… And Daddy, won’t you take me back to
Muhlenberg County,
Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay?
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking,
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
— John Prine
The early years of my life were spent in southern West Virginia. Dad worked for the railroad for a dollar an hour, and we lived in a rambling old house covered with brick siding. We had a good life hunting groundhogs on summer Saturdays and fox squirrels and whitetail deer in the fall.
Down the river a few miles were the coal fields. Before the turn of the century, it was said that some Yankee fellers came down from north of the Mason-Dixon Line and offered the hillbilly farmers a deal they couldn’t refuse. Landowners could keep their surface rights and continue farming just as always. All those city slickers wanted was a hypothetical thing called a “mineral right” to the subsurface. Selling out was easy; just sign your X on the dotted line.
For a decade or two, nothing happened except that the farmers got their “easy money” from the coal companies. Then one day, the company men showed up with steam shovels and drills and other tools of the trade and started in on the southern Appalachians. They even hired the locals to work the mines, which paid more than farming. And the hill people began to learn the meaning of the word “undermine.”
Slag heaps developed and some of them still burn. The rivers ran black and the miners who worked the day shift seldom saw the sun they used to farm under. Then came the strip-miners, who gouged huge pits in the hillsides with bulldozers and decapitated whole mountains, dumping the “overburden” into the deep coulees and ravines that the mountain people called “hollers.”
Old-timers were saddened to watch the land undergo a kind of “progress’ they couldn’t control, and to feel their lives changed for the worse. They’re gone, and their history easily forgotten, though scars on the land remain for the centuries to heal.
For a few wild and wonderful years I roamed the world, enchanted by the lofty Alps and New Zealand’s snowy ranges, by Fujiyama, Kilimanjaro, the giant Himalaya.
But for 30 years I’ve lived in Montana, mostly along the Rocky Mountain Front. A first glance at these mountains, unfurled from Glacier Park downrange to Rogers Pass, told me they were world-class wild lands, the best undeveloped country on earth. The foothills held the bear and eagle and the big game herds, and from those foothills, great windy prairies rolled eastward.
After years of climbing, riding, and hiking them, the mountains and valleys of the Front Range have become like brothers and sisters to me. Sun River, Castle Reef, Mount Wright and the Teton, Dupuyer Creek, Heart Butte and Feather Woman are not just lines and points on a map, but places known and cherished as old friends.
I’ve always feared the secret would slip out and more “outsiders’ like me would come here and too many of us would spoil it. And now everybody’s heard about Montana. If you’re a landowner near mountains these days, you might find folks waving money in your face. Incentives to subdivide some areas already outweigh the economics of staying on the land and operating a ranch.
Along the Rocky Mountain Front, there are company men too – not coal companies, but big oil. Which brings us back to mineral rights.
The Lewis and Clark National Forest is writing an environmental impact statement for oil and gas leasing on all national forest lands along the 100-mile stretch of roadless Rocky Mountain Front. Most of this land has been leased for 10-year intervals off and on for a few decades.
Nothing much has happened yet, certainly nothing resembling the full-field development that’s occurred in Alberta, Canada’s, oil and gas industrial zone. Much of the Montana Front is being studied for leasing, and at the same time much of Montana’s Front has been considered for wilderness designation. Roadless area reviews have given most of the area the highest possible qualifying marks. In 1992, all of Montana’s congressional delegation – Republican Sens. Max Baucus and Conrad Burns and Democratic Rep. Pat Williams – earmarked most roadless portions of the Front for inclusion in the wilderness system and recommended Badger-Two Medicine for additional wilderness study. Bills that differed slightly passed both houses of Congress, but compromise failed, largely due to an unrelated Senate filibuster during the end of the session.
An even stronger wilderness bill was passed by the House in 1994, and similar legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Baucus. However in the latest round, Sen. Burns introduced a different bill, one written by industry, which doomed the Montana wilderness debate to continue. Still, conservationists can now point out that when the Forest Service recommends extensive oil and gas leasing for the Rocky Mountain Front, that conflicts with the intent of Congress.
An oil and gas lease means selling a development right from the public’s property (national forest and BLM lands) to private interests. With stipulations, a company is allowed to explore and fully develop an area on which it holds an occupancy lease. This can mean major roads and heavy traffic, pipelines and power lines, and long-term disruption in primitive places never before developed.
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Almost 20 years ago, local conservationists convinced the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to delay further leasing while rewriting a forest management plan that emphasized the area’s inherent wild land values. But in the early 1980s, the agencies quietly leased most of the public lands along the Front again. They ran a simplified environmental assessment process with minimal public involvement.
Now, nearly all of those 10-year leases south of the Badger have expired. After completion of its ElS (projected for late 1995), observers expect the agency to recommend re-leasing many of those lands. The Helena National Forest recently finished writing the first draft of a similar ElS that calls for leasing nearly 100 percent of its available lands to oil companies.
If the agencies lease the Lewis and Clark portion of the Front again, another 10 years might pass without much happening. We might continue to have our cake and eat it, too, as the Appalachian hill folks did for a while.
But maybe not. Already a warning shot has been fired in the Badger-Two Medicine, an unprotected wild portion of the Front directly south of Glacier Park. As a result of the 1980s leases, two multinational oil companies have applied for drilling permits there. One proposed site is at the base of Goat Mountain, in the very heart of the undeveloped Badger Creek area. Public opinion runs 95 percent against development there, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has placed a temporary hold on drilling applications.
The U.S. Geological Survey predicts very little oil in the Front, but quite a lot of natural gas. Guesses range from a trillion up to 7 trillion cubic feet. That sounds like a lot. To put these numbers into perspective, however, detractors of development say even the highest USGS estimates would supply the nation’s gas demands for only a month or so.
Because leasing has been allowed, government agencies apparently have narrowed the public’s options to two: more leasing, or ask taxpayers for millions to buy back the leases in the Badger.
Conservationists see a chance to keep all the options open. If the Forest Service chose not to lease its lands for the next 10 or 25 or 50 years, saving the public lands of the Rocky Mountain Front would be like money in a bank.
The oil and gas (if it’s there) and the wild land (that is there) will be far more valuable in the future. What a gift to our descendants! We’d be acting in our own best interest too, by saving this prized part of the world’s best remaining wildlands as a national spiritual treasure.
Still, every U.S. citizen is directly or indirectly dependent on fossil fuels. Huge gambles are made on the possibility of huge profits, and lease money and royalties come back to local communities as economic benefits. Monies are directed to schools and other essential services, which may mean lower taxes and jobs that boost local economies. The American Way is based on continuous growth and the development of resources, as an ever-expanding human population with rising expectations threatens to outpace the earth’s capacity to sustain.
The local guides and outfitters who know the Front probably better than anyone else are an independent lot, not known as a group for political activism. But the threat of oil and gas leasing has pushed these latter-day mountain men into the role of wilderness advocates.
For certain others, economic incentives seem to favor taking a chance on development. While his neighbors express concern that oil companies might take over the mountains, at least one local cattle rancher favors leasing on public lands because he believes it enhances the possibilities for leasing his adjacent lands. Money from leasing private land supplements agricultural income. It’s a windfall that encourages traditional farm and ranch operations to continue; many would agree that that surely beats suburbs.
The theory goes that if public lands remain unleased and oil companies lose interest in leasing adjacent private lands, the loss of lease money will compel some cattlemen to sell out to land developers.
Are we stuck with another Hobson’s choice – subdivision and suburbs versus oil leasing and industrial zones? One worst-case scenario says we’ll get both, since local people no longer really control the decisions, if they ever did. Or, can we come up with more creative choices?
Ranchers along the Front are conservationists too. In many cases families have been on the land for generations. They have deep roots, and they love the land in ways hard to express to environmental-minded newcomers who would save it by strict regulation or have it all designated national park or wilderness.
Conservation easements through state agencies and environmental organizations offer a partial answer, although some property-rights advocates worry about losing control of their lands by accepting such arrangements. The Conservation Reserve Program has managed in certain instances to restore plowed-up rangelands to grass. Maybe we need something like a federal reserve to encourage continued ranching in lieu of subdividing, echoing the theme: cows, not condos.
Many of us would like to keep Montana’s one-and-only Rocky Mountain Front just the way it is now. But changes are coming, perhaps quicker and more relentless than we can imagine. Are we more far-sighted than those southern Appalachian hill folks were a century ago? Can we, for once, choose to invest in long-term aesthetic values, rather than grabbing the hard cash? Can we at least partially control our destiny? Can we save this Rocky Mountain Front we know and love – pass it on as a gift to our grandchildren to treasure as we have? Time will tell. And yes, the mountains will outlast us all, and the centuries will heal whatever scars we carve there.
For additional information, or to comment, contact:
- Montana Wilderness Association, Box 635, Helena, MT 59624 (406/443-7350)
- Chief Forester Jack Ward Thomas, U.S. Forest Service, Box 96090, Washington, DC 20090 (202/205-1661)
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front: Sell It or Save It?.
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