Even if you’ve never been to the vast red-rock desert country around Moab, Utah, you’ve been there—its mesas and buttes, its towering arches, have been the backdrop for a thousand movies (and even more S.U.V. commercials). It’s what we think about when we think about “the West,” a truly mythic place. Some of it has been protected in national monuments and parks: Arches and Canyonlands. But the fate of a large swath of it, though nominally belonging to the American people, may soon fall to a guy named Craig Larson.
Here’s the story so far. Under a long-standing law known as the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, anyone can “nominate” a parcel of federal land for oil-and-gas development—it doesn’t cost a thing. The rules are so lax that you don’t even have to supply your name if you want to nominate a piece of land, but Prairie Hills Oil & Gas did provide at least that much context when it asked the federal Bureau of Land Management to set aside land between Arches and Canyonlands. Prairie Hills Oil & Gas, of North Dakota, it turns out, is headquartered at a home that Larson, an attorney, co-owns in Big Lake, Minnesota, about forty miles northwest of Minneapolis. After the land is nominated, and certain review processes are completed, the B.L.M. moves to set up a lease auction, which, in the case of Larson and Utah, is scheduled for September. (Although Larson has nominated the parcels, anyone, in fact, could be the ultimate winning bidder.)
The minimum competitive bid for an acre is two dollars, and that’s often the price it goes for in areas like Moab—the prospects are far from guaranteed. The lease has a term of ten years, and, after the gavel comes down, the annual rental fee per acre would be a dollar and a half for the first five years, and two dollars for the second. As Steve Bloch, of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, explained it to me, “If Company A buys a hundred-acre lease, they will write B.L.M. a check for five hundred and twenty dollars.” That would include the bid, the first-year rental rate, and an administrative fee. If the company drills for oil and gas, it also pays the government a royalty of 12.5 per cent on the production, and the lease can be extended.
I recently called Larson to ask him about the company’s plans, and he couldn’t have been more polite or more unhelpful.
“I was curious how it was you decided to ask for those leases,” I said.
“You know, I really don’t have much to add than what we’ve done as far as the nominations,” he answered.
“Are you worried about the local Native American groups? Some have been upset.”
“I don’t really have anything more to say about it other than that our actions are public record.”
“What are the next steps in the disposition?”
“It’s up to the B.L.M. to decide the next steps.”
“Does the current economic environment around oil and gas give you pause?”
“I guess our actions speak for themselves, and I really don’t have much more to add. . . .”
“These aren’t technical or legal questions. I was trying to get at whether you took seriously the things people were raising.”
“I understand.”
Larson does not seem like a villain to me here, and he’s done nothing illegal. In fact, what’s preposterous is how entirely legal it all is. The law itself is the crime—a gift to the oil and gas businesses. It awards the industry chunks of federal land through a process designed to move real estate out of public control as easily as possible. Perhaps you could argue that, a century ago, it was an improvement over the previously unregulated disorder that gave industrialists almost literal free rein over the landscape, in that it provided at least some government oversight. But now?
Now Moab, a city of some five thousand people, makes a lot of money each year from mountain bikers and rafters, from people coming to visit the parks—though not during a pandemic. It’s world-famous for its dark skies; an Instagram capital of Milky Way viewing. Will oil wells flaring off gas help that business? “When you look at that map it just sends chills up your spine,” the chairwoman of the local county council told Bloomberg Law. (She also asked, “Why would you put an oil well in the center of a Picasso or van Gogh?”)
Now the world is awash in oil. The pandemic crash could mean that the planet reached peak oil demand in 2019, and that, as economic recovery follows, any new growth in energy supplies is likely to come from solar and wind power.
And now, above all, the world is overheating, and dangerously; the last thing it needs is more oil. The rivers of the Southwest are perfect examples of the mortal peril we now face. Moab is situated in the Colorado Plateau watershed. In February, a new study showed that, over the past century, the flow of the Colorado River was down by twenty per cent, owing mainly to climate change, and that it could fall another twenty per cent by 2050, if we don’t cut emissions. But, instead, as Bloch told me, the Trump Administration is “putting the Interior Department and B.L.M.’s pedal to the floor to sell as many leases as possible.” (A B.L.M. spokesperson said that the agency “follows its congressional mandate regarding lease sales.”) Indeed, the B.L.M. has scheduled nearly twenty oil-and-gas-lease sales on federal land nationwide through the end of 2020, and the Administration has shrunk the size of wildernesses and national monuments, paving the way for more drilling. It is a classic land rush.
The Southwest is not my landscape—I’ve spent my life in the wet mountains of the East, where an unobstructed view comes only if you devote a day to climbing the highest peaks. But I know that others feel entirely at home in that sere, spectacular region. “This land is beautiful,” Davis Filfred, a Navajo leader, told me, as he was delivering groceries to people suffering through the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit the Navajo Nation with particular force. At least, it’s beautiful until the fossil-fuel companies get there. “Where they’ve come, the land is completely contaminated,” Filfred said. “The water base is completely contaminated with petroleum, and with arsenic and selenium. The air—it smells like a rotten egg.” He added, “A hundred years from now—let’s say when my kid’s grandkids are here, we’re robbing them. I want them to see this land as it was Day One.”
I first got to know the region through the writings of Edward Abbey, whose classic book from 1968, “Desert Solitaire,” plays out against that remarkable terrain. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread, “ he wrote. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” I visited Abbey in Moab when I was in my mid-twenties, gathering string for what became my book “The End of Nature.” It was a memorable trip, ripping around desert backroads in a rental car; I was a little overwhelmed both by Abbey’s outsized personality and by the scale of the place itself. (I asked Craig Larson if he’d had a chance to read any Abbey. “I thank you for your call, but I really don’t have anything more to tell you,” he said.) In later years, I’ve gotten to know the land better through the eyes of a dear friend, the writer Terry Tempest Williams, who has succeeded Abbey as the chronicler of that region. I asked her to describe the scene near Moab as spring turns toward summer. “I was up before dawn this morning just watching light touch the desert and fill it with birdsong,” she wrote. “The globe mallow are blooming. Claret cup cactus, too. Clouds like schooners sailing across the blue skies.”
As it happens, Terry and her husband, Brooke, went to a B.L.M. auction in 2016 and tried to lease land—they paid $1,680 for a ten-year lease on 1,120 acres, plus a processing fee, and formed a company, Tempest Exploration L.L.C. (Not all the parcels were leased in the auction, and some were discounted afterward, in a sort of “fire sale.” That’s where Terry and Brooke obtained their lease.) She had no hesitation in explaining her motives, as she wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times, “The energy we hope to produce through Tempest Exploration is not the kind that will destroy our planet, but the kind that will fuel moral imagination. We need to harness this spiritual and political energy to sustain the planet we call home.” They made it clear that they would not drill for oil “until science could show it was worth more above ground than below.” The lease was eventually denied; they appealed, and a decision is still pending, four years later.
Another friend, an environmentalist named Tim DeChristopher, bid for leases on a large area at a competitive Salt Lake City auction, in 2008. He bid $1.8 million, and then said that he had no intention of paying the sum, which he didn’t have. For that, he was sentenced to two years in a federal correctional facility, in California. I visited him there, and remember thinking that Ed Abbey would have been proud of him. (He served twenty-one months, and was released in 2013.) Terry Tempest Williams has been one of his biggest supporters.
Now, finally, something may change. Joe Biden has promised, repeatedly, that, if elected President, he would end new leasing on federal lands for oil, gas, and coal. As he said during a primary debate in March, “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.” That would make a massive difference for the climate: fossil fuels pulled from public lands account for about twenty per cent of the nation’s total greenhouse-gas output.
But it would also make a massive difference for those parts of the Utah desert that have lain empty and sublime. I don’t know exactly whom they belong to—Native people, all of us, the coyotes, God? But the answer clearly shouldn’t be some guy named Craig.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-guy-named-craig-may-soon-have-control-over-a-large-swath-of-utah
