The Bull Mountain Pipeline is being constructed in the East Willow Roadless Area on Colorado’s Grand Mesa National Forest. Photo © James Johnston
“What a gorgeous place,” Peter Hart said gazing north across the East Willow Roadless Area. “This place has world-class wilderness values. And they’re just going to despoil it.”
It’s pretty hard to disagree with Hart that the area has world-class wilderness values. First of all, it’s big. The 8,500-acre East Willow Roadless Area is part of the proposed Clear Fork Divide Wilderness Area, a 137,393-acre roadless complex on the Grand Mesa National Forest in the wild heart of the Colorado Rockies, about twenty miles southwest of Carbondale. Second of all, it’s beautiful—a land of rolling green meadows, thick stands of 300-year-old spruce and miles of aspen groves that, at the time of our mid-summer hike, are covered in a tangle of wild roses.
It’s also pretty hard to argue about the despoiled part. Hart and I are standing next to the fresh, knee-deep mud ruts of a new road that crosses one of hundreds of crystal clear brooks gurgling through a field of lupine, false hellebore and blue-green buffalo grass. The road is being used to provide access for the construction of an underground natural gas pipeline from the Bull Mountain gas fields to the Interstate 70 transmission corridor.
Hart works for Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop, a conservation group that sued the U.S. Forest Service earlier this year for granting permission to an oil and gas company, SG Interests I Ltd., to build the twenty-mile long road. On its face, they argued, construction of the road and associated development is a clear violation of President Clinton’s 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The rule prohibits building roads—defined as “motor vehicle travelways over fifty inches wide”—in inventoried roadless areas, including temporary roads. But in June a federal appeals court sided with the Forest Service, which claimed that the road was neither a permanent road nor a temporary road but “a construction zone,” and thus not illegal under the Clinton rule.
The Bull Mountain pipeline provides a preview of a fight shaping up in Colorado over a draft rule that would loosen the Clinton Roadless Rule protections—protections that are already loose enough to allow construction of gas pipelines in roadless areas. The state of Colorado has become an advocate for more, not less, flexibility when it comes to roadless area protection. The Forest Service, at the request of Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, has issued a new draft rule that will weaken or remove many of the key existing protections for the 4.4 million acres of roadless areas managed by the agency in that state.
The citizens in this part of rural Colorado are not known for their opposition to wilderness protection. This is a true outdoor mecca, where much of the population in the three closest counties depend upon the tourism industry, which in turn depends on the region’s spectacular scenery. Hunting, fishing and wildlife viewing contribute $265 million to local economies every year, and 98 percent of that use takes place on national forest land.
It’s hard to find a local with anything good to say about the pipeline. While county commissioners in other western states decry environmental litigation, commissioners in Pitkin County, where Clear Fork is located, joined Wilderness Workshop’s lawsuit demanding more environmental protection for the area.
As Hart and I returned to our vehicle, we were stopped by a grizzled elk guide named Matt. His business is elk, and he hasn’t seen one for weeks, ever since helicopters began flying in construction materials. “I don’t expect we’ll see many animals until these guys are outta here,” he says. “If they’re ever out of here.”
ROADLESS RULE IN LIMBO
Trying to keep track of the national roadless conservation saga is like being a spectator at a tennis match, watching the ball fly back and forth between conservationists and advocates of wilderness development. Clinton’s Roadless Rule, the last act of his embattled presidency, was adopted after a three-year public process in which 1.6 million people weighed in, most strongly in support of roadless protection.
Fifteen days after the rule was signed, the newly installed Bush administration issued directives to abandon implementation of the rule. During the next three years, the administration refused to defend the rule against lawsuits from several western states. In July 2003, Wyoming U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Brimmer struck down the rule.
In May 2005, President Bush issued the 2005 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which requires governors to petition for state-specific rules to protect inventoried roadless areas in national forests and grasslands in their state. It’s a fundamentally flawed approach, according to Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council based in Boulder, Colorado.
“Before the [Clinton] Roadless Rule,” she says, “millions of pristine acres were disappearing piecemeal from the national landscape. The Forest Service’s own analysis found that a consistent policy across the national forest system was essential to preserve the wild roadless areas that remained.” The Clinton Roadless Rule, she says, accommodates local decision making for many activities while ending the most harmful and controversial activities.
Colorado was the first state to release a draft environmental impact statement under the Bush administration’s revised rule. The July 2008 draft allows broader exceptions to road building than does the Clinton rule. Where the Clinton rule prohibits road building or commercial timber harvest except to address the “imminent threat” of wildfire or other catastrophic events, the Colorado draft rule allows for temporary roads for “treatment actions” in specified roadless areas, such as in wildland urban interface zones. The Colorado draft rule allows logging in areas permitted for use by ski resorts. Roads can also be built to manage grazing allotments.
“Temporary” roads, under the Colorado rule, would be allowed in conjunction with oil and gas leases, including the construction of infrastructure to transport the oil or gas, making more roads like the one through the Clear Fork Roadless Area inevitable. The rule also allows “long-term temporary roads” that can be used for oil and gas mining for as long as thirty years.
All told, the draft rule would remove more than 200,000 acres from Colorado’s currently protected roadless inventory.
Democratic Governor Ritter and a number of conservation groups argue that the state’s draft rule benefits roadless areas because it locks in protections in case the controversial Clinton rule is thrown out by the courts, again, or by another Republican administration, again. Ritter describes the Colorado rule as an “insurance policy.”
The rules governing roadless areas are a moving target. On August 12, Judge Brimmer ruled again for the state of Wyoming in overturning Clinton’s Roadless Rule. The decision contrasts with a 2006 ruling by California U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth LaPorte that rescinded Bush’s 2005 rule and upheld the original Roadless Rule.
On August 29, the Forest Service released an environmental impact statement for a roadless plan for Idaho, which would open up 400,000 acres of roadless areas to mining and oil and gas development. The Idaho rule makes it easier to log in 5.6 million acres of roadless forests that are otherwise protected from road building.
MAKING EXCEPTIONS
“Fundamentally, the Colorado rule allows for more logging, road building, ski expansion and oil and gas development,” says Mall. “Who benefits from each rule? The Clinton rule was a more balanced rule. The Colorado rule was written to benefit industry. It has special favors for the skiing industry, the oil and gas industry and the grazing industry. There’s no special favors for the general public who use these areas.”
On September 22, the Bureau of Land Management issued SG Interests I a cease-and-desist order that stopped work on the pipeline after a White River National Forest official found only one of four required environmental inspectors on the job. The lack of sufficient inspectors, according to the order, “makes it very unlikely that environmental protections can be accomplished.”
The Clear Fork Divide is not the only area at risk from oil and gas development. Colorado’s rule would allow thousands of acres of gas leases to be developed in the backcountry, such as Thompson Creek, a large roadless area just west of Carbondale in the heart of ski country. Peter Hart and Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Wilderness Workshop, have been working to protect the areas as wilderness, but it “won’t have any roadless protection after the new rule passes,” Shoemaker says.
Not only has the area been proposed for inclusion in the national wilderness system, but it’s an important source of water for local ranchers.
“Our take on it is that it’s not a rule that’s focused on protecting areas,” says Shoemaker of the Colorado rule. “It’s a rule that’s focused on exceptions to protections. It’s a road to ruin.”