We know that the Bush Administration's energy plan was hatched in secrecy. No one had tickets of entry but complaisant political appointees and the energy industry itself. Now we are beginning to understand why the American public was excluded from this division of the spoils. And America's matchless public lands in Utah are among the major -- and early -- victims.

Utah's Book Cliffs-Uinta Basin
North of Green River, Utah, the 2,000-foot-high escarpment of the Book and Roan cliffs marks the southern perimeter of a million-acre wilderness of exceptional geographic and biological diversity. Bounded by a 250-mile long, thousand-foot-high band of cliffs, the longest continuous escarpment in the world, the Book Cliffs-Uinta Basin region is one of the largest unprotected, natural and mostly roadless areas in the western United States. This region is rich in wildlife habitat. It drew ancient hunters and draws the best of hunters today. Ancient cultural remains occur across the area. So do outstanding primitive recreational opportunities.

The Book Cliffs-Uinta Basin Region is a major sanctuary for wildlife. An estimated 375 vertebrate species -- half the number found in all of Utah -- occur in this region.  Archeological sites, including rock art, rock shelters, campsites, and burial grounds testify to its historical significance to humans. Today, people float the area's White and Green Rivers, hike and hunt its canyons and mesas, or simply enjoy watching wildlife bound over silver-green sage and early light burn on redrock cliffs.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently called the Desolation Canyon area in this region "a place where a visitor can experience true solitude -- where the forces of nature continue to shape the colorful, rugged landscape." Despite its own glowing evaluation of the place, the BLM works now to open these remaining wild lands to development of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

Protect It!
The Utah Wilderness Coalition (UWC) proposes wilderness designation for over 1 million acres of wilderness quality lands within the Book Cliffs-Uinta Basin Region in America's Red Rock Wilderness Act. There's no better way to ensure that the region remains as the BLM so accurately described it.

Why is Book Cliffs-Uinta Basin Region at Risk?
Over 140 years have passed since John Wesley Powell made his voyage of discovery on the Green River through Desolation Canyon, a period of time that has been characterized mostly by development. Yet the canyon and a very large surrounding region remain almost as wild as they were when Powell explored them. Bob Marshall, a founder of The Wilderness Society, once called this region the "Book Cliffs Roadless Area" and estimated its size at 2.4 million acres. In the sixty or so years since Marshall's statement, we've lost much. Mineral development and road construction have reduced the size of this roadless area by more than 60 percent.

Development companies have sliced, diced and drilled much of the Book Cliffs-Uinta Basin Region. They've narrowed both the critical summer and winter range for wildlife. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has identified a mule deer population here that declines because of drought, livestock grazing, increased human presence, and continuing energy development projects. And in letters to the BLM, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have expressed concern over the cumulative impacts of oil and gas development projects.

Yet the BLM refuses to protect the wilderness character of these outstanding recreational, scenic, and wildlife-rich wildlands. Why? The BLM's fiscal year 2002 budget offers a clue or two. It recognizes that the oil and gas industry has targeted most of eastern Utah as the next "gold rush" for oil and gas drilling. According to the BLM's April 25, 2002, testimony before the House Committee on Resources, BLM's primary focus now is inventorying oil and gas reserves and accelerating the approval process for drilling.

Bizarre, Bureaucratic Acupuncture Clinic
Some specific projects paint the picture. The BLM has already approved a range of proposals for drilling new wells, building new roads, and burying new pipelines within the White River and Lower Bitter Creek areas. Ironically, the White River is an area the agency itself recently found to have wilderness character. Today, the BLM is reviewing a proposal to drill over 400 gas wells and to build hundreds of miles of roads throughout an 80,000-acre project area that includes both of these units proposed for wilderness designation.

If this development is approved, hundreds of miles of roads, pipelines, drilling pads, production wells, and pumping stations will shatter the integrity of these wild lands. The impact, simply, would be devastating. Well access routes would be bulldozed over ridgetops, mesas, and through wash bottoms. Noisy production equipment would litter the landscape. Any opportunity for primitive recreation would vanish, along with wildlife habitat and wildlife.

Development isn't limited to oil and gas and it's not confined to the White River and Lower Bitter Creek wilderness units. The BLM recently approved rights-of-way for a coal mining operation within the Desolation Canyon proposed wilderness, the largest block of unprotected roadless land in the lower 48 states.

The proposed Lila Canyon Mine, including over 5,000 acres of federal and state lands, would overlap both an existing Wilderness Study Area and newly inventoried BLM wilderness units. The development would displace bighorn sheep and dry up crucial seeps and springs, unique water resources all the more important for their presence in an otherwise dry area.

What the Industry Already Has
The oil and gas industry already has access to a huge expanse of Utah public lands for energy exploration and development. Drilling in Utah wilderness lands makes no sense when vast resources exist outside wilderness. The Uinta Basin covers about 6,900,000 acres in northeastern Utah. The Utah Wilderness Coalition's (UWC) wilderness proposal in the Basin covers 1,132,915 acres, or just 16 percent of the Basin.

Over half of the total number of wells for oil and gas production drilled in Utah from 1911 through November of 2000 (15,315) were drilled within the Uinta Basin (8,737). And the most productive part of the Basin is north of the Utah Wilderness Coalition's proposal, closer to Vernal and Roosevelt. The fields in this area (Altamont, Bluebell and Cedar Rim) have produced about 31 percent of Utah's oil.

Oil and gas development is at an all-time high in the Uinta Basin, with more rigs operating, and more applications for permit to drill (APDs) being processed than ever.

If You Want Permission to Drill, Just Ask
From October 2000 through September 2001, the BLM's Vernal Field Office alone received 559 APDs and approved 394 wells on America's public land. Many others are drilled on state, private, and Native American tribal lands. That is an average of 33 approved each month, or about one and half wells per workday. That's nearly three times the average number of wells that the BLM approved in each of the 10 years preceding. With all of this area already open to drilling, it is extravagantly wasteful to permanently destroy the few remaining Utah lands still worthy of wilderness designation.

Solution
In late 2001, the Bureau of Land Management began the process of revising the outdated resource management plans (RMPs) for various BLM Field Offices, including Vernal and Price, the field offices that manage the Bookcliffs and Uinta Basin regions.

RMPs are the land-use plans, the documents that guide BLM decisions for all lands and resources over the 10 to 20 years of the plans' useful lives. Although oil and gas operations will no doubt continue to play a role on the lands these BLM offices manage, we need public comment to emphasize that oil and gas activity is not appropriate on all lands the plans cover. The wildlife, scenic, wilderness and other resource values of the area are irreplaceable. And they are dwindling. Despite orders from the Bush Administration, the BLM has a duty to protect those values.

Protection may take many forms. It could include non-discretionary oil and gas lease stipulations designed to protect wildlife, water sources, soils, or recreation; "no surface occupancy" lease stipulations; and "no lease" areas. And, certainly, no wilderness quality lands should be leased, explored or developed.

The ultimate protection for the precious wildlands here, as elsewhere in Utah, is passage of America's Red Rock Wilderness Act. In the interim, the Congress should support a "look before you lease" policy for the BLM to ensure that citizen-proposed wilderness lands, many of them places the BLM overlooked in its original inventories, are still wild when the Congress turns its attention to serious consideration of wilderness in Utah.