Not So Quiet on the Western Front

#88, March 6, 2002

The sun rises pure white over the canyon's rust red sandstone rim, illuminating the iron red of blood through my eyelids. Buzzing wings fly past, out into the utter silence. From within the silence I hear sounds like a breath pulsing through pinon needles, but the air is still. I hear the flow of my blood, the beating of my heart.

It was morning in the redrock lands of southern Utah, April 1976, the first day of a journey into the Escalante wilderness. We were there in part to rejoice in the demise of the Kaiparowits project: a mammoth coal-fed power plant which would have industrialized 9,000 acres of wild lands, belched half a million pounds of pollutants daily into the pristine skies, and brought the continuous thunder of coal trucks.

Since then the silence of the red desert has mostly survived, thanks in large part to the diligence of groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). But the Bush energy policy brings a new thirst for fossil fuel to these quiet corners of the world. The orders from Washington are clear: public lands managers will make oil development top priority.

My daughter Laurel lives in one of the new "national sacrifice areas" - Moab, Utah, just outside of Arches National Park. She describes the "thumper trucks" used for seismic mapping: 26-ton beasts that crawl cross-country day and night for weeks, scouring crude roads, hammering the earth with ear-splitting blows. They lay down a grid of wounds in the fragile desert soil that will persist for centuries. Having thus lost their virginity - and eligibility for protection as wilderness - the lands lie open for mineral extraction and motorized recreation.

Laurel says the local Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has pulled out all the stops. Last summer, their Environmental Assessment (EA) of the first exploration project found "no significant impact," and it snuck in under the cover of 9-11. The latest project comes within a few miles of Delicate Arch, the redrock icon adorning Utah license plates. Less than a month after the Olympic Torch passed under the arch, the thumpers were out gang-gouging nearby streambeds. The BLM tried to launch this project without even seeking comments from other agencies (they were notified by SUWA.)

So awful was the BLM's behavior that on Feb. 23 an Interior Department appeals panel put the project on hold. I told Laurel how the BLM argued "the concerns from the other agencies were taken into account." She laughed, "The BLM's initial EA said the soil damage would last one to three years, a number they just pulled straight out of the sky. The USGS soil scientist said it would be 50-300 years. So in the final EA, the BLM said it would be three to five years. That's how they took it into account."

All the mitigations were voluntary, she said. BLM had monitors on the site primarily to make sure SUWA didn't disturb the progress. When SUWA field rep Liz Thomas pointed out that the trucks were not following even the most basic environmental safeguards, BLM's Rich McClure told her he "was not there to hear comments on the EA." When she persisted, he put in his earplugs. Truth is the first casualty of war.

On the ground in redrock Utah, the Bush energy plan seems like a war of empire, with associated pillage, plunder and despoilment. The tragedy is that so few will benefit from the few weeks of national fuel consumption it might obtain, compared to the perpetual benefits of preserving the wild desert.

Just as Jesus went to the desert wilderness to perfect his wisdom, so can we. Moab neighbor Terry Tempest Williams writes: "If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found." And as we are found, we will need less oil, and more wilderness.

Help SUWA keep the Red Rock wilderness alive. See their spectacular desert photographs at www.suwa.org.