Stalked by Dinosaurs

Essay by Patricia Dowd

Montana Conservation Coordinator for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition

Every once in a while I get the strange feeling I’m being followed. Not by a stranger or a mountain lion looking for an easy meal, but by the oil and gas industry.

For the past 15 years the West has been my home. I lived in Wyoming for over a decade and moved north to Bozeman five years ago. During my time in Wyoming I discovered wonder in the wildlands of the Medicine Bow, Bridger-Teton and Shoshone National Forests, but no place was more spectacular to me than the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) area known as the Red Desert.

Encompassing some 8 million acres north of Rawlins, south of Lander, and east of Pinedale, the Greater Red Desert is home to Native American petroglyphs and holy sites, a desert elk herd, sage grouse, 50,000 pronghorn antelope, sand dunes, aspen groves, wild horses, and wide open spaces. For thousands of years this place has been known as the big empty. Unfortunately the big empty is filling up.

In 2004, the BLM issued its management plan for the heart of the Red Desert. The plan allows for up to 1,077 natural gas wells and 543 coalbed methane wells to be drilled—changing a wild landscape into an industrial one.

Oil and gas drilling occurs in almost every corner of Wyoming—from the Powder River Basin to the Pinedale Anticline, from the Red Desert to the Beartooth Front.

Now in Montana a similar story is unfolding. In 2005 the BLM issued its management plan for the southwest corner of the state, west of Yellowstone National Park. It put an estimated 1.2 million acres of its 1.3 million acres of land on the chopping block for oil and gas leasing. Recently, 43 oil and gas leases were proposed here.

So begins the process of transforming a landscape.

Last year alone nearly two million acres of state lands in Montana were leased for oil and gas drilling, in places such as Bridger Canyon outside of Bozeman, on the banks of the Yellowstone River east of Livingston, and smack in the middle of a critical wildlife migration corridor in the Centennial Valley.

Once leased for oil and gas drilling, landscapes change. Not only do drill rigs move in, but roads are built, transmission lines are strung up, and traffic noise and air pollution become commonplace. Wildlife get displaced. Quiet, wild, open landscapes disappear.

I know our country needs energy, but drilling for oil and gas in some of the West’s last best places just doesn’t make sense. We can protect our wildlands, open space and wildlife habitat and have homegrown energy to support our way of life, if we are willing to make a few small changes for the greater good.

I am working toward the day when communities across the West run on sustainable, responsible energy. We can start with conservation—shut off lights you don’t need, replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, drive less, turn down the thermostat, support local farmers, buy green energy from your energy company, install photovoltaic panels, participate in the decision making process that impacts wild places in your neck of the woods.

I am hopeful that together we can turn things around and achieve Wallace Stegner’s vision of creating a society to match the scenery. Because quite frankly, I love the West’s opens spaces just as they are, and I’m tired of being stalked by an industry that runs on buried dinosaurs.

Patricia Dowd, on horseback, in Wyoming’s Red Desert.

Patricia Dowd works for Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman, MT. When not in the office, Patricia can be found outside cycling, hiking, skiing.