Earth Equity News

Bureau of Land Management Rushing Through Aggressive Gas Drilling in Culturally-Sensitive Nine Mile Canyon. By Keith Kloor, Mother Jones, September/October 2008. "Nestled into the rugged, sparsely populated Tavaputs Plateau [in central Utah's Nine Mile Canyon]... is a virtual museum of prehistoric art, with an estimated 10,000 images pecked and painted on its towering sandstone walls. I've come to view the dazzling millennium-old renderings of hunters, shamans, and animals before, as [archaelogist and BLM employee Blaine] Miller fears, they vanish under a coating of dust and grime, thanks to decisions made by... the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department division that oversees some 262 million acres of federal land... Four years and some 200 [gas] wells [since 2004], this once-serene canyon has become an industrial corridor... [thanks to] a new blm-approved plan that would bring 600 more gas wells and up to 1,000 truck trips a day through Nine Mile. Although he's an expert on the canyon's history and the sole archaeologist in the bureau's local field office, [Blaine] Miller wasn't able to view his office's environmental impact statement for the drilling expansion prior to its public release in February, something Kevin Jones, Utah's state archaeologist, calls 'incredible'... What incenses Miller most, [aside from the damage to the priceless rock art on the canyon walls,] is his office's new Tavaputs Plateau resource management plan, the master blueprint that dictates how the bureau will oversee the area for the next 15 to 20 years. Normally, these 'rmps' take years to complete as myriad competing interests weigh in, but Interior has stamped as 'time sensitive' nearly a dozen such plans in six resource-rich Western states -- Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, and Alaska -- and is rushing to finalize them before Bush leaves office."