Canada lynx. Photo by Eric Kilby. cc-by-sa-2.0.

On April 3, 2025, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish and Native Ecosystems Council filed a federal lawsuit to protect habitat for three rare wildlife species — grizzly bears, lynx, and sage grouse — in Gravelly Mountains of Montana, which is an area that provides a critical wildlife corridor connecting the Yellowstone area to other mountain ranges in Montana.  The challenged government action is called the “Greenhorn” project and it allows destructive logging, road-building, and burning activities across thousands of acres of public lands in this key wildlife corridor zone  in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest..

We are deeply disappointed that the government would authorize this destructive project on our public lands considering the number of court rulings that have found similar projects illegal because such projects violate a number of federal laws designed to protect rare wildlife species.

The project area is enormous. It’s located about 10 miles south of Virginia City, Montana and calls for bulldozing in 28.7 miles of new and rebuilt logging roads to enable logging and burning over 17,000 acres or 26.5 square miles in prime wildlife habitat, much of it in inventoried roadless areas.

The government illegally eliminated 1.1 million acres of lynx habitat protections on the Beaverhead -Deerlodge National Forest in 2020, and it relies on that illegal removal to authorize logging in lynx habitat here.  Multiple federal courts have found this to be illegal, and the government knows it.

Sage grouse populations are also in very steep decline and the federal government is desperately trying to keep from having them listed under the Endangered Species Act. Consequently, destroying their habitat with clearcutting, burning, and bulldozing simply makes no sense. Nonetheless, the government never applied their own mandatory sage grouse protections to this project.

Also, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest Plan requires that 60% of the Gravellies be managed for secure grizzly habitat. Currently only 54% of the Gravellies provide secure habitat for grizzlies; the Greenhorn project would reduce grizzly secure habitat by one third. At the same time the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks is trucking grizzly bears from the Glacier ecosystem to the Yellowstone ecosystem for genetic connectivity, — why not just follow the law, protect the grizzly corridor, and let grizzlies walk there on their own? This government action just makes no sense.

This is an important corridor where grizzlies from Yellowstone could travel to breed with grizzlies from other isolated grizzly populations, and do it without trucks and for free.

What happens when the executive branch of the federal government breaks the law? The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution not only guarantees freedom of speech, it also gives citizens the right to sue the federal government for very good reasons. If someone throws a brick through a window, the police enforce the law. But when a federal executive agency breaks the law, the citizens must stand up to enforce the law.  This is how the civil justice system works and citizens should never be shamed or intimidated from using the civil justice system to hold the government accountable to the law.

We are not afraid to take federal agencies to court to make them follow the law because the Constitution is on our side. Our government does not exist to serve the for-profit interests of the billionaires.  Our government exists to protect our land, water, air, and wildlife for current and future generations.  Public lands are for the public — not private profit — and we will continue to stand up for this principle despite the name-calling and threats we are always subjected to by politicians and special interests.   This is our home and we will protect it.  Their money and scare tactics will not stop us.

If you agree, please consider helping us and also helping Counterpunch for publishing columns like this.

The post Conservation Groups Sue to Protect Grizzlies, Lynx, and Sage Grouse in the Gravelly Mountains of Montana appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

“It’s beyond frustrating that federal officials are harming wolf recovery by denying wolves in the northern Rockies the powerful federal protections they deserve,” said Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Unlike the Fish and Wildlife Service, we refuse to sanction the annual slaughter of hundreds of wolves. Allowing unlimited wolf killing sabotages decades of recovery efforts in the northern Rockies, as well as those in neighboring West Coast and southern Rockies states.”

The groups’ petition sought to relist gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains or across the West under the Endangered Species Act. The Service denied the petition, relying largely on outdated and unambitious recovery goals for the northern Rocky Mountains wolf population.

The Service also ignored the best available science that shows why the agency cannot reasonably rely on state overestimates of the northern Rockies wolf population and that aggressive, unregulated killing threatens wolf viability across the West. Wolf populations in West Coast and Rockies states rely on wolves traveling from the northern Rockies to increase genetic diversity and promote a healthy, stable future for the species.

“Nearly 30 years after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, wolves in the region are once again in danger of extinction,” said Margie Robinson, staff attorney for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States. “The Humane Society of the United States will not idly stand by while the federal government permits northern Rockies states to wage war on wolves. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must make decisions that protect precious native wildlife for generations to come, rather than allowing states to cater to trophy hunters, trappers and ranchers.”

Under recently passed laws, Montana extended the wolf-trapping season by four weeks and established a bounty program to pay hunters and trappers for costs associated with killing wolves. Montana hunters and trappers killed 258 wolves during the 2022 season and have already killed more than 235 wolves this season, which runs until March 15.

Idaho law allows the state to hire private contractors to kill wolves, lets hunters and trappers kill an unlimited number of wolves and permits year-round trapping on private land. It also allows hunters and trappers to kill wolves by chasing them down with hounds and all-terrain vehicles. In 2022 and 2023 Idaho hunters and trappers killed more than 560 wolves.

Across most of Wyoming gray wolves are designated as “predatory animals” and can be killed without a license in nearly any manner and at any time. Wyoming hunters have legally killed numerous wolves within 10 miles of the border with Colorado, where wolves are finally returning to the state through dispersals and historic releases.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service failed to recognize how the harmful methods that Idaho and Montana have implemented will drive down wolf numbers drastically,” said Nick Gevock, Sierra Club field organizer for the northern Rockies. “The regimens these states have pursued are reminiscent of the 1800s effort to eradicate wolves, and they have no place in modern wildlife management. No other species is treated this way, and it's reversing what was a great conservation success story.”

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service failed in its commitment to advance the long-term survival of wolves in the northern Rockies — instead bowing to the demands of those who prioritize profit over wildlife,” said Gillian Lyons, director of regulatory affairs for Humane Society Legislative Fund. “Gray wolves are iconic residents of the Rocky Mountains who deserve federal protections, and we will continue this fight on behalf of the millions of Americans who value these intelligent, social creatures.”

Today’s notice of intent to sue gives the Fish and Wildlife Service 60 days to remedy its legal violations. If the agency fails to do so, the groups will file a lawsuit in federal district court.

Background

Wolves in Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and northern Utah lost federal protections through a congressional legislative rider in 2011. Following a court battle, wolves in Wyoming also lost federal protection in 2012. Since losing Endangered Species Act protection, wolves in the northern Rockies have suffered widespread persecution.

In 2021, after Idaho and Montana enacted even more aggressive wolf-killing laws, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund and Sierra Club petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to again protect gray wolves in the northern Rockies. The petition asked for immediate relisting of wolves under the Endangered Species Act, saying the new, destructive wolf-killing state laws will cause steep wolf population declines, threatening the wolves with endangerment.

In August 2022, wildlife conservation groups were forced to sue the Service for failing to make a final decision on whether gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains warrant federal protection under the Act. The agency’s denial, announced last week, comes in response to a court-imposed deadline resulting from that lawsuit.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Wet snow pelts my face and pulls against my skis as I climb above 8,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada of eastern California, tugging a sled loaded with batteries, bolts, wire and 40 pounds of sunflower seeds critical to our mountain chickadee research.

As we reach the remote research site, I duck under a tarp and open a laptop. A chorus of identification numbers are shouted back and forth as fellow behavioral ecologist Vladimir Pravosudov and I program “smart” bird feeders for an upcoming experiment.

I have spent the past six years monitoring a population of mountain chickadees here, tracking their life cycles and, importantly, their memory, working in a system Pravosudov established in 2013. The long, consistent record from this research site has allowed us to observe how chickadees survive in extreme winter snowfall and to identify ecological patterns and changes.

In recent history, intense winters are often followed by drought years here in the Sierra Nevada and in much of the U.S. West. This teeter-totter pattern has been identified as one of the unexpected symptoms of climate change, and its impact on the chickadees is providing an early warning of the disruptions ahead for the dynamics within these coniferous forest ecosystems.

Our research shows that a mountain chickadee facing deep snow is, to borrow a cliche, like a canary in a coal mine – its survivability tells us about the challenges ahead.

The extraordinary memory of a chickadee

As Pravosudov calls out the next identification number, and as my legs slowly get colder and wetter, a charming and chipper “DEE DEE DEE” chimes down from a nearby tree. How is it that a bird weighing barely more than a few sheets of paper is more comfortable in this storm than I am?

The answer comes down to the chickadees’ incredible spatial cognitive abilities.

Cognition is the processes by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from their environment. It is critical to many species but is often subtle and difficult to measure in nonhuman animals.

Chickadees are food-storing specialists that hide tens of thousands of individual food items throughout the forest under edges of tree bark, or even between pine needles, each fall. Then, they use their specialized spatial memory to retrieve those food caches in the months to come.

Conditions in the high Sierras can be harsh, and if chickadees can’t remember where their food is, they die.

We measure the spatial memory of chickadees using a classic associative learning task but in a very atypical location. To do this, we hang a circular array of eight feeders equipped with radio-frequency identification and filled with seed in several locations across our field site. Birds are tagged with “keys” – transponder tags in leg bands that contain individual identification numbers and allow them to open the doors of their assigned feeders to get a food reward.

The setup allows us to measure the spatial memory performance of individual chickadees, because they have to remember which feeder their key enables them to open. Over eight years, our findings demonstrate that chickadees with better spatial memory ability are more likely to survive in the high mountains than those with worse memories.

However, chickadees may be facing increasing challenges that will shape their future in the high mountains. In 2017, a year with record-breaking snow levels, adult chickadees showed the lowest probability of survival ever measured at our site. This exceptionally extreme winter came with recurrent storms containing cold weather and high winds, making it difficult for even the memory savvy chickadees to forage and survive.

Nevertheless, triumphant populations have persisted in high-elevation mountain environments, but their future is becoming uncertain.

What’s the problem?

“It’s weather whiplash,” says Adrian Harpold, a mountain ecohydrologist. Harpold works to understand variations in climate patterns within forest environments, and one of his field sites lies alongside our chickadee research site.

The Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges in western North America have been experiencing more extreme snow years and drought years, amplified by climate change. Extreme snow linked to global warming might seem counterintuitive, but it’s basic physics. Warmer air can hold more moisture – about 7% more for every degree Celsius (every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that temperatures rise. This can result in heavier snowfall when storms strike.

In 2023’s record winter, over 17 feet (5 meters) of snow covered the landscape that our chickadees were using every day. In fact, these intense storms and cold temperatures not only made it difficult for birds to survive the winter but made it almost impossible for them to breed the next summer: 46% of chickadee nests at our higher elevation site failed to produce any offspring. This was likely due to the deep snow that prevented them from finding emerging insects to feed nestlings or even reaching nesting sites at all until July.

The cascading harms from too much snow

Even in years of tremendous snowfall, chickadees can still use their finely honed spatial memories to recover food. However, severe storms can shorten their survival odds. And if they do survive the winter, their nesting sites – tree cavities – may be buried under feet of snow in the spring.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t reach your nest.

Extreme snow oscillations also affect insects that are critical for feeding chickadee chicks. Limited resources lead to smaller chickadee offspring that are less likely to survive high in the mountains.

Snow cover is good for overwintering insects in most cases, as it provides an insulating blanket that saves them from dying during those freezing months. However, if the snow persists too long into the summer, insects can run out of energy and die before they can emerge, or emerge after chickadees really need them. Drought years also can drive insect population decline.

Extremes at both ends of the spectrum are making it harder for chickadees to thrive, and more and more we are seeing oscillations between these extremes.

These compounded effects mean that in some years chickadees simply don’t successfully nest at all. This leads to a decline in chickadee populations in years with worse whiplash – drought followed by high snow on repeat – especially at high elevations. This is especially concerning, as many mountain-dwelling avian species are forecasted to move up in elevation to escape warming temperatures, which may turn out to be hazardous.

Lessons for the future

Chickadees may be portrayed as radiating tranquil beauty on holiday cards, but realistically, these loud, round ruffians are tough survivors of harsh winter environments in northern latitudes.

Our long-term research following these chickadees provides a unique window into the relationships between winter snow, chickadee populations and the biological community around them, such as coniferous forests and insect populations.

These relationships illustrate that climate change is a more complicated story than just the temperature climb – and that its whiplash and cascading effects can destabilize ecosystems.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post The Chickadee in the Snowbank: A ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’ for Climate Change in the Sierra Nevada Mountains appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Benjamin Sonnenberg.

Photo: Steve Hillebrand/USFWS.

Recovery of endangered grizzly bears in the lower 48 states hinges on critical genetic connectivity between the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental grizzlies provided by the Bitterroot Mountains. Located on the western border between Montana and Idaho, the region contains one of the largest Wilderness Areas in the contiguous states and was historically home to thousands of grizzly bears before they were exterminated there by the mid-1900s.

The good news is grizzlies are moving back into the Bitterroots on their own — and thanks to a lawsuit by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, in March a federal district court ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to move forward on recovering grizzly bears in this region as required by the Endangered Species Act.

After more than two decades of stalling thanks to the Court’s order, the Fish and Wildlife Service must now prepare an updated Environmental Impact Statement that considers all the new information. The Environmental Impact Statement analysis process will be a transparent, public process that must solicit and address public comments, as well as garnering the best available science from grizzly bear experts. So we will finally have a scientifically sound plan in place to protect, preserve, and recover grizzly bears.

Both the State of Idaho and the Fish and Wildlife Service lodged appeals in an attempt to overturn the Court’s orders. But now, facing very long odds of success since a grizzly den was discovered in the Bitterroots, both have dropped those appeals, allowing the process to proceed — and giving grizzlies a fighting chance of recovery.

While there’s been good grizzly recovery in the Greater Yellowstone area, there has been no reliably safe and secure way for those bears to move north or for the bears in the Northern Continental Divide, Cabinet-Yaak, and Selkirk region to move south.

When grizzlies were first listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act in 1975 they were considered as one population in the Northern Rockies. But in truth, the populations were separated by fractured landscapes due to development, resource extraction, and habitat destruction from extensive road-building and logging.

Even after 50 years of recovery efforts, today grizzly bears remain in only about 6 percent of their original range and unfortunately, grizzly mortalities have spiked in recent years as the bears try to repopulate historic habitat and are shot, run over, and poached.

Our members have been fighting to recover grizzlies in the Bitterroots for decades, but now, after years of dogged persistence, we have finally prevailed. To avoid irreversible inbreeding, we need one connected population of grizzlies in the Northern Rockies — and with this court victory and the court ordered analysis and public process, we will finally see meaningful action that could lead to full recovery of grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies.

Please consider donating to the Alliance for the Wild Rockies to continue our effort to truly recover grizzly bears with one connected population throughout the Northern Rockies.

Please also consider donating to Counterpunch for their tireless work and dedication to a wide range of conservation efforts — and for publishing columns like this so others know how important these battles are and savor the victories when we win.

The post Great News! The Feds Must Proceed with Grizzly Bear Recovery in the Bitterroot Mountains Wilderness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

The post Oregon’s Blue Mountains: Opportunities for Carbon Storage and Wildlands Preservation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Wuerthner.

The Wallowa Mountains near Enterprise, Oregon. Photo George Wuerthner.

The Blue Mountains Complex of Oregon stretches east to west from the Snake River to the Cascades. The Blue Mountain Complex is made up of sub-ranges, including the Wallowa, Elkhorns, Strawberries, Aldrich, and Ochoco.

These forests must be preserved for biodiversity, and carbon storage. Notwithstanding that the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon’s largest protected area, lies within the complex, the Blue Mountains Complex still has some of the lowest percentages of designated wilderness or other protected landscape of any ecoregion in the state of Oregon.

Protected landscapes like wilderness preserve water quality, sustain biodiversity and are critical for carbon storage.

Trees larger than 21 inches only makes up 3% of the forests in eastern Oregon, but they account for nearly 50% of the above ground carbon 

Due to logging, clearing for agriculture, and other factors, researchers have found that only 3% of the trees in eastern Oregon exceed 21 inches. Yet this small percentage of the forests contains nearly 50% of the above-ground carbon storage in the region.

Furthermore, larger trees accumulate carbon at a more rapid rate than smaller trees, so maintaining as many large trees—either alive or even dead—in the forest ecosystem is critical to keeping carbon in the forest ecosystem.

In 1936 86% of the forests in the Blue Mountains were considered old growth. Pine Creek, Hells Canyon NRA. Photo George Wuerthner 

A 1936 inventory in the Blue Mountains (today’s Malheur, Ochoco, Umatilla, and Wallowa- Whitman National Forests) found that forests containing a significant proportion of ponderosa pine occupied about 80% of commercial forestlands. The great majority of pine forests consisted of old growth (86%). By the mid-1960s, however, the proportion of commercial forests…had dropped to 40%, primarily due to logging, a loss of half over a 30-year period.

Wenaha River, Wenaha Tucannon Wilderness. Photo George Wuerthner 

To protect large trees, in 1994, the Forest Service enacted the 21-inch policy, known as the Eastside Screens, which prohibits logging trees larger than 21 inches.

However, in recent years, the Forest Service, along with its collaborators, has recommended the elimination of the 21-inch rule. The Trump administration approved the modification of the Eastside Screens which would allow the logging old and mature trees throughout eastern Oregon. A lawsuit challenging the decision was filed by six conservation groups and the Blue Mountain Biodiversity Project is challenging the Fremont Winema NF on similar grounds.

In particular, the Forest Service wants to target grand fir for removal, even though the species accounts for the greatest carbon accumulations in eastern Oregon forests.

For a good analysis of why the 21-inch rule should be maintained, arguing that they are biocultural legacy, see this overview by Dominick Dellasalla and William Baker.

Old growth ponderosa pine along the Imnaha River, Wallowa Whitman National Forest, Oregon. Photo George Wuerthner 

The Forest Service and its supporters suggest that eastern Oregon’s forests “need restoration”. Unfortunately, the main way they accomplish this restoration is with bulldozers, chainsaws and clearcuts in the name of wildfire prevention.

Research suggests that chainsaw medicine (logging) often enhances fire spread by opening up the forest for greater wind penetration and drying, both of which are major factors in large wildfires.

Some researchers question whether thinning and other “active forest management” are really effective to limit high severity blazes under extreme weather conditions.  As they note: “Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires.”

Dellasalla and Baker suggest that: “Fear of megafires is driving forest management policies throughout the region that call for reducing tree density and removing large shade-tolerant firs thought to increase fire hazard, even though firs were historically common in Eastside mixed-conifer forests.”

.

View of  Blue Mountains region from Monument Mountain Wilderness, Malheur National Forest. Photo George Wuerthner 

One of the issues of debate is the historical frequency and severity of wildfires in the dry forests of eastern Oregon. Some researchers suggest that frequent wildfires kept fuels low, forests more park-like and high severity fires were unusual. They usually advocate more chainsaw medicine (logging) to reduce forest densities.

A fire scar on old growth ponderosa pine, Lookout Mountain Proposed Wilderness. Ochoco National Forest. Some researchers argue that fire scar studies misrepresent the historical fire conditons.  Photo George Wuerthner 

By contrast, other researchers using Government Land Office survey reconstruction showed that only about 40% of the Blue Mts. had exclusively low-severity fire, with 43% mixed severity and 17% high severity where the majority of trees were killed.

Indeed, Dellasalla and Baker report the reliance of fire scar studies tends to misrepresent the historical fire conditions. As they note: “Limited fire-scar sampling (fire return intervals extrapolated from small unrepresentative stands to landscapes often without reconstructing fire severity) result in fire return intervals that are too short, and misrepresent the occurrence and ecological importance of mixed- and high-severity fires.”

Western larch, Glacier Mountain proposed wilderness addition, Strawberry Mountains, Malheur National Forest, Oregon. Photo George Wuerthner

They go on to say: “This has led some researchers and the agency to falsely conclude that Eastside forests were predominately open park-like pine forests, when, in fact, fire regimes and forest structure and composition were much more complex.”

Another study came to similar conclusions: “These extensive montane forests are considered to be adapted to a low/moderate-severity fire regime that maintained stands of relatively old trees. However, there is increasing recognition from landscape-scale assessments that, prior to any significant effects of fire exclusion, fires and forest structure were more variable in these forests. Biota in these forests are also dependent on the resources made available by higher-severity fire.”

Map showing Oregon forests and carbon priority rank. Much of the Blue Mountains is ranked medium to high. 

In a recent paper, Oregon State Scientists and colleagues argue that protecting forests is the lowest-cost climate mitigation option to reverse climate change.

Oregon has the highest percentage of forested landscape of any western state, yet has the dubious distinction of the lowest proportion of protected forest ecosystems.

Old growth ponderosa pine in Joseph Canyon roadless area. Such places should be designated wilderness. Photo George Wuerthner 

Currently, only 7% of Oregon’s forests have permanent protection from logging, grazing, and other extractive industries.

The wood products industry (green) accounts for 35% of the carbon emissions in Oregon. 

There is good evidence that an inverse relationship exists between “forest management” and carbon storage with greater carbon losses due to logging and thinning, and a consequent increase in carbon emissions. Indeed, the greatest contribution of Greenhouse Gas emissions in Oregon comes from the wood products industry.

This brings me back to the Blue Mountains ecoregion. It is Oregon’s largest sub-region and contains some of the most carbon-dense forests on the planet. In addition, the ecoregion is a critical wildlife corridor that connects the Cascades to the Rockies.

Silvies River proposed wilderness. Photo George Wuerthner 

Unfortunately, in the Blue Mountains Ecoregion, wilderness areas are typically small, with large distances between each protected area. There is a great need for a well-designed, intergraded system of new wilderness reserves with connected corridors. Currently, approximately 2.2 million acres (about the size of Yellowstone National Park) need protection as wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, and other designations that can improve connectivity and ecosystem function across the Blue Mountains.

The North Fork of the Malheur River is one of the many roadless lands in the Blue Mountains that should be preserved as designated wilderness. Photo George Wuerthner 

One of the current pieces of legislation that would protect important aspects of the Blue Mountain ecoregion is the Oregon Rivers Democracy Act introduced by Oregon Senators Merkley and Wyden. Writing these senators to support their legislation would help ensure some of this spectacular region gains some permenant preservation. Permanent preservation of all roadless lands in the Blue Mountains and protection of corridors needs to be implemented across all eastside forests.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Wuerthner.

The 70 homes in Gyai Thar village lie about 1.5 miles from a diving and transport unit, about 21 miles south of a naval base at Thandwe in the western state of Rakhine, where renewed fighting between the junta and the Arakan Army armed ethnic group has intensified following the dissolution of a fragile ceasefire in July. 

The military wants Gyai Thar’s 350 residents to move next month to a site chosen by the junta.

“They said we must move out, no matter what,” a villager who requested anonymity for security reasons told RFA’s Burmese Service. “We must leave no matter how many years we’ve stayed here. If we don't, they said they’d remove us by force. 

“They said they have a project [they are working on]. They didn’t show any documentation of it. They seemed to be saying they have the power to do what they like. When they say go, we can just go,” the villager said.

The diving and transport unit lies only three miles away from Gyai Thar, according to the villager. He said that authorities had already requested that the village relocate once in 2018 and twice more prior to the Feb. 1, 2021, coup, but since last April the junta has been stepping up the pressure on  the community.

The relocation zone has been prepared on a mountain range about four miles away from the village, but moving there would be hard for residents, who rely on the sea for food and their incomes, the villager said.

“They have a plan for relocation, but the site we are asked to move to is not suitable for people like us who mostly work as fishermen,” another Gyai Thar resident told RFA.

“They have not constructed any buildings for us. They just cleared the land and asked us to move there. So we can't do that. We are people who depend on the sea for food. It’s impossible for us to live in the mountains, about four miles from the sea,” the second villager told RFA.

Other villagers said that they have been living in Gyai Thar for generations, and any relocation zone must be close to the sea.

In a notice to the village in April last year, the military said the people in the community were living on government property without permission in violation of Section 3 of the 1955 Government House Eviction Act. It threatened that the villagers would be forcibly removed if they did not relocate before a specific date.

The military should at the very least offer compensation to the villagers, as well as a site near the sea, Oo Tin Nyo, a lawyer who assists citizens with land issues, told RFA.

“The place where they are asked to move is about four miles away, so it is difficult for people like them who live by the sea. Their livelihood will be in jeopardy,” he said. “I think it’d be more acceptable if the site is close to the sea, with roads constructed and power lines and water guaranteed along with some moving expenses.”

He said it’s a particularly hard time to move for the residents, given inflationary pressures in the country.

Khine Thuka, spokesperson for the Arakan Army, told an online news conference earlier this month that the junta is wrong to claim Gyai Thar village sits on military land.

“All those villagers have been living there since the time of their ancestors and now the military is saying that they must move out immediately despite the monsoon rains, which is an inhumane act,” Khine Thuka said. “It is an act of bullying people because they have weapons.” 

RFA contacted Rakhine State Attorney General Hla Thein, spokesman for the Rakhine State military council, but he denied any knowledge of the situation.

In May 2021, junta troops removed nearly 200 houses and shops, with the help of a large number of police personnel, in the town of Ann where the junta’s Western Command Headquarters of Rakhine is located, saying they had encroached on military land.

Myanmar military and Arakan Army forces fought fiercely in Rakhine from December 2018 to November 2020 over the latter’s demand for self-determination for the state’s Buddhist Rakhine ethnic minority.

But the two sides struck an uneasy truce a few months before the military seized power from a democratically elected government on Feb. 1, 2021, and Rakhine had been quiet amid widespread protests and fighting against the coup and junta across the country of 54 million people. 

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Suzanne Levi-Sanchez.

In the journal from his legendary 1869 expedition down the Colorado River, explorer John Wesley Powell called the remote Tavaputs Plateau in Eastern Utah “one of the stupendous features of this country.” The one-armed Civil War hero marveled at the Wasatch Mountains soaring above the Uinta Basin, the canyons carved by the Green River thousands of feet below, and the Uinta Mountains to the north, where, he wrote, “among the forests are many beautiful parks.”

Much of that vista remains unchanged, except that now it’s blanketed with thousands of oil and gas wells, and in the winter, a thick layer of smog that constitutes some of the worst air pollution in the country. Since the first significant oil well was drilled there in 1948, the Uinta Basin has become home to some of the most productive oil and gas fields in the mountain west. Its relatively modest output of at most about 90,000 barrels of oil a day contrasts dramatically with places like the Permian basin in New Mexico and Texas, which will pump out more than five million barrels of oil a day this year.

But what the Uinta Basin holds is immense potential.

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the United States. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated three trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them, for one basic reason: all those mountains that enchanted Powell 125 years ago.

Even today, only two main roads link the oil fields to refineries in Salt Lake City, and they’re often two-lane highways with steep grades that can be nearly impassable in the winter. For decades, Utah officials have been hoping to remedy this problem, primarily by trying to build a railroad to service the mineral-rich basin, which also holds large deposits of phosphate, gilsonite (a form of asphalt), coal, and, potentially, rare earth minerals. All of those efforts have failed to get traction — until now.

In December, the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, signed off on a plan to build an 88-mile railway from the Uinta Basin to a rail terminal about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City. The railway, devoted almost exclusively to transporting oil, could allow oil production in the basin to quadruple at a time when scientists say the world has less than a decade to wean itself from fossil fuels or face irreversible catastrophic impacts from climate change. “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness,” United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said in April when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most recent report. “Such investments will soon be stranded assets — a blot on the landscape and a blight on investment portfolios.”

The Uinta Basin Railway will be the largest freight rail infrastructure project in the U.S. since the late 1970s, and promoters say it will bring jobs to a depressed rural area while helping liberate the U.S. from reliance on foreign oil.

“This has long been an area in need of rail,” says Mike McKee, a former Uintah County commissioner who is retiring this spring as the executive director of the Seven County Coalition on Infrastructure, a quasi-governmental organization that has been orchestrating the railway. “We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin. It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.” With the railway, he told me in an interview in February, “we’ve found a way to do this that’s viable.”

McKee is backed by Utah’s entire political establishment — everyone from Republican Governor Spencer Cox to Republican Senator Mitt Romney to local county commissioners — in supporting a project that picked up steam during the Trump administration. Now, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are pushing the Biden administration to expedite approval of the railway as a way of increasing domestic oil production and reducing reliance on Russian oil. The railway needs permission to traverse part of the Ashley National Forest, which Biden’s U.S. Forest Service chief tentatively approved in October. But the decision is not yet final, and Utah officials have been pressuring the administration to finish the job so construction can get underway this year.

“[Y]our administration must end its fight against public land energy development in Western states, including Utah,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox wrote in a letter to Biden on March 7. “We need support for the Uinta Basin Railway.” Republican Senator Mike Lee, who met with the Forest Service at the end of March to discuss the railway, has been even more critical. “Biden would rather flirt with mullahs in Iran and the despot in Venezuela than help places like the Uinta Basin,” Lee told an eastern Utah radio host in late March. “Mr. Biden, approve this project. We need it now.”

Environmentalists, however, warn that the railway could have immediate and long-term catastrophic effects by facilitating an increase in oil production that could pump as much as 53 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. Construction will harm big game migration areas and disrupt critical at-risk breeding areas of the greater sage grouse. It will cut through at least 12 miles of inventoried roadless wilderness areas. And during a time of extreme drought, the construction will impact more than 400 streams, many within the critical watershed of the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to 40 million people in the West.

“We’re seeing the Uinta Basin as sort of a test case as to whether the Biden administration can walk the talk,” says Deeda Seed, a senior public lands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity in Salt Lake, which in February filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the railway. “If they can’t get it right here in terms of their ability to stop climate-damaging, Utah-based projects, we’re screwed.”

One crisp sunny day in October, I decided to drive the planned railway route. I grew up in Utah, but I’d never traveled out that way and I was curious to see what was at risk. From Salt Lake, I headed south and picked up Highway 6, which runs along the Price River up a spectacular, rugged canyon, to the tiny town of Kyune. That’s where the Uinta Basin railway would connect to the national rail network that would transport basin oil to Gulf Coast refineries and beyond.

From Kyune, I bumped along the rutted Emma Park Road, where the railway would skirt the edge of Indian Head ranch, an expansive 10,000-acre private elk hunting reserve and state cooperative wildlife management area. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been working here to improve the habitat for the sage grouse, whose critical mating grounds lie within a mile of the proposed railway route.

Just past the ranch, I saw my first pumpjack, gently dipping like a bird as it extracts oil from a well lacking sufficient pressure to force it to the surface. It seemed surprisingly graceful for an instrument of planetary destruction. In this vast, empty landscape, the only other notable landmark for miles appeared when I headed north onto Highway 191 and passed a solitary monument built in 1918 by prison inmates as a tribute to Simon Bamberger, the state’s first and only Jewish governor.

Highway 191 is an official state scenic byway, but instead of many leaf peepers or RV enthusiasts on my drive, I encountered a steady stream of oil tankers coming the other way. The trucks are both a unique feature and a significant hazard of Utah’s oil industry, and one of the driving forces behind the railway proposal. Here’s why: Most U.S. oil is transported via pipelines. But Uinta Basin oil is mostly a yellow, waxy crude that must be heated above 115 degrees Farenheit to keep it from solidifying. As a result, basin oil is shipped in 250 heated tanker trucks to five Salt Lake refineries every day, where it’s converted to gasoline, jet fuel, and propane before being shipped throughout the West.

The scourge of Utah commuters, oil trucks clog up freeways and barrel down the steep and often snowy mountain roads, where they occasionally crash and burn. In the winter of 2017, a semi carrying 11,000 gallons of oil up Parley’s Canyon hit another truck and burst into flames, killing one of the drivers and closing the road for hours. The following year, another tanker crashed along Highway 6 and spilled hundreds of gallons of oil into the Price River. County officials in the Uinta Basin predicted in March that after oil prices jumped to $100 a barrel after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the number of tankers on the road could soar to 400 a day in the coming months.

A decade ago, the Utah transportation department began researching the feasibility of a Uinta Basin railway after a state study concluded that the region would lose at least $30 billion in economic benefits and tens of thousands of jobs over 30 years without more viable transportation options for the basin’s waxy crude.

To help advance this goal, in 2014, a group of counties in eastern Utah banded together to develop regional infrastructure projects. Now known as the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, its leadership consists of elected commissioners from the state’s most significant fossil fuel producing counties — local governments not famous for their environmental sensitivity or fiscal responsibility. (Last year, for example, the Uintah County Commission spent half a million dollars in federal pandemic relief funds to build a snow tubing park.)

Among the coalition’s former chairmen is Phil Lyman, a former San Juan County commissioner and well-known critic of federal land management. Lyman was arrested in 2014 for leading a protest of about 50 ATV riders up Recapture Canyon, a Native American archeological site that the Bureau of Land Management had closed to motorized vehicles. He was joined by Ryan Bundy, son of the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who only a month earlier had engaged in an armed standoff with the BLM. Lyman was convicted of misdemeanor trespassing and sentenced to 10 days in jail — a sentence that did not prevent him from being elected to the Utah legislature in 2018. President Donald Trump pardoned Lyman in 2020 just before leaving office. 

For all their animosity towards the federal government, leaders of the infrastructure coalition nonetheless sought funding for the railway from the state’s Permanent Community Impact Fund Board, or CIB, which administers what might be considered a slush fund of royalties from federal oil and gas leases. State and federal law require the board to invest in projects for the public good, like sewer lines and new fire trucks, to mitigate the negative impact of extractive industries on rural communities. But conveniently for the Uinta Basin railway enthusiasts, the CIB has been led by many of the same people who also served on the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition board, including its retiring executive director Mike McKee.

The CIB has spent millions in public money, often in no-bid contracts, to subsidize roads and other projects that mainly benefit the fossil fuel industry. In 2015, it even voted to approve a $53 million loan to fund the construction of a controversial coal export terminal in Oakland, California. In 2014, the CIB gave the fledgling infrastructure coalition $55 million to advance the railway.

Meanwhile, the Utah Department of Transportation commissioned a feasibility study, considering more than two dozen different potential railway routes. As with previous studies, the last completed in 2001, virtually all the routes out of the basin were jettisoned as environmentally disastrous, too expensive, or because they threatened ancient petroglyphs or other archeologically significant areas. Elected officials in eastern Utah eventually concluded that the railway construction would cost more than $5 billion, far too much to make it financially viable, especially at a time when oil prices were suddenly crashing. They scrapped the idea.

Yet dreams for a railway still refused to die. One reason might be that it was a full-employment program for consultants whose well-connected firms have collected millions in fees doing one study after another on the same project. One firm in particular, Jones and DeMille, has actually employed Utah elected officials while they were in office, including the former Utah Senate majority leader Ralph Okerlund, a dairy farmer who also served as the first executive director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition. But the election of Donald Trump also seemed to reanimate the zombie train as supporters saw an ally in the oil-friendly White House.

In 2019, after commissioning yet another feasibility study that this time claimed the railway could be built for a mere $2 billion, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition announced that it had formed a public-private partnership to turn the dream into reality. Running the railroad would be the Rio Grande Pacific Corp., a Texas-based privately held freight railroad company. The coalition also partnered with the DHIP Group, an investment firm charged with finding billions in private funding for the railway. The coalition applied for permits from the Surface Transportation Board and pushed for an expedited decision. “By providing an economic alternative to trucking,” it wrote in the petition, “the proposed Project would allow Uinta Basin producers to access new markets, thereby enhancing the quality of life for the residents of the Uinta Basin and its communities.”

The Uinta Basin railway route approved by the STB closely follows Highway 191, which runs parallel to Willow Creek and crosses the rugged Wasatch Mountains through Indian Canyon in a stunningly beautiful part of the Ashley National Forest. When I drove out that way in October, the engineering challenges the mountain posed for a railway quickly became so apparent I wondered whether any of the Salt Lake politicians supporting it had ever actually been there.

My rented Nissan Sentra chugged towards Indian Creek Pass, elevation 9,100 feet, along a narrow two-lane road that hugged the sheer cliff. At the summit, layers of sandstone and limestone had been sliced open to make way for the road. Wire mesh had been installed to shore up the crumbling rock walls but during public hearings on the railway proposal, a Utah highway patrolman who owns a ranch along the railway route testified that landslides were a chronic problem on the road. “We have boulders rolling off that mountain constantly,” he said. “They are half the size of the cars. They roll right across the road…I just can’t imagine a train going through and vibrating those things through all the time.”

Indian Creek Pass is far too steep for a train to go over. Instead, the railway will blast through the mountain in five tunnels, one at least three miles long. But going through the mountain may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gasses, not all of which have been mapped. Noting that such hazards “could potentially cause injury or death,” the STB suggested in its environmental review that before blowing up the mountain, the coalition should perhaps conduct some geoengineering studies, which it hadn’t done.

The railway’s largest tunnel will come out about a half-mile from the end of Darrell Fordham’s property in Argyle Canyon, a secluded mountain community near Indian Creek Pass of about 400 modest cabins. With no water or sewer lines and no electricity, the community is a place where people put up security cameras not to catch burglars but to watch the bears and other wildlife. “We’ve got these beautiful properties up there that are completely off-grid that are peaceful,” he told me ruefully, “and they’re going to destroy it.”

A business owner who lives most of the year in Lehi, Fordham has raised serious questions about the viability and environmental impacts of the project at public meetings, even pursuing legal action. “But you know, it just feels like anything that we as landowners have expressed has largely just fallen on deaf ears,” Fordham said. “Even our state representatives — the governor and senators — they all look at the project and just buy into the ‘Oh it’s going to create jobs and stimulate jobs in that area. It’s got to be a good thing.’ They just refuse to look at the reality of it.”

Railway construction may indeed create a lot of jobs, at least for a while. Various estimates put the number of workers needed for the massive construction project as high as 3,000. The 2015 feasibility study noted, “This size of the workforce would overwhelm the existing city infrastructure of the local small communities, requiring separate camps with upgraded infrastructure to be built to house the workers.”

When I spoke with Fordham in January, there were five feet of snow on his property, another factor that is almost never mentioned in the coalition’s plans for the railway, which call for construction to begin in January 2023. The coalition claims the entire railway can be completed in just two years, despite a 2015 state study estimating that such a project would take more than a decade to complete.

Fordham suspects that the coalition also is vastly underestimating the railway construction costs, and the ability of the private sector to pay. Indeed, its own consultants concluded in 2018 that the project would require government bonds because “any railroad which may eventually service the line has relatively little incentive to invest in the construction of the line, especially given the high associated capital costs.”

He worries that if construction is allowed to begin, any private money will quickly run out and the state and federal governments will get stuck paying to clean up the mess or complete the project. “When they go blast through an entire mountain like that, there are no mitigation measures, no monitoring to see what those impacts are going to be,” Fordham says. “They just grant them carte blanche to destroy whatever they want in the watershed.”

To make the Uinta Basin railway profitable, oil companies need to commit to consistently shipping at least 130,000 barrels of oil a day on it, nearly twice the basin’s current production level. But the industry is notoriously vulnerable to boom-and-bust cycles, and during the past few years, oil companies have lost a huge amount of money even when they were producing a lot of oil. Throw in the rapid development of electric cars and a worldwide move away from fossil fuels and the industry’s future is anything but certain. “From a financial point of view, the inherent volatility of oil prices can make it harder to justify big, long-term infrastructure investments” like the railway, says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think tank focused on sustainable energy.

Indeed, one of the major oil producers in the Uinta Basin, EP Energy, was just emerging from bankruptcy when its chief operating officer, Chad England, sent a letter to the STB supporting construction of the railway last year. In March, the company agreed to pay a $700,000 fine and spend more than one million installing pollution controls on its existing wells to settle an EPA complaint about violations of the Clean Air Act in the basin. EP Energy creditors had been trying to sell the company to another large oil company in the basin, but the Federal Trade Commission blocked the merger on anti-trust grounds. In late March, the FTC approved the sale but required the new company to divest all its Utah assets to protect competition and lower gas prices. Given all that, the company seems like an unlikely candidate to commit to a multi-million-dollar railway shipping contract.

“If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago,” says Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at New Consensus, a think tank where he studies the finances of energy transition. “If this were a financially viable project, why didn’t Exxon or someone do it?” he asks. “To me, the economics are never going to work on this.”

Which leads to the obvious question: How does such a dubious and potentially disastrous fossil fuel project get so far along in the process, with support from both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, at a time when the dangers of climate change are so pressing?

The obvious answer? Politics, of course.

Let’s start with the low-level officials in the Uinta Basin itself. Ronald Winterton was a Duchesne County commissioner who served on the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition board from 2015 through early 2019. He also served on the Permanent Community Impact Board, which in 2018, voted to suspend its own rules to rush through the first $6 million of a $27 million grant to the coalition to get the project approved before Trump left office. According to minutes from the meeting, Winterton said, “Let’s get this going. Because the longer we wait…we could change administrations and then we’re going to have problems.”

At the time, Winterton was employed as a consultant by Jones and DeMille Engineering, which has done millions of dollars of work on the railway, paid for with the CIB grant Winterton had voted for. Winterton — now a Utah state senator — did not respond to a request for comment, and a call to Jones and DeMille went unreturned.

Even with these well-placed supporters, the railway would have stalled were it not for the federal Surface Transportation Board, which has to approve additions to the interstate rail network. In January 2021, just before Biden was inaugurated, the three-member board granted preliminary approval for the railway. The board’s lone Democrat, Martin Oberman, a former Chicago alderman who’d served on the board of Chicago’s commuter rail Metra, wrote a scathing dissent. He questioned whether the “environmental impact of the project will outweigh the project’s transportation merits,” which he called “at best uncertain.” Oberman argued that the board had not scrutinized the financial viability of the railway, even though the coalition’s consultants were quite clear in a 2018 feasibility study that “the private sector will not build this railroad,” he wrote. “Only a government can afford to build it.”

Oberman singled out the coalition’s financing partner for its lack of railway construction experience. On its website, DHIP lists only three projects that it has worked on to date, and one is the Uinta Basin Railway. Another involved a controversial oil export terminal in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish that was canceled in November last year (though you wouldn’t know that from the DHIP website). No one from DHIP responded to several requests for comment.

After his inauguration, Biden appointed Oberman STB chairman, and then in April 2021, he tapped one of Oberman’s Chicago colleagues, Karen Hedlund, to replace one of the departing board members who’d voted in favor of the Uinta railway. But Senator Mike Lee put a hold on her nomination, which then stalled for the rest of the year. On December 15, 2021, the STB issued its final decision approving the railway. The very next day, the Senate confirmed Hedlund. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

As I started the steep descent from Indian Creek Pass towards the town of Duchesne, Highway 191 wound around an array of eerie sandstone formations and past a sign that read “Ashley National Forest, land of many uses.” A few yards beyond the sign, a pumpjack rocked quietly up and down. In late October, the Forest Service tentatively approved a right of way for the oil trains to pass through this forest. In a letter to environmentalists, Forest Service chief Randy Moore claimed that the decision supported Biden’s executive order on climate change and would “rebuild our infrastructure for a sustainable economy…as products move quicker and safer by railway than by tractor-trailers on a highway.”

Moore argued that the decision didn’t violate regulations prohibiting new roads on protected roadless areas because “a railway does not constitute a road.” He said the railway construction would not impact the roadless area. How train tracks would materialize in the middle of a roadless wilderness area was unclear. The Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment.

One day while driving around the Uinta Basin in October, I learned from KLCY, the local country music station, that a group of attendees of a National Association of Counties regional meeting in Salt Lake was being feted by local dignitaries in Duchesne County, a member of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition. They had taken a three-hour bus trip from Salt Lake to “learn about the county’s economy and natural resources, including the petroleum extraction industry,” read the event description. “The tour will continue to a nearby petroleum site to observe the production process and learn how industry complies with regulations.”

Among the conference’s featured speakers was Utah Department of Natural Resources Director Brian Steed, who had served as the acting director of the Trump BLM. Also appearing was American Stewards of Liberty executive director Margaret Byfield, representing her sagebrush-rebellion style group dedicated to fighting the Biden administration’s conservation initiatives.

But the most prominent speaker was Biden’s Forest Service chief Randy Moore. While in Salt Lake, he met with the Uinta Basin railway promoters and expressed support for the project. “In my opinion, we have somebody on our side back there in Washington,” Uintah County commissioner Bart Haslem reported back to a meeting of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition a week later. “[Moore] felt like it’s a viable project. I think we have somebody there who will help us push that through.” Four days later, the Forest Service issued preliminary approval of the right of way for the railway. The White House and Biden’s “climate czar” Gina McCarthy never responded to my many emails asking how the Forest Service decision comported with the president’s climate change executive order.

Meanwhile, Senator Mike Lee recently complained in a basin radio interview that the Forest Service isn’t moving fast enough to finalize the permitting for the railway. But the agency is now getting pressure from outside of Utah as the broader impacts of the infrastructure project are becoming more apparent — especially in Colorado. Oil trains from the Uinta Basin will most likely head south to link up to a rail line that parallels I-70 directly along the Colorado River. Eagle County, Colorado, has sued the STB arguing that it failed to take into consideration the environmental impacts on downstream users, particularly the risks of wildfires, when it licensed the rail line. The suit is supported by both of the state’s Democratic senators.

Concerns spread beyond Western states. At the end of March, environmental justice groups on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who oversees the Forest Service, protesting that the agency had failed to consider that 85 percent of the oil shipped on the Uinta Basin railway would end up at Gulf Coast refineries, many of which are already polluting historic Black neighborhoods where residents suffer from a wide range of health problems. “Our communities have suffered for years from the environmental injustice inflicted by the fossil fuel industry,” they wrote. “The massive influx of oil via train from Utah will only make our situation worse.”

I followed the railway’s proposed path through the Ashley National Forest and the road leveled out into an unnaturally green valley, where ranchers irrigate alfalfa in close proximity to more oil wells. Highway 191 eventually emerged near the Duchesne city cemetery where it becomes Route 40, and the scenery transforms into what environmentalists have dubbed “Mordor,” the heart of the basin’s oil and gas industry that, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional hellscape, is also surrounded by mountains on three sides.

Even without the railway, oil and gas development in the basin already creates some of the highest ozone levels in the world. The mountains surrounding the Tavaputs plateau trap pollution in a thick layer of smog in the winter that regularly violates the Clean Air Act even though few people live out here. Among those who suffer from the poor air quality are about 1,500 members of the Ute tribe who live on the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, which at 4.5 million acres is the second-largest reservation in the country.

While indigenous people have been instrumental in fighting oil pipelines elsewhere, the Utes have long been active in oil and gas development, and they have wells on the reservation. The tribe is now an equity partner in the Uinta railway, and it has agreed to let it pass through tribal lands even though it threatens several endangered plants that Utes consider sacred. No one from the tribe responded to several requests for an interview.

Unable to interview any tribal leaders, I took a short detour from Route 40 to do a little rubbernecking on a pocket of private land inside the reservation now called Skinwalker Ranch near the end of the railway route. The ranch is Utah’s version of Nevada’s Area 51. For a century, people have reported witnessing unusual phenomena here — everything from cattle mutilation to alien abductions. The Pentagon has funded UFO research at the ranch, and there’s even a UFO-themed campground nearby.

A few years ago, a Salt Lake real estate developer named Brandon Fugel bought Skinwalker Ranch and continued the previous owners’ UFO research. He now stars in the History Channel series “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.” On the show, he jumps into his Maserati looking like a Bond villain and races through Salt Lake to an awaiting helicopter that whisks him away to the ranch. I wondered how Fugel felt about the prospect of having two-mile long oil trains rumbling near his ranch all day, every day, given what all that vibrating might do to UFO research — or the prospects of a fourth season of his show.

Unfortunately, he didn’t respond to my requests for comment, and the History Channel turned down my request for a tour. It turns out that the ranch superintendent is the son of Utah state Senator Ronald Winterton, one of the railway’s biggest promoters. But I did manage to talk to Ryan Skinner, who has written a number of books about the ranch. He knows Fugel and other paranormal investigators in the basin. One of them, Space Wolf Research, actually has an office close to where the railway will start in Myton. The driver of a semi, Skinner lives in Wisconsin but he makes a trip to the Uinta Basin monthly to scan the dark skies and continue his investigation into the mysteries of the mesa, after having his first close encounter 15 years ago.

He says that UFO researchers have only just figured out how to keep the fracking booms from screwing up their measurements and couldn’t imagine the impact of the railway on their work. Skinner says he has nothing against oil development and has long heard about the plans for the railway. Somehow, he didn’t think it would ever happen. “Taking these hidden gem locations and really industrializing it to such a degree, it really bothers me,” Skinner explains. “This is like holy land out there. This just feels like land that needs to be left alone.”

Skinner may view the Uinta Basin as sacred ground, but many of the people who live there see it as barren land ripe for exploitation that should not be impeded by federal regulations or pesky environmentalists from the city. “Leave us the hell alone,” Vernal insurance agent Mark Winterton said angrily at a 2020 hearing on the railway. “Where we’re running this railroad, it’s land that mostly is basically wasteland. Nobody is there…If you don’t live out here, I don’t feel like you should even have a say.”

I understand what he means about the wasteland. When I tried to drive the last leg of the railway route to its eastern terminus near the town of Myton, I discovered that the only main thoroughfare is unpaved. Crossing it in a Sentra proved to be a really bad idea. A wide open, desolate stretch of land crisscrossed with dirt roads named for well numbers, the Leland Bench area is where railway promoters are planning to construct a rail trans-loading facility as well as a new oil refinery. As I searched fruitlessly for a cell signal near Chevron Pipeline Road, it was easy to see how people like Winterton would consider this land expendable.

Even so, this scrubby plateau is surrounded by public land that belongs to everyone, even us city slickers. It’s about 50 miles from the Dinosaur National Monument Quarry visitor center, a marvel of archeology and the western edge of a “Dark Sky” national park that is one of Utah’s underappreciated natural gems. Less than 20 miles to the east, at the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying desperately to save endangered native fish in the Green River. And yet, the Biden administration is preparing to greenlight a railway that would only hasten their demise. “Utah is kind of the epicenter” of these sorts of local fights about climate change, says the Center for Biological Diversity’s Deeda Seed, which means the proposed railway “affects the fate of not only our state but other states.” In the end, she concludes, “All of these decisions matter now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline An oil train is set to destroy pristine Utah mountains. Why won’t Biden stop it? on May 7, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Stephanie Mencimer.

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The post Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council Halt Grazing and Sagebrush-Juniper Burning in the Elkhorn Mountains appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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