Lost lands? The American wilderness at risk in the Trump era
In the great expanses of the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument, the silence hits you first. Minutes pass, smooth and unbroken as glass. The smallest sound – a breath of wind, a falling rock – can seem as loud as passing traffic.
Colter Hoyt knows this landscape well. As an outdoor guide, he walks the monument almost daily. Yet these days he is full of fear. This remote paradise of red rocks, slot canyons and towering plateaus faces an uncertain future, following a controversial presidential proclamation that removed 800,000 acres from the monument and opened land up for potential energy development.
When Trump took office in 2016, he promised the energy industry a new era of “American energy dominance”. This would only be possible by exploiting America’s 640m acres of public land: mountains, deserts, forests and sites of Native American history that cover more than a quarter of the country.
The US government has the discretion to decide what use a parcel of public land should be put towards, such as conservation, energy development or grazing. Under Trump, environmental advocates fear a shift to the extreme: land offered indiscriminately for mining and drilling, with disregard for other potential uses.
Two years after Trump came to power, a new study produced by the Wilderness Society, a not-for-profit organization advocating for the protection of public lands, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, reveals the full extent of his government’s efforts. Key findings include:
13.6m acres onshore have been made available for leasing by the Trump administration, far more than in any two-year period under the Obama administration.
More than 153m acres of ecologically sensitive habitats – from the California desert to the Arctic national wildlife refuge – have seen conservation protections rolled back in some form.
More than 280,000,000 acres have been made available for offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and along nearly 90% of the US coastline.
For Hoyt, the prospect of mining on formerly protected lands is a scenario almost too painful to contemplate. One a recent August afternoon, as temperatures climbed to 95F, he bumped and shuddered down a winding road at the wheel of his expedition vehicle. His destination: a lookout point, from which the Circle Cliffs, an almost incomprehensibly vast segment removed from the monument, could be viewed. Motoring through the auburn hills, he became visibly emotional.
“This is where the mining trucks would be driving in and out.”
The Guardian profiledthree affected communities in the American west – in the Utah desert, the southern Rockies, and valleys of western Colorado – to see three different responses to this shift toward energy development.
The lost monument: the future of Grand Staircase-Escalante
Many longtime cattle ranchers in the area had been upset by Clinton’s move, fearing their cattle would be kicked off grazing lands. “It felt like a pretty big disrespect to us,” explains Link Chynoweth, 57, a fourth-generation rancher and alfalfa farmer. He and other ranchers welcomed Trump’s rollbacks.
The monument is an archaeological, paleontological and environmental wonder, and its special new status brought change: tourists, new businesses, and outdoor enthusiasts searching for a slice of frontier magic. While that has benefited some, it has left many others feeling ostracized.
“I’ve been here all my life,” says Chynoweth. “So when environmentalists say we have to make this a monument because they have to protect it,
I’m saying: ‘Who do you have to protect it from? Me?’ The message I’m getting is: if we don’t protect it, you guys will ruin it.”
While cattle grazing on the monument remains a point of contention, it’s the energy industry that has environmentalists most concerned. A section removed from the monument known as the Kaiparowits Plateau sits on top of an enormous coal reserve – albeit one that may be too remote to develop. Meanwhile, a Canadian mining firm has boasted of its acquisition of the Colt Mesa, a former copper mine on land once circumscribed by the monument.
In a recent draft management proposal for the monument and the nowexcluded land around it, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) expressed a preference for a plan that would be the “least restrictive to energy and mineral development”.
At auction land can be leased for as little as $2 an acre, but that doesn’t mean it always gets bought. Leases can also be purchased by companies simply to increase their asset portfolio, with no plans to develop it. The result is land being offered without a guarantee it will translate into more energy or other returns on investment for the American taxpayer.
For Nicole Croft, the executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, the benefits of the monument are now at risk. “The monument has brought diversity,” she says. “It’s brought opportunities. It put this place on the map.”
Ricki Brown, who came here more than 20 years ago, was one of the first to put the new tourist economy to the test. He built guest houses that now rent out to visitors from around the world, who enjoy sweeping views of flat-topped mesas and desert shrubs. “Basically everybody has jumped on the tourist wagon,” he says, “whereas we used to be the only ones doing it.”
Blake Spalding, a Buddhist chef, opened her restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill, in 2000 – and has watched business flourish. “We now do in a month what we used to do in a whole year,” she says on a warm evening over a green salad and a glass of red wine.
As hikers and adventure seekers file in to fill their stomachs, she insists “tourism has brought opportunities galore” beyond the food business. “You can start a guiding business. We need electricians, carpenters and janitors, too. The notion that we need an extractive industry is a lie.”
To mine or not to mine: Colorado’s North Fork Valley faces a choice
The closure of two key mine sites in 2013 and 2016, Elk Creek and Bowie #2, saw hundreds of coal miners laid off. Vineyards and cherry orchards now span the green valley floor, blossoming under the shadow of nearby mountains and sitting side by side with the former mines.
When the BLM put 8,000 acres on the table for leasing in its December auction, it pushed people to decide what future they really wanted: bring back the energy industry, or embrace the new agricultural economy.
While the majority of the lease sales were for methane gas reclamation from sealed coal mine sites, land near the Paonia Reservoir, which supplies the region’s irrigation water, would still be open to horizontal drilling for oil and gas.
For the valley’s farmers, water contamination would be devastating. Alison Gannett is one of those farmers. At Holy Terror Farm, the 53-year-old grows all her own food – except for coffee, cocoa, and salt – on her land and in sun-dappled greenhouses. A former professional free skier, Gannett moved to the town of Paonia 10 years ago after growing concerned about toxic drinking water near her previous home. Five years later, she developed brain cancer.
“My favorite thing about the valley is to be able to grow my own food without being surrounded by toxins,” she says.
Julie Bennett, too, depends on the water. She owns Skyhawk Vineyards: 35 acres of dark red pinot noir grape. When leases still loomed in late summer, Bennett was in the middle of making cherry wine she planned to sell at her new tasting room and cafe.
“Water is the key to our success,” she says. “If an accident were to happen that diminished water quality, we would be out of business.”
Tom Huerkamp has lived in the county for 51 years, with a front row seat to its economic transformation. “Do you know how many coal mines have closed in Delta County?” he asks. “Twenty-seven.”
Huerkamp isn’t against change – he’s invested in solar energy himself. But as the board vice-president of Delta County Economic Development, he worries organic farming alone won’t be enough to make up for lost jobs.
“As a community, instead of just digging our damn heels in, we need to talk to each other, objectively, without all of this emotional crap that goes in,” he says.
But for Gerren Anderson, a former North Fork coal miner, fossil fuels aren’t the answer. Anderson was laid off in 2015 when the Bowie #2 mine closed and today lives on disability benefit. The decades underground left him with black lung, chronic bronchitis, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “I don’t have any regrets,” he says. “I had a good career. I raised my family. I knew the risks. I just ran the machine longer than anybody else should.”
Though many of his co-workers went into oil and gas after the mine closures, Anderson says he doesn’t support drilling in his own backyard. “I’m a hunter and a fisher, so I like to see our landscape the way it is.”
Faced with the chance to welcome back the industry that once sustained it, the North Fork seems to be imagining a different future. A proposed 20,000-acre sale was successfully defeated in 2012, prompting local residents to develop their own, citizendriven management plan for how they would like to see the valley used.
In November, the North Fork tasted victory when the 8,000 acres were taken off the table: the BLM said it would defer all the leases in the valley until the completion of its Uncompahgre Resource Management Plan, which will guide management of the region’s public lands for the next 20 years.
“People no longer see the future of this valley as tied to extractive industries,” says the environmental activist Pete Kolbenschlag , who campaigned against the proposed leases. “And we’re smart and sophisticated enough that we know what economic future we want for ourselves.”
‘The area is sacred’: Native American resistance in the Great Sand Dunes
But a proposal to lease the mineral rights beneath their land – rights owned by the federal government – prompted a national outcry. Leases would have fallen within a mile of the park and Mt Blanca (Sisnaajiní in the Navajo language), a mountain so sacred it appears on the Navajo Nation flag.
“The mountains are very symbolic,” explains Daniel Tso, a member of the Navajo Nation and a grassroots activist. “They are the real leaders who hold this land. Since time immemorial, they haven’t moved or been shaken.”
Many saw echoes here of the energy industry’s longstanding encroachments on Native American lands – from the extraordinary Standing Rock reservation protests over the Dakota Access pipeline to the Havasupai tribe’s tireless resistance to uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.
Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the energy lobbying group Western Energy Alliance, counters that “our modern lifestyle would not exist without oil and gas”. On a table in her glasswalled office in downtown Denver, golf caps, T-shirts and stickers bear the motto “Keep Calm and Frack On”.
“We can all wish there was some other source of energy,” she says, “but the reality is that it’s keeping us safe, gives you clean water, heats your home, gets you where you need to go.”
Across the mountain ridge from Great Sand Dunes, Bill Dixon runs a shop crammed with books, saddles, jackets and jewelry. Traveling indigenous groups often stop by while paying homage to the mountains, Dixon says. “The whole area is all sacred.”
A member of the Menominee Indian tribe of Wisconsin, Dixon has lived here for the past 16 years. “This isn’t a town full of millionaires,” he says. “This is a town full of people who came here for quality of life. We came here for the clean air, the clean water, the lifestyle, the nature.”
Like others in the valley, he worries that oil and gas development would affect the local water supply. “If they were to be fracking out there, they’d probably end up polluting the aquifer. I don’t see how they wouldn’t. We got the mountain in between us, so we might be safe, but I can’t be sure.”
Ahead of the proposed recent lease sale, the local resistance mobilized. Organizers gathered and submitted public comments to the BLM. They staged a three-day campout at the proposed drilling site. They even organized a flight over the region to educate public officials about what was at stake.
Christine Canaly, the director of the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, helped lead the effort. “We’re in the most remote part of the southern Rockies,” she said. “What are we going to do? Populate it with oil and gas drilling? That’s the antithesis of why this area has remained intact.”
Their bid worked. The BLM has since agreed to delay lease proceedings to allow time to consult with the Navajo Nation. A date for consultation has not been set but, for now, the land is off limits.
In the second week of December, the BLM will hold its final public lands auction of the year. More than 293,000 acres across Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming will be on the block. Meanwhile, environmental groups are preparing for two more years of resistance.
“We accept some energy development will occur, but it has to be in the right places. There’s room for multiple uses,” said Nada Culver, the senior counsel at the Wilderness Society. “But this administration seems to only see room for one kind of use: developing fossil fuels at the expense of everything else, especially conservation.”
All arial photography by Bruce Gordon, courtesy of Bruce Gordon and EcoFlight.