Bush's energy bill will destroy the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana, wildlest place left

Talk of Gas Drilling Splits Pro-Bush Factions in West

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...003Nov3_3.html

By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 4, 2003; Page A01


CHOTEAU, Mont. -- The Great Plains smack into the Rockies just west of
here. The collision of flatness and verticality results in the Rocky
Mountain Front, the only place in the West where large numbers of
grizzlies, elk and bighorn sheep still wander down out of the
mountains and take their leisure on the grassy plain.



Seven years ago, the U.S. Forest Service ruled that the Front deserved
"special attention" and halted new oil and gas leasing. Hunters,
hikers and assorted lovers of this 100-mile-long stretch of
wildernessbreathed a collective sigh of relief.

A long fight between energy extraction and wildlife protection seemed
over. The bears and the elk had apparently won, with the help of
national conservation and hunting groups, as well as a majority of
Montanans, who told pollsters this place should be left alone.

But now, with natural gas prices up sharply and with President Bush
making domestic energy production a national security priority, the
fight over the Front is back on. Although the Forest Service's ban on
new leases remains in effect, the Bureau of Land Management is
reviewing plans by three companies with existing leases to extract gas
from eight wells. If they find significant amounts of gas, there will
almost certainly be many more new wells, plus roads, pipelines and
processing plants.

Rumbles of renewed resource extraction along the Front are echoing
across the country -- with prime hunting and fishing habitat coming
under threat in the federal forests, plains and wetlands of Alaska,
Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, South Dakota, New Mexico and elsewhere. The
gathering din has begun to worry -- and, in some cases, infuriate --
America's fishermen and hunters, many of whom are Republicans who
voted for Bush. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates about 47
million Americans fish or hunt.

"This is a community that is slow to anger, but once they get lit it
is a real hot burn," said Chris Woods, conservation director for Trout
Unlimited, which has 130,000 members, 64 percent of whom say they are
Republicans. "You are seeing this now on the Rocky Mountain Front.
This is one of the Holy Grail places."

When it comes to politics, a long-standing lament among American
sportsmen is that Democrats want your guns and Republicans want your
land.

Leaders of the country's major fishing and hunting organizations agree
that concern about gun-control laws was a key factor in their members'
support for Bush in the last election. Yet, with the exception of the
National Rifle Association, these leaders say they are hearing from
members upset about what the Bush administration is doing to federal
land.

"While many of them vote gun rights first and conservation second,
many do not," said Paul Hansen, executive director of the Izaak Walton
League, which has 50,000 members, 80 percent of whom describe
themselves as Republicans or independents. "I think the administration
is making a big mistake if they are taking this electoral group for
granted."

The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, an umbrella group for
many hunting, fishing and conservation groups, is hearing angry
questions from around the country.



"Sportsmen look to us to tell them what this administration is doing
for hunters and fishermen," said George Cooper, a spokesman for the
partnership. "We don't have much good news to give them. It is hard to
quantify, but I would certainly say there is concern and growing
frustration."

The National Rifle Association, though, said its 4 million members are
neither upset nor asking questions about federal land use under Bush.

"Preservation of hunting habitat is always a concern, but we have not
heard any communication from our members on this matter," spokesman
Andrew Arulanandam said. He said the dominant issues are getting rid
of gun laws passed in the Clinton era and lobbying Congress to pass a
law protecting gunmakers from lawsuits.

The NRA seems alone among major gun groups in not hearing at least
some grumbling from members about administration land policies. Even
groups that declined to comment publicly on the administration's
policies, such as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Boone and
Crockett Club, said energy exploration on prime hunting turf is a
major source of debate and worry.


About 450 gun clubs across the United States -- including 49 combat
handgun clubs -- have signed a petition objecting to the
administration's proposal to remove the Tongass National Forest in
southeast Alaska from the protection of a Clinton-era rule that bans
new roads in undeveloped parts of the forest. The Tongass contains
perhaps the world's premier salmon fisheries and is a favorite site
for high-end big-game hunting.




"The Tongass is a gold mine for sportsman," the petition said. "Given
the extraordinary values of this region, it was surprising and
disappointing, to see the Department of Agriculture proposing to
remove the Tongass" from the roadless rule.

The petition was mailed last week to Dale Bosworth, chief of the
Forest Service, from the Northern Sportsman Network, an Alaskan group
of hunters, fishermen, outdoor guides and religious leaders.

The Mule Deer Foundation is one of many hunting groups objecting to
the administration's push to accelerate coal-bed methane drilling in
Wyoming and New Mexico. The drilling technique, which pumps water out
of shallow aquifers to get at methane trapped in coal seams, has laced
vast tracts of Wyoming -- including prime deer-hunting land -- with
roads, wastewater pits, power lines and noisy compressor stations.

"Remove the best habitat from 8 million acres and deny its use to
150,000 mule deer, and you have some idea of the potential impact of
uncontrolled CBM [coal-bed methane] development in northern Wyoming,"
Dale Ackels wrote in the foundation's magazine, Mule Deer.

In South Dakota, many bird hunters are upset by the administration's
retreat from a federal program of buying conservation easements on
wetlands that are prime habitat for migrating ducks.

Tony Dean, host and producer of a popular outdoors television show,
has accused the administration of undermining a conservation program
that is good for birds, farmers and hunters.

"Saying you're the friend of sportsmen because you support gun
ownership, while using it to hide the dismantling of America's
conservation policies, is patently dishonest," Dean wrote recently in
Outdoors Unlimited, a publication of the Outdoor Writers of America.

As much as any wildlife habitat in the West, the Rocky Mountain Front
is an instructive place to observe the collision between the
administration's energy policy and the passions of the nation's major
hunting and conservation groups.

The Front is the gateway from the Great Plains to the largest cluster
of protected wilderness in the lower 48. The region abuts a 2
million-acre swath of mountains stretching south from Glacier National
Park down through three designated wilderness areas to the outskirts
of Helena, Montana's capital.

The land along the Front is a patchwork of federal, state and private
ownership, and very little of it has an official wilderness
designation. But boundaries and designations have little influence on
large seasonal migrations of big game.

Grizzly and brown bears, the country's second-largest herd of elk,
mule deer, white-tailed deer, wolves, mountain goats, the country's
largest herd of bighorn sheep, bobcats, lynx, wolverines, and coyotes
all venture out of the high country into the foothills and plains
along the Front at various times of the year.

The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks classifies the Front
as a part of the top 1 percent of wildlife habitat in the United
States. The only major big-game animal not still present in large
numbers is the buffalo, which was hunted to near-extinction in the
late 1800s.

Starting in 1913, when the first private game reserve was established,
hunting and conservation groups have tried to protect the animals that
remain. In almost every way, they have succeeded.

The Front is one of the most impressive conservation stories in
America," said Jim Posewitz, director of Orion the Hunter's Institute,
an organization in Helena that teaches the history and ethics of
hunting.



One severely disruptive interloper that the Front has not had to be
protected from is the subdivision. The weather here is reliably
horrible: cold and windy, hot and windy, snow and windy. The wind
routinely blows railroad cars off tracks.

This is not a part of Montana where wealthy people build trophy homes.
(One exception is David Letterman, the talk show host, whose ranch
house near the Front was recently busted up by a black bear.) In
recent decades and at a quickening pace, Montana hunting groups, along
with the Nature Conservancy and the Boone and Crockett Club, have
bought a number of large tracts of land and set them aside for
wildlife. In 1972, the Scapegoat Wilderness area, which abuts the
Front, was the first federal wilderness in the country to be created
as a result of local citizen initiative.

"What doesn't fit into this picture is oil and gas development,"
Posewitz said. "It cannot come lightly into a wild landscape."

The energy industry says that argument is flat wrong.

"We aren't going to screw up the land," said Gail Abercrombie,
executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association. "The grizzly
bears and elk will be there with natural gas production. It is not one
or the other. We will have both."

But the recent history of the oil and gas industry in the Rocky
Mountain West does not inspire trust, according to the Montana
Wildlife Federation, an umbrella group for 25 hunting clubs in this
state. The organization points to environmental damage done by gas
drilling in northern Wyoming, as well as to large-scale gas drilling
in Canada on a stretch of land similar to the Front.

"It is not as if our members have taken a position against the Bush
administration or the Republican Party, but when it comes to the Front
they just want to keep industry out," said Nathan Birkeland, a
spokesman for the federation, which is the state's largest hunting
group.

What concerns many local hunters and national conservation groups is
the relatively small amount of gas the government estimates can be
extracted from the Front. According to a Bureau of Land Management
document released last year, the amount of recoverable gas is 14
billion to 106 billion cubic feet. That is a few days' worth of
national gas consumption, which now runs at an annual rate of about
22.5 trillion cubic feet.

The Montana Petroleum Association counters that although relatively
small gas fields may seem insignificant, they can add up to a major
role in addressing the country's energy shortage.

"No single place in this country can provide all of the natural gas we
need," Abercrombie said. "It will take all the various sources."

Still, many people who live along the Front, along with several
national hunting groups, question why one of those relatively small
sources has to be a premier wildlife habitat.

"To me, it doesn't make sense," said Carl Rappold, 51, a rancher on
the Front who has always voted Republican but said he will not vote
again for Bush. "We got all these species clustered in a little bit of
space. It is almost like a last stand. And now we are going to develop
it for a handful of gas?"