This Beautiful Bird Might Thwart the Oil and Gas Industry's Drilling Plans

A quarter-century ago, a fight over the fate of a nocturnal bird came to symbolize the standoff between environmentalism and industry. In 1990, the federal government  declared the northern spotted owl a threatened species, thwarting timber operations on millions of acres in California and the Pacific Northwest where the bird nests in trees. Conservationists cheered. The timber industry jeered. A cultural icon with feathers was born, and a culture war over ecology erupted. Sometime in the next two weeks—likely on November 12, a legal deadline that happens to fall a week after the midterm elections—the Obama administration is scheduled to announce whether it will put another imperiled critter on the Endangered Species List. The Gunnison sage grouse, a chicken-like bird, roams the range of Colorado and Utah. Its numbers have dwindled over the years due, scientists say, to many factors, from wilder wildfires to increased development. A move by the government to put the bird on the Endangered Species List would, in turn, threaten many other things in the grouse’s habitat: among them, surging oil and gas production. The potential designation of the Gunnison sage grouse is seen as a kind of preview of possible federal intervention to protect another animal, one for which the stakes are even higher. The Gunnison has a cousin—the greater sage grouse—whose habitat comprises an area roughly seven times as large as the spotted owl’s: roughly 165 million acres that stretch across 11 Western states ranging from Washington, down to California, over to Colorado, and up to North Dakota. By September 2015, the government will decide whether to place the greater grouse on the Endangered Species List, and that prospect has struck terror into an unlikely alliance of interests across the West: recreation, ranching, mining, oil drilling, even wind- and solar-power development. Adding the animal to the protected list would essentially threaten every land-intensive economic pursuit across a significant swath of the nation. Studies estimate the economic hit to the region could total billions of dollars a year. Among the biggest effects: It would severely limit energy production in a part of the country that, over the past few years, has become one of the most prolific sources of energy on the planet.  Clashes over wildlife are hardly new to the American West. But today’s concern over the sage grouse is doing something very different from what yesterday’s worry over the spotted owl accomplished. Instead of prompting a war between nature-preservers and nature-exploiters, it’s uniting strange bedfellows who have gambled that their divergent interests all are best served if they join forces to try to protect the environment and the economy simultaneously. The green movement cut its teeth on the notion of opposing growth, but now, in an age of climate change, it too wants growth of a certain sort, particularly of large-scale renewable-energy operations. When those green-growth goals clash with other green goals—such as protecting critters—the environmental movement is having to make some hard choices. The alliance in favor of state action to protect the grouse is tentative, it’s controversial, and it may well break apart. But so far it’s sticking...more