Friday, 26 Oct 2001

SEATTLE, Wash.

Today’s trivia question: Where was Dick Cheney born?

Answer: not in Wyoming. Our vice president was born in Lincoln, Neb. Yes, he grew up in Casper, Wyo; yes, he graduated from the University of Wyoming; and yes, he represented Wyoming in Congress for 10 years. Still, on recent trips to Sheridan and Casper for Environmental Media Services, I had plenty of people point out that, technically speaking, Dick Cheney is not from Wyoming.

But from my media-advisor perspective, I had to do the glass-half-full routine and remind them that Cheney’s Wyoming “ties” (I won’t call them “roots”) had netted an unbelievable amount of media coverage for what was, until this year, a pretty obscure story: Wyoming’s boom in natural gas production. Once Cheney unveiled his “I Love Fossil Fuels” energy plan in May, reporters began heading to Wyoming, seeking to understand the mind of a man who could blithely dismiss conservation as, “a sign of personal virtue.” Time, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NBC, CBS — that’s just a partial list of the major media outfits that trekked out to the Cowboy State to cover the energy boom. They may have come out intending to talk about oil, which is certainly still a mainstay of the Wyoming economy, but they went home with stories about gas.

Why? Because the Wyoming coal bed methane gas boom is on its way to becoming the national poster child for the “rape, ruin, and run” school of energy development. This dream-come-true for the gas companies — hey, it’s cheap, it’s fast, and nobody’s trying to regulate us! — is turning into a nightmare for a lot of people. These are people who probably resemble you or your parents: folks who saved up to buy their dream retirement home only to see it surrounded by gas wells; ranchers who’ve kept the family spread going for five generations and are now watching their ground water disappear; hard-working town dwellers who live downwind of giant smokestacks.

“I’m being surrounded by gas wells,” said Dale Ackels, who bought a Wyoming farm in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains after 28 years in the military. “Slowly but surely, I’m turning into Odessa, Texas, and I didn’t come here to do that.”

“I’m a local girl,” Deborah Thomas said. “M
y husband and I went away for 10 years to get enough money to buy our property. A year ago, a wildcat rig moved into our neighborhood. It took 100 double semi loads to move it in. I’ve learned that as a surface landowner with no mineral rights you have virtually no rights at all. That the government that we would like to think protects us and our rights does not protect us or our rights if there’s a lot of money involved.”

Nancy Sorenson’s husband’s family has been ranching in northern Campbell County since 1880. So far, gas developers have drilled five wells on her property. Now, she finds herself worrying about water. “I think a big question is what is the future of the aquifers? I feel like I’m not the only stakeholder in those aquifers. So are my neighbors. So are you, indirectly!”

Ackels, Thomas, and Sorenson live in the heart of gas country: the Powder River Basin of northern Wyoming, where some 10,000 wells have already been drilled and 50,000 more are expected in the next decade. All three are members of a grassroots group called the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an alliance that is breaking Western political rules by bringing ranchers and other landowners together with conservationists.

Kevin Lind, staff coordinator for the council, is from Hardin, Mt., 80 miles north of Sheridan on the edge of the Crow Indian Reservation. Lind moved back to the U.S. two years ago after 20 years of work for relief and social service organizations in Asia. He and his wife, Bing, a native of the Philippines, are not the kind of constituents Dick Cheney regularly courted when he was Wyoming’s congressional representative during the oil boom of the 1980s. Bing is a teacher. Kevin runs a nonprofit organization. They clearly didn’t come back to take a ride on the gas boom; they came back because they wanted to raise their sons in a safer place.

But what does safe mean? Safe water to drink, safe air to breathe? Safety from terrorists? Almost anyway you define it, you can cross Wyoming off the list. Now that Cheney’s friends on the Hill are working hard to cloak their drill-the-Rockies campaign in red, white, and blue, the safe, serene Big Horn country of Lind’s youth exists only in his memory — and in the dreams that fuel the hard work of the council.

The day I left Sheridan, heading east toward Gillette through the heart of gas and oil country, I flipped on the radio and heard President Bush telling us that he had ordered bombs dropped on Afghanistan. It was a Sunday; I had some time off. Listening to Bush, looking around at the lonely plains dotted by the occasional bobbing rig, I longed to be home with my family, absorbing this news together. But home was far away, so I headed for the Black Hills, where I knew I could at least see some trees. For better or for worse, the trees know nothing about gas drilling in Wyoming; or about Dick Cheney; or about war.