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NEWS RELEASE January 13, 2008 New Plan for Great Divide Pushes Drilling at Expense of Wildlife, Public RecreationLARAMIE – Conservationists and members of the public today criticized the BLM’s newly released long-term land use plan for the Rawlins Field Office, which will replace the 1990 Great Divide Resource Management Plan. The plan, which governs the management of over 4.5 million acres of public lands and minerals including the eastern half of the Red Desert, prioritizes oil and gas development over all other uses, allowing oil and gas leasing on 98.4 percent of public lands and mineral resources. “This lack of balance is striking,” said Bruce Pendery, Program Director of the Wyoming Outdoor Council. “In the just-approved BLM Pinedale Resource Management Plan the BLM designated 455,340 acres of an even smaller Field Office unavailable for future leasing in order to protect wildlife and other resources, yet in Rawlins the BLM has designated only 73,230 acres unavailable for leasing even though the wildlife and other resources are just as valuable.” Adobe Town, the crown jewel landscape of the area, got the minimum protection allowed by law. Although a broad coalition of conservation and sportsman groups, the Wyoming Council of Churches, unions representing over 20,000 blue-collar Wyoming workers, two of the three county commissions in the planning area, and over 80,000 members of the public all demanded that the BLM expand protections in Adobe Town, the agency refused to withdraw any of the unprotected lands from oil and gas leases. “The BLM’s failure to protect Adobe Town is a slap in the face to the local governments, Governor Freudenthal, and all of the Wyoming people who stood strong to demand long-term protections from oil and gas development,” said Kim Floyd, a union leader with the Wyoming AFL-CIO. “By approving this plan the BLM has shown a depraved contempt for the public, and the only group they’ve been willing to listen to is the oil and gas industry.” “Adobe Town is the largest and most spectacular BLM wilderness in Wyoming, and big chunks of wild country have become the rare and endangered landscapes during the era of ‘drill, baby, drill,’” added Liz Howell, Director of the Wyoming Wilderness Association. "Wyoming must diversify economically and provide wild places for our future. Adobe Town has marginal oil and gas potential, and with the new administration coming in, we expect to prevail in protecting it." Despite public calls to balance drilling with greater protections for wildlife, the new plan extends the current reliance on timing measures that have been shown to have little to no biological value. For example, the plan continues the current ineffective sage grouse stipulations for oil and gas drilling, providing only a quarter-mile “No Surface Occupancy” buffer for sage grouse leks (or breeding sites) and allows road construction and drilling within two miles of the lek as long as it is done outside the breeding and nesting season. “Wildlife protections in the new plan are virtually non-existent, representing a continuation of the failed policies that brought the sage grouse to the brink of Endangered Species listing and caused declines in wildlife in oil and gas fields across Wyoming,” said Erik Molvar, wildlife Biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. “Scientific studies have proven that the present sage grouse protection measures don’t work, state wildlife agencies have roundly criticized them, and the BLM itself has admitted in the Powder River Basin that the current policies aren’t working and a new strategy is needed. Yet in the new Rawlins RMP, the agency has approved the exact same unworkable measures to govern one of the most important sage grouse strongholds in the world for the next 20 years. It’s as if they’re trying to drive the grouse onto the Endangered Species list.” The plan takes a similar approach for other types of wildlife, and will allow heavy impacts to big game animals, birds of prey, and rare types of wildlife such as the pygmy rabbit and Wyoming pocket gopher, according to the groups. "Hunters have been using the Great Divide area for many generations,” said Mike Guy, a Wyoming sportsman who hunts in the Red Desert. “The BLM’s refusal to give this prior use its due consideration is an insult and a taking of resources from the hunters of Wyoming. Every oil and gas wellsite they permit reduces the amount of wildlife habitat and thus reduces the overall wildlife population." "This Great Divide area is part of the ancestral homeland of the Eastern Shoshone people, and contains sacred landscapes, respected places, and cultural sites that are important to Native people," added Dick Baldes of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. "We respect the Earth and all of its inhabitants, and we are shocked and disappointed that the BLM's new plan shows so much disrespect to the land, the wildlife, and the cultural sites in its haste to prioritize oil and gas drilling." The new plan also reduces the number of Areas of Critical Environmental Concern from 4 to 3, failed to even consider the critically important wildlife habitats and migration corridors of the Powder Rim, and fails to protect any of the ACECs that did get designated. Contact information:
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Biodiversity Conservation Alliance P.O. Box 1512, Laramie, WY 82073 (307) 742-7978 - carmi@voiceforthewild.org |