapid and overreaching oil and gas development program launched from Washington, D.C., and promoted by companies and those who seek to benefit from rising profits and higher costs for consumers, has ruled the day based on a 1988 plan.

The new Pinedale Resource Management Plan has the potential to create a lasting legacy that will outlive the current administration in Washington, create the atmosphere within which the local public choices are limited, and will likely eventually be overtaken by a different national energy strategy.

How would it respond to a request for a lease to develop a wind farm or solar electric site, for example? Management by stipulations or seasonal suspension tools is insufficient to meet the real challenges of air pollution, water contamination, hydro-geological disruption to water supply, aquifer contamination and draw down, and alternative energy development.

In 2000 the BLM told us that oil and gas development could be done in an environmentally acceptable way. Then the decline in the mule deer issue became evident; the migration corridor issues surfaced; the migratory bottlenecks became obvious, even though many warned and worked hard to change the development direction. Lately in 2008, benzene and other toxic chemicals in water were detected and ozone alerts occurred.

Energy resources are being extracted differently than in earlier boom times in Wyoming. Today resources are "continuous," found trapped in layers beneath the surface, and extraction is accomplished by deep drilling and large volumes of water and fraccing fluids, chemicals dangerous to humans, wildlife, soils and water.

The layers into which this drilling, flooding and chemical intrusion occurs can and will have a profound effect on the hydrogeology; that is the relationship between and among layered aquifers that provide our drinking water and irrigation waters.

High volumes of super-salty water result from this drilling. Re-injection, closed loop systems, piping, storage tanks, or trucking these produced waters each presents problems and impacts unaccounted for by this largely front-end-loaded development plan.

This BLM Pinedale Resource Management plan is deficient in its approach because it starts with oil and gas instead of planning to balance the development of these commodities with human health, water quality and quantity, air quality and other land management concepts. We can live without oil and gas - we cannot survive with out clean air and water; we cannot maintain our lifestyle without the wildlife, wild lands and small communities we all live here for.

The nation may actually be on the cusp of making important changes to develop new and alternative forms of energy to replace what we use now.

The enactment of a plan that is "yesterday focused" and without air and water safeguards, without sufficient containment is not a plan we should want. The BLM was supposed to develop a new plan to replace the 1988 plan, and what have we got?

The plan is tortured. Because it started on the wrong foot, oil and gas first and everything else second, in the final analysis it lacks the balance, and thoughtfulness that plans with decades of forward impact should have.

It lacks hard data where it should have data, and seems to be caught in a place where even if they wanted to do better, they do not seem able to know how. They have tinkered around the edges, taken to heart the issues of certain wildlife matters because that is easy. But the tough stuff, the hard science that would result in limits on where and under what circumstances these resources can be developed is missing.

The document itself is difficult to read, it is voluminous, and its "devil" is in the details. It has a format that is repetitive and bureaucratic, and in every way leads the already skeptical reader to dig deep into its tables and maps and endless rhetoric to find the nuggets where the public interest will be damaged. SDSBT is neither surprised, nor disheartened by this document, it is just too bad that the BLM is what it is.

Linda J. Cooper is spokeswoman for Stop Drilling-Save the Bridger-Teton, a citizens group headquartered in Bondurant.