I moved to Arizona eleven years ago in search of wildness. I came from Iowa, the most successful state in the Union at eliminating wild lands. A majority of Iowa was once covered by prairie, a rich grassland ecosystem that was home to bison, prairie chickens, elk, bears, mountain lions, wolves, and even river otters. All that was dismantled — or 99.9 percent of it, anyway — to make way for row crops, mostly corn and soybeans. Iowa became a wilderness sacrifice area.
Yellow warbler, San Pedro River (Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management).
The fact that so much of Arizona remains wild has nothing to do with any ecologically-minded superiority of its inhabitant, of course. Mostly, Arizona has been blessed with a lack of water. The Sonoran desert is still host to so much of its original wildlife simply because, with few exceptions, the European migration (or “invasion,” to most native peoples) that began in the early 16th century found the desert inhospitable, or more accurately, unprofitable.
Riparian areas — the interface between land and water — are home to countless species of plants and animals in the arid Southwest, most noticeably to birds that either live there permanently or travel along them. For much of the wildlife here, rivers are the true Arizona highways.
An ExxonMobile official threatened reporter Lisa Song (InsideClimate News) with arrest at the site of an Arkansas oil spill on Wednesday. Song is co-author of The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of. The expose of the July 2010 oil spill of more than a million gallons of dilbit — diluted bitumen, the same substance that spilled in Arkansas — into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, was a finalist for the 2012 Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Writing.
The ExxonMobile Pegasus pipeline that ruptured in Mayflower, Arkansas, on March 29 is at about sixty-five years old and was not originally designed to carry dilbit, a mixture of Canadian oil and chemicals that is heavier and more corrosive than normal crude oil. ExxonMobile has said the 800-plus mile pipeline that runs from south-central Illinois to Texas was upgraded to double its capacity two years ago.
“I have been reminded by Exxon’s representatives that this is a relatively small spill and cleanup is going just great,” Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel told NPR on Wednesday when he was inspecting the site. “I hope that they realize that to the homeowners in this area, it is not small — it is catastrophic.”
News of the threat follows reports of other attempts by ExxonMobil to limit public access to information about the 80,000 gallon spill. (For example, here and here.)
Here’s a clip from today’s InsideClimate News about the incident:
Song had tried to enter the command compound on Tuesday, but was turned away by a security guard. On Wednesday, however, a different guard was on duty and he waved her through the gate. Inside, a second person directed her to the warehouse that houses the command center.
Inside the building, Song went to a table with a sign that said “public affairs,” where she was given the name and contact information for Austin Vela, the EPA spokesman at the site. Before she could get the name of a DOT representative, however, Exxon spokeswoman Kim Jordan spotted Song and told her to leave. A second person arrived and said, “You’ve been asked by security to leave. If you don’t you’ll be arrested for criminal trespass.”
As Ronald Reagan so famously put it: “There you go again.”
When he uttered that phrase, Reagan was attacking Jimmy Carter. Today, the observation applies equally to another historical dust-up, between Theodore Roosevelt’s old nemesis — Big Oil and Gas — and the home of TR’s legacy: Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP).
As TR’s great-great-grandson, Winthrop Roosevelt, says in a new video, “Unchecked development [of fracking] is on a collision course with one of America’s truly special places” — the grassland park in North Dakota that bears the name of the America’s greatest environmental president.
A Boom With No Boundaries, produced by the Center for American Progress, shows how a slew of new fracking wells — with many more planned — threatens the integrity of TRNP. The 110-square mile park is home to bison, pronghorn antelope, elk, prairie dogs and other distinctive and rare flora and fauna of the American Badlands.
Roosevelt’s “Ethical Movement” Against Big Oil
There is obvious irony in that the threatened park is named for the nation’s “Wilderness Warrior” (the title of Douglas Brinkley’s compelling TR biography). There’s an added layer of irony. One of TR’s biggest and longest-standing enemies was the Standard Oil Company. When Roosevelt became president in 1901, Standard Oil was Big Oil.
Punch Magazine, 1906.
Even before that, in his last formal address to the New York legislature as that state’s governor, Roosevelt warned that without government regulation and oversight, industrial giants would destroy the environment.
“Unrestrained greed,” Roosevelt said, “means the ruin of the great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.”
TR was at least as concerned about the broader, anti-democratic tendencies of concentrations of great wealth and power. To prevent such abuses, President Roosevelt helped create the Bureau of Corporations, a federal body with unprecedented (but still limited) power to investigate and regulate giant corporations like Standard Oil.
The fight, said Roosevelt, was “fundamentally an ethical movement” targeting “the most dangerous members of the criminal class — the criminals of great wealth.”
Roosevelt had his attorney general sue several companies under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for price-fixing and other illegal practices. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the umbrella organization for dozens of interconnected companies, was one of Roosevelt’s primary targets.
The foes duked it out in court for years. Although he was no longer president, Roosevelt was vindicated in 1911 when the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil of New Jersey to spin off some 33 separate companies.
In a press release accompanying the new CAP video, Andrew Satter and Jessica Goad call on the Obama administration to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s example.
The story of the assault on Theodore Roosevelt National Park is only one example of how energy development and land conservation are out of balance on our public lands. Over the past four years, the Obama administration has leased two-and-a-half times more acres of public lands to oil and gas companies than it has permanently protected. It’s time for the administration to put policies that protect and conserve our public lands and national parks for future generations on equal ground with policies that promote more oil and gas drilling.
