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Future looks bright for new wilderness

November 2008

protecting wild places and wildlife, for their sake – and ours

Th e promise of January 20Th e promise of January 20

Let the healing of the land begin. The political realignment in Washington promises to restore

a spirit of stewardship and a respect for science in the management of our fed-eral public lands. Here in Colorado, the prospects for getting new wilderness look suddenly brighter than anytime in the last 20 years.

As we had hardly dared to hope, the election results have brought nearly all the necessary stars into alignment for the Hidden Gems Wilderness Campaign. Co-led by the Wilderness Workshop, the campaign is advocating for hundreds of thousands of acres of

new wilderness areas in and around the White River National Forest.

It takes an act of Congress to desig-nate wilderness, and the Hidden Gems Campaign will require the support of Colorado’s two senators and the two House members whose districts cover the proposal area. The four chosen by voters to occupy those seats in the next Congress – Sens. Ken Salazar and Mark Udall and Reps. John Salazar and Jared Polis – are just the team we need to carry the Hidden Gems bill.

We’re optimistic that the Hidden Gems proposal will be next on deck for Colorado wilderness bills, poised

to enter the legislative queue as soon as the Rocky Mountain National Park, Dominguez Canyon and Northern San Juan Mountains proposals have passed. The first two are part of the Omnibus Public Lands Bill, which looks unlikely to get a vote in the current lame-duck Congress but is well placed to move early in the next; the San Juan proposal will hopefully be introduced next year.

Undoing the damage

The outcome of the White House race bodes extremely well, too, but we still have to get to Jan. 20.

The proposed Acorn Creek Wilderness

Addition, north of Silverthorne.

Photo courtesy of John Fielder.

In this issueIn this issuePollution & health impacts of drilling 2

Roadless misrule 5

Stuff goes downhill 6

Bull Mtn pipeline 7

Travel Management Plan 8

Hidden Gems next steps 9

Tar sands & oil shale 10

Here come the beetles 12

Naturalist Nights 2009 13

Donor Hall of Fame 15

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

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Wilderness Works November 20082

In its final days, the Bush administra-tion is ramming through a raft of deci-sions that would open up federal lands to development and weaken environ-mental protections. One of its top priorities before heading out the door is to approve oil-shale development on 2 million acres in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – a potential environmental disaster that could make today’s gas boom look like a backyard project (see page 10).

The oil shale approval will cap an eight-year drive to promote energy ex-traction on federal lands to the exclu-sion of all other values. The incoming Obama administration has indicated that it will reverse this drill-every-where course; the first step should be to rescind the Bush executive order expediting energy development on public lands, and replace it with one that restores a sensible balance between energy supply, the environment and human health (see next article).

Another Bush legacy will be the mess that it’s made of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, putting much of the wil-derness-quality land southwest of Carbondale at risk (page 5). It will take coordinated action locally and in Congress to res-cue the particular areas we’re concerned with. To fix the problem nationally the Obama administration will have to reinstate the original 2001 Roadless Rule, and should work with the new Congress to enshrine roadless protections in legislation.

We’ll have to keep playing solid defense for the next couple of months yet, but come Jan. 20, the work of un-doing the damage can begin. We can’t wait to get started.

We in the conservation community have been trying for years to put a

bridle on the runaway bronc that is oil and gas development here on the West-ern Slope. Recently we’ve found what looks to be a promising legal rope.

In the past several months, WW has teamed up with the Natural Resources Defense Council on a couple of initia-tives relating to air quality and public health that we hope will finally get the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to rein in the beast.

In one, we’re suing both agencies over their failure to take air quality into account when they approved a

new drilling area south of Silt known as Hells Gulch. In the other, we’ve spurred local towns and counties to ask the BLM for a Health Impact Assessment of the future gas develop-ment it foresees on its lands in our area.

OK, so it lacks some of the excite-ment of Pro Rodeo. But this is the way you get stuff done – or stop bad stuff from happening – in the New West.

Drawing a line in the sand

Outside of a small circle of local hunters, Hells Gulch is little known and little visited. Situated in the hills between Alkali and West Divide creeks, the Forest Service area isn’t potential wilderness, nor even roadless.

Yet it’s a place where we’ve been drawing a line in the sand for the past year, using the 45-well project as a lever to force federal land managers to stop looking at gas development projects on a piecemeal basis, and start addressing the cumulative and off-site impacts of the boom. In isola-tion, this project may not raise alarm. When combined with the multitude of similar projects coming down the pike, though, Hells Gulch and the analytical failures that paved its way exemplify a broken system, a disregard for the health of people and ecosystems, and a failure to comply with environmental law. We’ve chosen to attack the most glaring oversight, the failure to analyze and mitigate pollution of the air we breathe.

It’s no secret that gas development is a significant and growing source of air pollution in Western Colorado. Among other emissions, gasfield operations produce nitrous oxides, sulfuric oxides and volatile organic compounds. When combined with sunlight these com-pounds form ground-level ozone, or haze. Even at low levels, ozone can cause or aggravate respiratory prob-lems, damage plants and ecosystems, and shroud views.

The Clean Air Act requires govern-ment agencies to ensure that activities they authorize won’t degrade our most

Hold yer horsesHold yer horsesPollution and health impacts

may rein in gas drilling

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Jan. 20Jan. 20

Proposed Hells Gulch project

Wilderness Works November 2008 3

sensitive and pristine airsheds – ar-eas like the Maroon Bells-Snowmass and Flat Tops Wilderness Areas. We’re already seeing high levels of ozone in Garfield County and on top of Aspen Mountain; monitoring data also shows visibility impairment in local wilder-ness areas.

Even the BLM and Forest Service’s own analysis admits that emissions from the Hells Gulch project will con-tribute to the significant deterioration of air quality downwind. Yet, under intense pressure to expedite energy production, they approved it anyway.

So in October, after the BLM and Forest Service had denied our final appeal, we and NRDC filed suit. Our chief argument is that emissions from the Hells Gulch project will contribute to violations of state and federal air-quality standards, which the agencies are obliged to uphold.

We’re demanding that the feds get a handle on the air quality impacts already occurring due to oil and gas activity on their lands, and put a regu-latory framework in place that ensures

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is close to issuing a final set of regulations that will

provide vastly stricter regulation of the oil and gas indus-try at the state level. WW was part of a large coalition of conservation groups, led by Western Resource Advocates and EarthJustice, that pushed for the changes.

In October the COGCC gave the initial nod to about 100 new regulations, including ones that:

require companies to maintain inventories of the • main chemicals they use in drilling;restrict operations within 300 feet of streams that • provide public drinking water;require odor-control equipment on most facilities • located within a quarter-mile of homes, schools or hospitals;require best-practices management of stormwater • runoff from well pads;

provide public notice and 20-day comment peri-• ods for all drilling applications;require companies to begin reclamation sooner • on areas that are no longer being drilled, and set more stringent reclamation standards;increase bonding requirements to keep up with • the growing cost of capping abandoned wells; andrequire companies seeking a variance on wild-• life or health and water rules to consult with the Division of Wildlife or the Department of Public Health and Environment.

Most of these rules represent some kind of compro-mise, but they’re a huge improvement over the current laissez-faire arrangements. The Colorado legislature, which initiated this historic sea-change last year, will like-ly approve the new rules in its next session. Additional changes will be implemented over the next year or so.

Stronger Colorado oil & gas regs on the wayStronger Colorado oil & gas regs on the way

Natural gas wells produce a condensate that can contain complex hydrocarbons and aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene.

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that any future development won’t exacerbate the problem.

Haunting science

Here in the Rockies, most natural gas is locked up in what are called tight-sands formations. Much credit for the present gas boom goes to the

development of hydraulic “fracking” – the process of injecting a cocktail of chemicals under pressure into a well to fracture the rock and release the gas. Companies use proprietary blends of more than 100 fracking chemicals, which include such known carcinogens



as benzene, naphthalene, diesel fuel and heavy metals. Not only are the chemi-cals injected into wells, they also evapo-rate into the air and often spill onto the ground.

Meanwhile, people living in gas-producing areas complain of bad smells and report high rates of unusual can-cers, high blood pressure and chronic headaches. An emergency-room nurse in Durango nearly died in April after treating a gasfield worker who had been soaked by fracking chemicals. Large animal vets in the Grand Valley report livestock abnormalities are on the rise.

Hmm, could there be a connection?If you attended our “Haunting Sci-

ence” panel discussion in Carbondale – so named because it was held the night before Halloween – you know that the answer is that we don’t know, and we desperately need to find out.

A provision of the 2005 Energy Policy Act removes fracking from the Environmental Protection Agency’s oversight and exempts companies from having to disclose which chemicals they use. (When doctors treating the Dur-ango nurse called the drilling company to find out which chemicals the nurse might have been exposed to, they were told that the information was a trade secret.)

And fracking chemicals are only one of several public-health hazards of natural gas production. Others include exhaust emissions and particulates from industry vehicles and compres-sors, methane (natural gas) and other hydrocarbons released into the air from belowground, work-related injuries, noise and light pollution, and indirect societal impacts such as traffic acci-dents, substance abuse and crime.

According to Roxana Witter, one of the “Haunting Science” speakers and the lead author of a recent white paper on

the subject, we’re flying blind on these health-related issues – and what we don’t know could defi-nitely hurt us.

“Given that even limited air and wa-ter quality studies revealed dangerous levels of benzene and other chemicals of potential concern, continued ignorance of the status of the air and water quality and the potential health impacts in Garfield County should not be considered ac-ceptable,” she wrote in her paper.

Full disclosure

The towns of Rifle, New Castle, Glenwood Springs and Carbondale, along with Eagle and Pitkin counties, have come to the same conclusion. In August, they sent letters requesting that the BLM conduct a Health Impact As-sessment (HIA) of future oil and gas de-velopment as part of the new manage-ment plan the agency is preparing for its Glenwood and Kremmling districts.

HIAs are used in Canada and other countries to analyze the full spectrum of health effects that might result from a proposed industrial development. Last year the BLM issued its first HIA, examining oil and gas development on Alaska’s North Slope; the towns of Pinedale and Pavilion, Wyoming re-cently asked for an HIA of potential gas development there.

The Natural Resources Defense Council brought the HIA option to our attention this spring, and to us, after years of making little headway with the BLM over its superficial scrutiny of gas projects, this looked like a promis-ing new tool. Together we presented it to the towns and counties in the area,

and they immediately embraced the idea.

(You might have noticed that one local government at the center of the local gas boom is conspicu-ously absent from the list of participants. We decided to wait until after the elec-tions to make the HIA presentation to Garfield County.)

It remains to be seen whether the BLM will heed the local governments’ request. The agency’s only response so far has been a comment that St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction is already conducting a study of the health impacts of drilling. (True, but that study is more narrowly focused, and is only looking at present conditions. The purpose of the HIA is to project the impacts of the specific development scenarios envisioned in the BLM’s Resource Management Plan. According to one estimate, we can ex-pect 1,000 new wells a year for at least the next decade in Garfield County alone.)

Right now, the BLM is directed to view things like health impacts (and wildlife impacts, air quality, water quality, etc….you get the picture) as impediments to energy production. Let’s hope that changes soon after Jan. 20. In any case, we’ll keep pressing for full disclosure of impacts in the Glen-wood-Kremmling Resource Manage-ment Plan.

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Hold yer horsesHold yer horses

What you can do

Tell the Garfield County com-missioners to act now to protect our health. Please sign the petition and add your comments using the online form at www.progress-nowaction.org/page/s/GarCoHealth.


If you’ve been getting our email alerts about Colorado’s roadless areas for the past three years, you

may be thinking Chicken Little is our webmaster.

Unfortunately, our roadless areas are still at risk – honest! – and the process of getting their protected status back just keeps getting more convoluted. In the past year it’s emerged that the pro-posed Colorado Roadless Rule, which was only supposed to be an “insur-ance policy” in the event that the Bush administration succeeded in gutting the federal Roadless Rule, is in reality a “no-backs” deal that’s so riddled with loopholes that it’s unclear whether it would protect any roadless areas at all.

Worse, for us here on the edge of the gas patch, is the revelation that the Colorado Roadless Rule would grandfather about 100 roadless-area gas leases issued since the publication of the original federal Roadless Rule in 2001. Nearly half of these “gap leases” lie within the Clear Fork Divide, one of the flagship proposal areas of the Hidden Gems Wilderness Campaign (see map). Many of the rest are in the Battlement Mesa and Housetop Moun-tain areas further west, and south of McClure Pass.

On a different track

Colorado chose to go its own way early on in the process. In 2005, the Bush administration sought to undo the original Roadless Rule, which had been issued in the last days of the Clinton ad-ministration after an exhaustive three-year process, by creating a complicated procedure in which states wanting continued protection for their road-less areas had to petition the federal government.

Conservation groups quickly sued, and most states waited to see whether

the new process would stand. In the end, only Colorado and Idaho filed petitions.

Three years later, the Roadless Rule is still in legal limbo, and may well be thrown out by the incoming Obama administration before the courts decide its fate. But no matter how the issue is resolved at the federal level, Colorado is on a different train heading down a different track.

And somehow that track has curved off in a direction contrary to what most Coloradans wanted. The draft Colorado Roadless Rule unveiled in August contains provisions that allow for new wells, pipelines and roads (plus of course the gap leases) for the oil and gas industry; virtually unrestricted logging in roadless areas; and roads for just about every other special interest (utilities, grazers, ski areas, coal mines,

etc.). In a feat of oxymoronic verbal gymnastics, it even allows for “long-term temporary roads” for oil, gas and coal development.

The Forest Service is now in a hurry to push this piece of Swiss cheese through the process before the admin-istration changes. If it does, Colorado will be in the perverse position of having weaker roadless protections than any other state in the union. (Even Idaho got a better deal.)

Turning the tide

Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning, thanks to diligent work by the entire Colorado conservation commu-nity in the past several months. We and our partners have been working this issue on three fronts.

Roadless misrule: mind the gapsRoadless misrule: mind the gaps

Gas leases in the Thompson and Divide creek drainages. Most of them are in roadless areas.



Most publicly, we mobilized our grassroots to flood the Forest Service with emails urging it to close the loop-holes in the Colorado Roadless Rule – hence the recent action alerts leading up to the Oct. 23 comment deadline.

Those emails added considerable weight to the inside game that we were simultaneously playing. In September, WW executive director Sloan Shoe-maker was one of a half-dozen repre-sentatives of Colorado conservation groups who testified before the Road-less Area Conservation National Advi-sory Council (RACNAC), the federal panel created by the Bush administra-tion to review state roadless petitions and oversee state rulemaking processes.

It was the first time the council

had been made aware of the extent of public distress over the loopholes, and it prompted a major shift in conscious-ness. Since then, the panel has decided to recommend eliminating the grazing exception (“the need for it is zero and the impact is 3 million acres”), and has scheduled another hearing for later this month to consider the others.

There’s one other possible route to getting our roadless areas back, and that’s to get Gov. Bill Ritter to with-draw Colorado’s roadless petition, which was originally submitted by his predecessor Bill Owens. Prior to the September RACNAC hearing, the Gov-ernor had seemed unwilling to revisit the issue, apparently assuming that the petition was the result of a consensus-

based process and unaware of its flaws. Recently, however, Ritter’s staff have started to express alarm at the loop-holes, especially the problem of the gap leases.

Gov. Ritter has always characterized the Colorado petition as an insurance policy, needed in the event that the 2001 Rule went away. Given President-Elect Obama’s expressed support for the 2001 Rule during the primaries, the insurance may be unnecessary. Could the change of administration give Ritter the pretext to just pull the petition? We don’t know, but we’d like to remind him that in his petition letter he reserved the right to do so “if the rule-making outcome is unacceptable to the state.”

The 2001 Roadless Rule was indeed a worthy initiative, but the subsequent mess revealed flaws in the approach. If this whole sorry saga has taught us any-

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Roadless misruleRoadless misrule

STUFF GOES DOWNHILLSTUFF GOES DOWNHILLWhy residents of Carbondale (our fair city) aren’t too crazy about the idea of gas drilling in the Thompson Creek drainage. An illustrated map by WW member Malcolm McMichael.


Th e pipeline and Th e pipeline and the damage donethe damage done

You probably already know the end of the story: the Bull Mountain Pipeline, or at least

its 50-foot-wide “travelway,” is now a fact on the ground. We were unsuc-cessful in our lawsuit to prevent the construction of the project, which cuts through an eight-mile stretch of roadless area between Silt and Paonia, and appears designed to facilitate gas development in the Thompson Creek headwaters west of the Crystal.

We and our pro bono counsel, EarthJustice, had what we thought was a slam-dunk case: if it looks like a road, it is a road, and roads (even temporary ones) aren’t allowed in roadless areas.

The merits of the case were never heard. The district court denied our motion for a preliminary injunction in June, and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals – a very conservative bench that gives great deference to federal agencies – upheld the denial. The doz-ers rolled out, the damage was done. With the court signaling that it prob-ably wasn’t going to find in our favor, we withdrew the suit rather than risk-

ing setting a bad precedent on roadless policy.

Looking on the bright side, the Bull Mountain Pipeline has become an attention-getting poster child for what shouldn’t be allowed to happen to other roadless areas and proposed wil-derness areas, and it’s focused renewed attention on preventing the Thompson Creek gas leases from being developed.

Another silver lining is that the For-est Service, the pipeline owner and the Tenth Circuit have all stated that the pipeline corridor isn’t a road. We’ll hold them to their word, then: if it’s not a road, then the area is still eligible for inclusion in the Hidden Gems wil-derness proposal.

When completed, the corridor is supposed to be revegetated, and grasses and shrubs (but not trees) will be al-lowed to grow uninhibited, resulting in a treeless linear corridor that is oth-erwise fully vegetated. That seems to meet the Wilderness Act’s requirement that “the imprint of man’s work [is] substantially unnoticeable.”

thing, it’s that “administrative rules” and “executive orders” are like grass, sown by one administration and cut down by the next. A Roadless Bill would be a more durable policy – and there’s a chance we may see such a thing come out of the next Congress or two – but wilderness designation still provides the strongest, most lasting protection of all.

Part of the Bull Mountain Pipeline “travelway,” seen from the air.

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What you can do

Write or call Gov. Bill Ritter to tell him to withdraw Colorado’s roadless petition so that stronger federal protections prevail. To send an email, go to www.colorado.gov/governor and follow the “Contact the Governor” link. Mailing ad-dress: 136 State Capitol, Denver, CO 80203-1792. Phone: (303) 866-2471. Fax: (303) 866-2003.

The fight to protect the Roan Pla-teau continues, with some good

news to report. In September, the Bureau of Land Management issued leases for the public lands on the Roan Plateau, and dismissed over 15,000 protests filed by concerned parties ranging from local citizens to the State of Colorado. On the same day, a coali-tion of sportsmen, recreation and con-servation groups, including WW, filed for an injunction in federal court to prevent full-scale drilling of the Roan Plateau and to protect its important natural values as they are today.

Subsequently, all parties involved, including the Bureau of Land Manage-ment and the oil and gas companies holding the new leases on the Roan, agreed to a ban on surface disturbance on the Roan Plateau until June 2009. This ensures that the concerns ex-pressed in our litigation will be heard and carefully considered before any development is contemplated.

Roan updateRoan update


Finally, it’s out. The long-delayed latest version of the White River National

Forest’s Travel Management Plan was released on Nov. 7.

And now the clock is running. We have until Jan. 6 to read, analyze and submit detailed com-ments on the complex plan. WW is part of a coalition of groups formulating a joint response.

The speed of preparation of government documents, and the sexiness of their titles, is often in inverse proportion to their importance. The Travel Man-agement Plan determines the status of every trail and road, motorized and non-motorized, throughout the 2.3-million-acre White River National Forest. Any travel you do on the Forest is affected by this plan.

WW’s take on travel management comes down to a few simple principles: preserve roadless areas, minimize habi-tat fragmentation, segregate motorized and non-motorized uses, don’t legalize “bandit” routes, rehabilitate ecologically damaging routes, and keep the travel system in scale with the funds available to maintain it. In our response to the first draft of the plan, in 2006, we sub-mitted route-by-route comments de-tailing how all 5,400 miles of roads and

trails on the Forest should be managed. (The plan now before us is in effect a second draft, necessitated by the Forest Service’s adoption of a new national off-highway vehicle, or OHV, rule.)

Based on a preliminary review just before this newsletter went to press, it looks like the WRNF has incorporated many of our concerns into the latest draft. By eliminating a bunch of un-necessary, duplicative or eco-damaging routes, the proposed travel system is scaled back in proportion to the For-est’s frugal budget. The plan also makes progress on separating motorized and non-motorized uses. Of some concern is the proposal to legitimize hundreds of miles of illegally created routes, rewarding past banditry (and thus en-

couraging more in the future).By and large, we’d say the

Forest is moving in the right direction. But of course, the right direction ecologically will be seen by others as shutting down an entitlement. Since no good deed goes unpunished, we expect to see the WRNF take a lot of flack for its attempts to design an efficient and rational transportation system,.

With the Forest’s thin enforcement capabilities, it’s hoping that a well-designed travel system will minimize the

problems that incentivize illegal behav-ior. But there’ll always be some who ignore the rules and wreak damage on the commons. We all must be willing to partner with the Forest Service to see that that doesn’t happen.

Action stations for Travel Mgt PlanAction stations for Travel Mgt Plan

The 2008 Hidden Gems Hike Series was a hit, introducing well over 100 partici-pants to nearly two dozen of the proposal areas this past June, July and August.

Pictured here, clockwise from up-per left: young hikers in Spraddle Creek; overlooking Grizzly Creek at high water; a wildfl ower walk in Hunter Creek; on top of Red Table; Bill Lukes and friend near Petroleum Lake; gathering to set off on the popular Hay Park full moon hike.

Many thanks to our volunteer guides, whose personal knowledge and love of these places made the outings that much more special. Thanks also to Bristle-cone Mountain Sports, in Basalt, which sponsored the series and the daily Hid-den Gems underwriting spots on KAJX throughout the summer.

In 2006 we organized a posse of citizen volunteers to “ground-truth” the Travel Management Plan’s ques-tionable routes. Given the snow on the ground, the need may not be as great this time, but we may still need some eyeballs on the ground. If you’d like to be on call for some ground-truthing, contact WW’s Lisa Moreno at [email protected].

You can submit your own com-

ments on the Travel Management Plan, as well as access the WRNF’s online GIS maps, by going to www.fs.fed.us/r2/whiteriver/projects/travel_management/index.shtml#. We’ll send out an email alert before the January deadline with suggested points to make in your comments – be sure to join our email list, if you’re not already on it, by going to www.wildernessworkshop.org.

What you can do

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Ground-truthing in the McClure Pass area two years ago.


This fall and winter, the Hidden Gems Wilder-ness Campaign is in

fact-checking mode, working through the myriad potential use conflicts and boundary is-sues – grazing permits, access to water rights, motorized encroachments, outstanding gas leases and the like. Our intent is to hand a clean, “no surprises” bill to our mem-bers of Congress to carry.

This will be largely a desk exercise during the winter. Next summer, though, we hope to mount an active vol-unteer operation to check boundaries and conditions in the field, along with a bigger and better hike series.

If you can’t wait for summer and are

up for doing some fieldwork in the snow, please contact WW campaign coor-dinator Lisa Moreno at [email protected].

Who’s who in GarCo

Being a 501(c)3 nonprofit, the Wilder-ness Workshop can’t and doesn’t endorse political candidates or parties. That said, we certainly followed the recent Garfield County races with heightened

interest, since the endorsement of that county commission will be influential in getting wilderness designation for

several large Hidden Gems areas south and southwest of the Flat Tops.

The voters returned John Martin for a third term and elected newcomer Mike Samson to represent the western part of the county; the third commis-sioner, Tresi Houpt, wasn’t up for elec-tion this year.

We’re looking forward to working with all three commissioners to get more wilderness in Garfield County. We’re especially heartened by Martin’s statement, during a candidate brief-ing at the WW office Sept. 12, that he supports wilderness designation for the Deep Creek and Grizzly Creek areas, north of I-70, and the GarCo portion of the Clear Fork Divide, just outside of Carbondale. As for Samson, we don’t know his position on wilderness, but he’s got to be more open to it than his predecessor Larry McCown was.

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Next steps for Hidden Gems CampaignNext steps for Hidden Gems Campaign

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HIKING FOR THE GEMSE GEMS


Let’s take a quick four-paragraph trip up to the Athabascan Tar Sands of northern Alberta,

where the largest industrial project in human history is under way.

Here, in what used to be a vast boreal wilderness, the earth has been strip-mined from horizon to horizon, unwanted overburden heaped in piles as big as the Egyptian pyramids. The biggest trucks in the world operate 24 hours a day, hauling oily sand from open pit mines to nearby processing plants the size of small cities. Settling ponds for the toxic wastewater cover a total of 20 square miles.

A senior UN official who recently visited the area compared what she saw to Mordor, the evil kingdom in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.

Shell, Exxon Mobil and other com-panies are currently extracting 1.2 mil-lion barrels of oil a day from this region – an immense output, although only about 6 percent of U.S. consumption. Producing each one of those barrels creates three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conven-tional oil, and requires three to five barrels of water in the process.

In early October, the Wilderness Workshop hosted the Glenwood Springs stop of the “Tar Sands and Oil Shale Road Show,” a traveling joint presentation by Canadian photographer Garth Lenz and local oil shale expert Randy Udall.

Anyone who saw Lenz’s images of the tar sands operations might have wondered if this was a vision of north-western Colorado’s future.

To be sure, the technology for recov-ering oil shale would be different, and it’s still an open question whether it will ever become commercially viable. But if it does – and the outgoing Bush administration is working mightily to make that happen – its impacts on our

region’s landscape, air, water and com-munities, not to mention the earth’s at-mosphere, will be comparable. Indeed, according to Udall, oil shale production emits even more carbon dioxide per barrel of oil extracted, making it argu-ably the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Charging ahead

As reported in the June newsletter, WW has been partnering with state and national groups to resist the Bureau of Land Management’s rush to approve commercial oil shale development be-fore the Bush administration departs.

In recent months, the BLM has if anything stepped up the pace. In early September it released the final Environ-mental Impact Statement on opening up 2 million acres in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to development. The EIS gave not even the slightest nod to the concerns that our groups, local govern-ments and Congressional representa-tives voiced over the earlier draft ver-sion; as a Center for Native Ecosystems staffer observed, about the only change

made to the document was replacing the word “Draft” with “Final” on the cover page. And in blatant disregard of environmental law, the BLM is refusing to take public comments on the final EIS, and no protest of the final decision will be allowed.

Simultaneously, the BLM is charg-ing ahead with finalizing its com-mercial leasing regulations – basically, the terms it will offer to companies wanting to develop oil shale on federal lands. Sen. Ken Salazar and Rep. Mark Udall had managed to block issuance of the regulations for a year through a Congressional funding moratorium, but that expired at the end of September and they were unable to extend it.

It’s not just that the BLM is mov-ing too fast on these decisions, it’s that the agency doesn’t have nearly enough information to even make any decisions about oil shale. If the energy companies still don’t know whether their technol-ogy will work on a commercial scale, how can the BLM pretend to assess water impacts or set royalty rates?

Th e dirtiest fuel on earthTh e dirtiest fuel on earth

The Syncrude tar sands operation in Alberta – a vision of an oil shale future in north-west Colorado?

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A number of laws passed and executive orders issued during the Bush years have had the

effect of shutting the public out of deci-sions relating to federal lands. The chart below illustrates how one such law, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, has allowed an increasing number of energy proj-ects in our area to avoid scrutiny.

“Categorical exclusion” is the bureau-cratic term for an exemption from the usual environmental review process. When Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requiring federal agencies to analyze the environmental impacts of their actions, it realized that lots of routine actions – mowing the lawn outside the district office, for instance – shouldn’t have to be reviewed. Categorical exclu-sions were conceived to alleviate the problem, but the current administra-tion has stretched the use of exclusions well beyond routine activities.

The fastest-growing categorical ex-clusion (read loophole) was created by Section 390 of the 2005 Energy Policy Act. So-called 390 CE’s give a pass to a whole host of energy projects: if a com-pany already has a well pad, say, it can add more wells as long as it stays under

the acreage limit, without any analysis of the added water and air impacts.

Needless to say, this kind of exclu-sion encourages companies to chop up big projects into smaller parts that can slip through the review screen. The agency rubber-stamps the parts sequen-tially without ever taking a serious look at the whole, and without meaningful opportunities for comment and appeal.

The chart depicts the number of categorical exclusions granted by the BLM’s Glenwood Springs office in the past five years.What jumps out is the sudden doubling of energy-project exclusions thanks to Section 390.

Mercifully, what had looked like a skyrocketing growth trend was not continued in fiscal year 2008 (the U.S. government’s fiscal year ends Sept. 30). According to David Boyd of the BLM, who helpfully provided these figures, the decline in CEs in 2008 cor-responded to a decline in applications for drilling permits on federal lands, even as applications on private and state lands increased.

You can see how the categorical exclusions are being used by going to www.blm.gov/co/st/en/BLM_Infor-mation/nepa/gsfo.html.

Feeling excluded?Feeling excluded?Will o’ the wisp?

As dire as all this sounds, there’s a good chance that oil shale may turn out to be a will o’ the wisp that disappears with a change of political winds.

The national conservation groups are planning to ask the Obama administra-tion and Congress to invalidate the leas-ing regs and revoke the fast-track provi-sions for oil shale in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that are driving the environ-mental review. Indications are that the new administration will also order the BLM to take a more balanced approach to energy decisions, forcing a realistic assessment of oil shale’s environmental and human-health impacts.

And if Congress institutes a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, or if the White House gives the Environmen-tal Protection Agency the go-ahead to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, oil shale will be finally exposed as the dirty fuel it really is.

What you can do

Call or email Sen. Ken Salazar, Rep. Mark Udall (soon to be Sen. Udall) and Gov. Bill Ritter to thank them for opposing the BLM’s rush to advance oil shale before the im-pacts are understood, and encour-age them to keep up the pressure.As Jan. 20 approaches, we’ll likely send out an email alert on how you can help influence the Obama ad-ministration to send the BLM back to the drawing board on oil shale.

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390 CE'sOther CE's

Categorical exclusions issued by BLM Glenwood

“The battle we have fought, and are still fi ghting for the forests is a part of the eternal confl ict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it ... So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to fi nd anything so surely good and noble to strive for.”

John Muir


Until recently, most residents of the Roaring Fork Valley were blissfully unaware of the

ravages of the mountain pine beetle to the northeast. The current outbreak has done its worst in Grand and Summit counties, whose forests are dominated by lodgepole pine, the beetles’ favorite food; the Roaring Fork watershed, with its greater forest diversity, is in a much better position to weather the blight.

Nevertheless, we’ve known for several years that the beetles were coming, and in the past year or two they’ve definitely arrived. Swaths of red lodgepoles can now be seen in many places, including areas east of Aspen, up Hunter Creek and along the flanks of Mt. Sopris.

WW executive director Sloan Shoemaker has spent much of his free time (ha!) in the past two years rallying decision-makers in northwest Colorado to develop an ecologically appropri-ate response to the outbreak. As the conservation community’s representa-tive on the Colorado Bark Beetle Coop-erative, he has almost single-handedly steered the group toward a pragmatic, science-based approach where the emphasis is on enabling communities to remain sustainable in the face of natural and inevitable forces like beetle out-breaks and wildfire. By consensus, the Cooperative has prioritized targeted projects that protect life, property and critical community infrastructure, realizing that attempts to manipulate

ecosystems by, for example, logging the backcountry are bankrupting and ultimately futile.

This fall a new Basalt-based non-profit, For the Forest, has formed to study and develop responses to the beetle outbreak. The group will host a community symposium on the issue on Dec. 11 and 12 at the Aspen Insti-tute. While Sloan has not been invited to present, he will attend to offer his experience and help FTF along on its learning curve.

WW will present “Beetlemania,” a panel discussion on the mountain pine beetle and what to do about it, on Jan. 21 at Dos Gringos in Car-bondale and on Jan. 22 at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies.

Here come the beetlesHere come the beetles

MAROON BELLS MAROON BELLS CIRCLE SUMMERCIRCLE SUMMER

The Maroon Bells Circle, WW’s national council, hosted three summer events built around lunch at the home of a member and a hike in a nearby Hidden Gems area. Clockwise from right: Ellen and Bill Hunt at their North Thompson Creek ranch; Aron Ralston and Garry Snook near Garry’s home at the base of Mount Sopris; Paul Andersen guiding hikers in his backyard, Seven Castles Creek.

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JanuaryJanuary7 (C’dale) & 8 (Aspen) Colorado’s Red Rock Canyon Country: There’s More to Colorado Than Just Mountains – Kate Graham, Colorado Environmental Coali-tion public lands organizer

15 (Aspen) Danish Women Bike in Heels...No Sprawl in Helsinki...Swiss Cows Are Happy – Piper Foster, director of the Sopris Foundation

21 (C’dale) 22 (Aspen) Beetlemania: What’s the Big Deal? – Panel discussion with ex-perts from the Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative, moderated by WW executive director Sloan Shoemaker

29 (Aspen) Bringing Home the Bacon: Local Food Farming, Our Dance With Nature – Michael Thompson and Jerome Osentowski of Fat City Farms, Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute and the Heritage Fruit Tree Awareness Project

FebruaryFebruary4 (C’dale) & 5 (Aspen) Nature’s Aspirin: The Miracle Treat-ment for Saving the Wild – Michael

Soulé, founder of the Society for Conserva-tion Biology and the Wildlands Project

12 (Aspen) Rock Glaciers: Ubiquitous and Puzzling Features of the Colorado Alpine – Kurt Refsnider, PhD candidate,

University of Colorado Institute of Arc-tic and Alpine Research

18 (C’dale) &19 (Aspen) Our Amazing Backyard Batcaves – Phil Nyland, White River National Forest, Aspen-Sopris Ranger District biologist

26 (Aspen) Getting Green Done: Hard Truths and Real Solutions from the Front Lines of the Sus-tainability Revolution – Auden Schendler, Aspen Skiing Company Executive Director for Community and Environmental Responsibility

MarchMarch4 (C’dale) & 5 (Aspen) Wild Utah: America’s Redrock Wilderness – Barbara Eubanks, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

12 (Aspen) State of the Roaring Fork Watershed Report – Sharon Clarke, Roaring Fork Conservancy, and Mark Fuller, Ruedi Water and Power Authority

Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES): 100 Puppy Smith St., Aspen. Dos Gringos Burritos: 588 Highway 133, Carbondale. For more info, call WW at 963-3977.

Once again this winter the Wilderness Workshop is partnering with the Aspen Center for En-vironmental Studies and Dos Gringos Burritos in Carbondale to bring the acclaimed Natural-ist Nights speaker series, featuring visiting and resident presenters. All shows are free. ACES shows are on Thursday nights and start at 7:30; Dos Gringos shows are on Wednesday nights and start at 7. Please join us!

Naturalist Nights 2009 @ ACES & Dos GringosNaturalist Nights 2009 @ ACES & Dos Gringos

Colorado’s Red Rock Colorado’s Red Rock Canyons - Jan 7 & 8Canyons - Jan 7 & 8

Wild Utah - March 4 & 5Wild Utah - March 4 & 5

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Michael Soulé - Michael Soulé - Feb. 4 & 5Feb. 4 & 5

Auden Schendler - Auden Schendler - Feb. 26Feb. 26


P.O. Box 1442Carbondale, CO 81623

589 Main St., CarbondaleTel (970) 963-3977Fax (970) 963-8447

[email protected]

The Wilderness Workshop’s mission is to protect and conserve the wilderness and

natural resources of the Roaring Fork Watershed, the White River National

Forest, and adjacent lands.

WW is a nonprofit organization that engages in research, education, legal

advocacy, and grassroots organizing to protect the ecological integrity of local landscapes and public lands with a focus on the monitoring and conservation of

air and water quality, wildlife species and habitat, natural communities, and lands

of wilderness quality.

Board of DirectorsMichael McVoy

President

Peter Van DomelenTreasurer & Vice President

Steve ChildSecretary

Paul AndersenBeth Cashdan

Mary DominickJohn Emerick

Ginni GalicinaoCharles HoptonPeter LooramTim McFlynnTravis MooreAron Ralston

Mike StranahanAndy Wiessner

FoundersJoy CaudillDottie Fox

Connie Harvey

StaffSloan ShoemakerExecutive Director

Melanie FinanPeter Hart

Lisa MorenoDave Reed

An artist in wildernessAn artist in wilderness

Mor

gan

Boy

les

Joan Engler was selected to be the fi rst recipient of the Artist in Wilderness residen-cy, established in memory of Dottie Fox and Jackie Chandler. Joan spent a week in late September photographing and painting existing and proposed Hidden Gems wilderness areas. She’ll donate one of her original pieces to WW, and will give us rights to repro-duce several others in greeting cards and other items. Thanks to our panel of jurors, Mary Dominick, Denny Vaughn, Jody Ensign, Elissa Topol, Cici Fox and Deb Jones.

The next Artist in Wilderness residency will be in June. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 15. For more information contact Mary Dominick at 925-7892, [email protected].

Please remember WW Please remember WW in your yearend givingin your yearend giving

These are challenging economic times for nonprofits. Like most or-

ganizations, the Wilderness Workshop has experienced a downturn in dona-tions so far this year.

This comes at a time when we’re called upon to do more than ever to defend against the threats of gas drill-ing, oil shale, off-road vehicles, road-building and other destructive activities in roadless and sensitive areas on our local public lands.

It also comes just as the window of political opportunity is opening to make the big push for Congressional designation of hundreds of thousands of acres of new wilderness through the

Hidden Gems proposal – our biggest initiative in 30 years.

WW has a trained, well-oiled team that is operating more effectively than at any time in its history. It would be unthinkable to let any staff go at this point. If anything, we need more staff to lead the Hidden Gems Campaign.

You’ll soon receive your annual fundraising appeal from WW. When you open it up and the forest fragrance of the little evergreen sprig stimulates fond memories of backcountry adven-tures in your brain’s limbic system, please heed the call and make a gift to the organization that’s working to keep our backcountry as is. Thank you!


DONOR HALL OF FAMEDONOR HALL OF FAME

$10,000+ $10,000+ AnonymousCamille BurkePeter LooramNew-Land FoundationAron Ralston $5,000-9,999 $5,000-9,999 Ruth Brown FoundationBarbara Allen and Bil DunawayMaki FoundationPeter Van Domelen

$2,000-4,999 $2,000-4,999 Beth Cashdan and Paul D’AmatoMary Dominick and Sven CoomerBeth FergusThe William H. & Mattie Wattis

Harris FoundationJulie HeymanEllen and Bill HuntKatie Kitchen and Paul KovachAnn NicholsSusan O’NealKatie and Hank Van SchaackMichael and Adelaide Waters*William B. Wiener, Jr. Foundation

Donor Advised Fund of ACFJack and Bonnie Wilke

$1,000-1,999 $1,000-1,999 Bruce BergerSally Cole, in memory of Lathrop

StrangDon and Susan EdmondsMarty FlugRichard Goldstein Private

FoundationFelicity HuffmanLinx Wednesday Group*Ford and Susan SchumannIsa Catto and Daniel ShawDeidre Stancioff

Douglas and Gabriella StuartAndy Wiessner and Patsy

Batchelder $500-999 $500-999 Ken and Carol Adelman, in honor

of Paul AndersonAndy and Muffy DiSabatinoJane and Dick HartSue and Greg MozianChuck and Meredith OgilbyRoaring Fork Valley Horse

CouncilPat SpitzmillerSpring Board Advised Fund of ACFKelly Wyly* $250-499 $250-499 William and Sara Barnes*Jay Cowan and Harriet GarthCVEPAJack Gausnell (RFW)Lanny and Judy GertlerTim HobbsSandy JacksonCarol Ann Kopf (RFW)Kathy and Tim LindholmReese Henry & Co.Steve SmithJohn and Sarah Villafranco* $100-249 $100-249 Karen BeardCarl and Katie BergmanDiana BeuttasHC and Dee BlakewellJohn BuergerKatherine and James BulkleyKatey BusterBeth Cashdan and Paul D’AmatoColorado Environmental CoalitionKatalin DomoszlayJames and Carmen Dowley

Ted EckAllyn Harvey*Michael Hassig and Olivia EmerySue and Bob Hess (RFW)Tom and Carol KurtWilliam LaemmelNick and Sarah LebbyTim and Donna McFlynnMary Anne Meyer (RFW)Travis MooreDavid Mork and Nanna SchovDoug and Lyn Nehasil (RFW)Lynda PalevskyGinny ParkerDavid Pietsch and Peggy CorcilloAron RalstonGreg RussiAuden Schendler and Ellen

FreedmanGreg and Nancy Schultz*Craig Scott* (RFW)John and Ingrid SeidelRichard and Carolyn Shohet*Mike and Margaret SimmonsRyan and Anda Smalls (RFW)The Ute MountaineerBetty WeissPierre and Beth Wille $50-99 $50-99 Marty Ames and Steve Hach

(RFW)Peter BissetRoger BrownLee CassinKim Chang and Jim ConditJanet CourseyKristine CrandallTom and Cathy CrumBeth DardynskiGail Ellerbrake*Ann and Mark Gianinetti*,

in memory of Jackie ChandlerKay Hannah, in memory of Jackie

ChandlerDavid and Annaday HiserKatherine HubbardDeborah HutchinsonEllen and Steve KnousBrad and Laurel LarsonAmy Mall*Lois Marmont

Cathy and Scott MillerChuck and Meredith OgilbySusan Philp and Lance ClarkeSandy Regan*Mary Ellen Sheridan (RFW)Bob and Phyllis ThromMark Venake*Kate Warren* Up to $49 Up to $49 Crista and Joseph Barlow*,

in memory of Valerie DurandDavid and Patti BluefieldOni Butterfly*Trish ChewChip CominsWilliam and Dolores Damrel*,

in memory of Valerie DurandTania DibbsLarry and Keiko Estell*Nancy FehrmannMary Jo FentonGreer and Bruce FoxSara GartonSusie Hoeppli*Pat HopkinsDoug and Jess Jacobson*Alex KettnerMary Jo KimbroughCathleen KraheSacha and Michael Logan*Nancy Lovendahl and Scott

KeatingMartha MadsenJames Maguire*Julia MarshallSandy and Mary Lynn MunroLee Osterman and Elissa Topol*Ginny ParkerPeter Plantec*Rachel RichardsGregory and Heather RydellMary Ellen Sheridan (RFW)Bill and Susan Shirley*Colby SmithDave Struempler*Kerek SwansonDon Thompson and Jan OenNancy Tipton, in memory of Jackie

ChandlerJim and Fay WardBrad Yule

The Wilderness Workshop wishes to thank the follow-ing people who have made donations since the June

newsletter. New members are indicated by an asterisk (*), members of Realtors for Wilderness by (RFW).

Dick Burke, a true friend of the Wilderness Work-shop, passed away unexpectely earlier this year.

The founder of Trek Bikes, Dick was a strategic philan-thropist; his “investment” in WW was highly successful, providing seed money that leveraged other gifts to enable us to nearly double our staff in three years. Thank you, Dick. Your legacy lives.


NON-PROFIT ORG

U.S. Postage

PAIDPERMIT NUMBER 62

CARBONDALE, CO

81623

Membership expiring?Your membership renewal date is printed above your address. You can renew your membership by using the enclosed reply envelope.

P.O. BOX 1442CARBONDALE, CO 81623

ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED

Printed on 100% recycled paper. Please recycle this newsletter - pass it on to a friend!

Wilderness WorksWilderness Works June 2008 June 2008

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A good day on Huntsman Ridge, north of McClure Pass in the proposed Clear Fork Divide Wilderness Area.

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