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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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As a Matter of Fact, Money Does Grow on Trees (cont.)


	(Photograph by Dan Winters)

$72 AN ACRE

Wilderness economics may not be the last word in the conservation argument, but it's taken on considerable weight, given the alacrity and scale with which the White House is rolling back wilderness protection. If the current wilderness land grab had an emblematic moment, it was the morning of November 24, 2003. I was on hand that day when the federal government—dramatically reversing long-standing precedent—took a chunk of protected land (acreage that the BLM itself had identified as having "wilderness characteristics," and that was part of the proposed 9.5-million-acre Red Rock Wilderness) and auctioned it off to oil and gas developers.

"Parcel number 26 is the next one we're offering," the auctioneer called out to the 22 land men—agents for oil and gas companies—who had assembled inside a BLM conference room in Salt Lake City. "Minimum bid: two dollars to start."

Auctions like this are, in themselves, nothing new. Since the 1920s, private companies have acquired the right to drill on public land for as little as $2 an acre. Currently there are 94,000 wells on public property and Indian reservations, producing 11 percent of America's natural gas and 5 percent of our oil.

But Parcel 26 was different. Behind its sale lay nearly three years of legal maneuvering at the top levels of

Wilderness isn't just beautiful but "worthless." Wildlands have tremendous cash value—and this must be a factor in what we develop and what we preserve.

the Interior Department. After chafing under two terms of President Bill Clinton's conservationist policies, industry executives and Bush appointees came into office determined to ramp up the industrial use of public land. In their way stood two things: Clinton's Roadless Area Conservation Rule, adopted by the Forest Service in January 2001, and the de facto wilderness protections installed on BLM land in 1999 by then–Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

The roadless rule halted the taxpayer-subsidized construction of new roads on the most pristine 58.5 million acres of national forest. (There are currently 436,000 miles of roads on the nation's 192 million acres of national forests and grasslands.) Because the rule came late in Clinton's term, President Bush—just minutes after taking the oath of office in January 2001—was able to temporarily freeze its implementation. By the end of 2004, the White House had eliminated roadless protection for much of Alaska's 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest and had rewritten the rule in a way that all but ensured that roadless protections would never take effect in the nation's other national forests.

Opening up protected BLM wildlands to oil and gas developers has proven trickier. The BLM oversees 261 million acres, almost all of which is in the West. Most of that land is open to oil and gas drilling, but 6.5 million acres are protected as congressionally authorized wilderness areas, and 15.5 million are held as wilderness study areas (WSA), meaning the land is off limits to development pending further evaluation.

Based on state-by-state inventories conducted over the past two decades, environmental groups claim that the BLM manages an additional 12 million acres of wilderness-quality land not protected in either WSAs or formal wilderness areas, including several million in Utah. In 1996, prompted by conservationists, Bruce Babbitt told BLM managers to re-inventory the agency's Utah holdings. And if you find that it's wilderness, he told them, manage it as wilderness. The process took three years, but in 1999 the BLM acknowledged that it held more than 2.6 million additional acres of wilderness-quality land and gave it protected status.

The Bush administration, with Babbitt's successor, Gale Norton, leading the charge, was determined to reverse that policy. From 2001 to 2003, Norton and Interior officials secretly negotiated a deal with Utah state officials—including then-governor Mike Leavitt, who later became Bush's EPA administrator—to remove the wilderness restrictions.

Norton's April 11, 2003, announcement stunned wilderness advocates. Not only had the deal wiped out the BLM's 2.6 million acres of "managed wilderness" in Utah; it also prohibited the BLM from expanding its WSA inventory. In any state. Ever.

Seven months later, on November 24, 2003, the first of the previously protected BLM parcels was put up for lease in Salt Lake City. After the auction, I caught up with the man who had placed the winning bid to lease Parcel 26 and two other pieces of Desolation Canyon. (In about five minutes he'd leased 4,700 acres for $340,000.) His name was Joe Thames, and he was there on behalf of Baseline Minerals Inc., a minerals-brokerage firm based in Denver. Because land men like Thames often represent third-party buyers, I asked whom he'd purchased the lease for.

"I'm not able to disclose that," he said. I asked why there was so much interest in the Desolation Canyon property.

"I'd rather not say." With that, Thames turned and left. Three pieces of Utah wilderness disappeared with him.

Joe Thames's money wasn't theoretical; he wrote a check to the American taxpayers for $340,000. But is that the whole story? If Baseline Minerals builds a natural-gas well and runs a road into Desolation Canyon (when this issue went to press, no development had yet taken place on this land), the development could threaten the $1.5 million annual revenue generated by the rafting industry on Desolation's Green River. Moreover, this land couldn't qualify for full wilderness protection.

Is that worth $340,000? Or did the BLM just sell a piece of Utah's economic future far too cheaply?

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