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Photo by Linda Baker
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Working group doesn't work
LINDA BAKER, UPPER GREEN RIVER VALLEY COALITION
The Bureau of Land Management called together the Pinedale Anticline Working Group (PAWG) in 2000, a Federal Advisory Committee formed to bring together a diverse representation of interested and affected parties, and provide monitoring and mitigation recommendations for the Pinedale Anticline Natural Gas Field. The management tool to be used is called Adaptive Environmental Management (from which the BLM has now dropped the word "Environmental").
The Pinedale Anticline represents a major confluence of natural resource conflicts: there are tens of thousands of wintering mule deer, pronghorn antelope and sage grouse on the Mesa (the land mass under the Anticline), and perhaps 40 TCF of natural gas 15,000 feet below it.
Six years and one industry-generated lawsuit later, the PAWG has provided two sets of comprehensive monitoring recommendations to BLM, forwarded through the PAWG from the Task Groups working on air quality, water quality, wildlife, reclamation, cultural/historic, socio-economic, and transportation issues.
Only a small portion of the monitoring required by the Record of Decision and recommended by the PAWG have occurred.
Existing, industry-funded wildlife monitoring shows a 46% decline in mule deer populations and a 51-89% decline in male sage grouse lek attendance. Air quality monitoring shows an increase in NOx that exceeds that analyzed in the EIS by 300%. The EIS analyzed impacts from an anticipated 276 miles of roads. We now are only half-way to full-field development and have 521 miles of roads on the Anticline.
BLM does not require oil and gas operators to fund monitoring, despite indication of such in the Record of Decision. BLM is unable to provide adequate monitoring funding. Operators fund only those projects they choose to, in exchange for the waiver and removal of seasonal drilling stipulations (drilling in wildlife crucial winter range in the winter). Operators then advertise that they are voluntarily funding monitoring, but then refute the results.
PAWG recommendations to BLM recently included a mitigation recommendation from the Wildlife Task Group that BLM has chosen to reject. Other recommendations to mitigate impacts from development, as indicated in the ROD should occur, are also rejected by BLM.
Despite awareness of PAWG term expirations over a year ago, BLM allowed seven of the 9 PAWG members' terms to expire, as of May 4, 2006, and refuses to allow current members' terms to be extended. BLM is now calling for new nominations to the PAWG.
Photo by Linda Baker
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BLM and industry are working together to encourage industry-friendly representatives to submit their nominations to the new PAWG. The issue the PAWG will focus on will be a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement recommending removal of all seasonal and surface stipulations designed and utilized over the past 30 years to protect wildlife.
As you may have guessed by now, the PAWG is a spectacular failure in "Cooperative Conservation." BLM has no intention of cooperating, especially to enable conservation. BLM has repeatedly and publicly heralded the success of Cooperative Conservation, and now intends to stack the deck so that PAWG recommendations are "acceptable" and BLM can maintain the appearance of cooperating with all interested parties when in fact there is only one group with which it wishes to do business.
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