Land Management

The Bush pattern of ignoring the public welfare in order to favor commercial interests continues unabated. Despite the evidence of scientists in and out of the government, the Administration continues to pursue policies that contradict objective findings. Just review recent articles on the use of carbon monoxide, global warming, generic drugs, and mine safety. Today’s Washington Post provides yet another example:

The Bureau of Land Management, caretaker of more land and wildlife than any federal agency, routinely restricts the ability of its own biologists to monitor wildlife damage caused by surging energy drilling on federal land, according to BLM officials and bureau documents.

The officials and documents say that by keeping many wildlife biologists out of the field doing paperwork on new drilling permits and that by diverting agency money intended for wildlife conservation to energy programs, the BLM has compromised its ability to deal with the environmental consequences of the drilling boom it is encouraging on public lands.

For years the BLM has reallocated money Congress intended for wildlife conservation to spending on energy. A national evaluation by the agency of its wildlife expenditures found three years ago that about one-third of designated wildlife money was spent "outside" of wildlife programs. The sum effect of these diversions, the study said, has damaged the credibility of land-use planning by the BLM. These findings were echoed last year in a report by the Government Accountability Office, which said that BLM managers order their field staff to devote increasing time to processing drilling permits, leaving less time to mitigate the consequences of oil and gas extraction.

"It has become almost a cultural practice in the BLM to spend money that is appropriated for one purpose for whatever purpose somebody deems is a higher priority," said a senior BLM official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said he would be fired for speaking publicly. "There is really no penalty for this."

In the Pinedale, Wyoming BLM office, as in agency offices across the West, monitoring and research on the impact of drilling on wildlife are almost never done by staff biologists, according to Roger L. Bankert, associate field manager for lands and minerals. "This is an energy office, and our biologists don't have time to do the monitoring," Bankert said. He said it is "done by private consultants who are hired by the energy companies," with BLM approval.