A fragile land is ruined in the name of energy

[Guest guest]

http://www.iht.com/articles/48897.html

 

A fragile land is ruined in the name of energy

Terry Tempest Williams | NYT

Friday, February 22, 2002

 

CASTLE VALLEY, Utah For many Americans, the Bush administration energy plan,

developed by Vice President Dick Cheney with the help of a task force whose

deliberations he will not reveal, is an abstraction at best, and at worst a

secret.

 

Here in the redrock desert of southern Utah, it is literally an earthshaking

reality.

 

Oil and gas exploration is going on in the form of seismic tests, conducted

with what are called thumper trucks, in sensitive wildlands adjacent to

Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.

 

Last Sunday, with a group of friends concerned about the fate of this

landscape, one of America's most treasured, I witnessed the destructive power

of the thumper trucks on the fragile desert.

 

We had a Bureau of Land Management map showing the territory designated for

exploration and drilling under the Bush energy plan. This pristine country of

sandstone formations, pinyon and juniper forests, and fragile alkaline desert

is one of the proposed preserves in the Redrock Wilderness bill now before

Congress, which would protect these lands from new leases for oil drilling

and exploration.

 

Lines drawn on the map marked the physical corridors where four large trucks

would crawl cross-country, tamping the desert for clues as to where oil might

be found. As we set out to look for the trucks, our task was simplified by a

helicopter carrying what appeared to be an enormous doughnut. It was a tire.

We watched where it was dropped and hiked to the work site. A thumper truck

was lodged in the steep banks of a wash, its huge rear left tire having been

torn off by an unseen boulder. Parked nearby was a truck in which

WesternGeco, the company contracted to do this preliminary work, was

recording the seismic information.

 

Three other thumper trucks were at work about half a mile ahead. Behind them

was pulverized earth: a swath of beaten down and broken junipers, blackbrush,

rabbitbrush, squawbush and cliffrose. The delicate desert crust that holds

the red sand in place from wind and erosion, known as cryptobiotic soil, was

obliterated. Replacing it, in effect, was a newly crushed road.

 

In January Jayne Belnap, a United States Geological Survey expert on soil

damage, submitted an official comment letter to the Bureau of Land Management

about the fragility of desert crusts, warning it could take from 50 to 300

years for the dry soil to recover from the damage incurred by heavy

equipment.

 

Up close, the thumper trucks creeping across the desert looked like gigantic

insects, gnawing and clawing across the rugged terrain. At the designated

stops, each truck in the convoy lowered a steel plate onto the desert,

clamped tight and then sent a jolt of seismic waves below to record density.

 

The ground went into a seizure. Sand flew and smoke obscured the horizon

where Skyline Arch and Sand Dune Arch - the Windows section of Arches

National Park - stand.

 

When the steel plate lifted, the once supple red sand had turned to concrete.

 

We were only a few miles from Delicate Arch, where a few weeks ago a Ute

elder uttered prayers and passed the Winter Olympics torch to his

granddaughter in the name of goodwill and peace.

 

The trucks moved forward, heading straight for a spring where 100-year-old

cottonwood trees provided a rare canopy of shade.

 

We ran ahead, not believing the trucks would force a road into this fragile

desert oasis, but they did, gunning the gas, breaking down stands of

squawbush and willows and ripping right on through the cottonwood shoots.

There was nothing we could do but watch. This was America's new energy plan,

translated into action.

 

Terry Tempest Williams, author of " Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, "

contributed this comment to The New York Times.