Expert: Drilling could destroy Mesa

 

Walt Whitford lives in a little-known corner of Las Cruces, in a house surrounded by desert and frequented by 12 pairs of quail and a wayward cat. Santa Fe-style adobe homes and the occasional geodesic dome sit far back from the streets there, most of which are dirt and none of which was paved until five years ago. The city is somewhere to the northwest, invisible and forgotten but for the rush of U.S. 25.

“I just feel comfortable and at home when I’m in the desert,” said Whitford. “I feel like I’m surrounded by old friends.”

Whitford fell in love with arid places while stationed in Fort Bliss during the Korean War. After the conflict’s end, he made the desert his home and his subject. He earned a doctorate in physiological ecology and taught desert ecology at New Mexico State University from 1964 to 1992, before accepting an appointment as a senior research ecologist with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Thirty years later, more than 250 articles on arid lands line the bookshelves in his home office, and a framed copy of the cover of his book, "Ecology of Desert Systems," hangs on the wall behind his head. This same love has also inspired him to use his expertise in defense of Otero Mesa, offering in a published report his reasons for considering oil and gas development there "a tragic and needless mistake."

The last desert grasslands

Whitford knew Otero Mesa a vast Chihuahuan Desert grassland, the development of which prompted the state to file suit against the federal government and the Bureau of Land Management long before the nation heard about it on the news.

He had spent time studying prairie dog colonies there, and had been head investigator of the International Biological Program’s Chihuahuan Desert section.

Nevertheless, the chance to write in its defense found him. He was enjoying his retirement and consulting for several companies when the Southwest Environmental Center asked him to make the case for Otero Mesa’s ecological uniqueness. They wanted a leading grasslands scientist for the job, and Whitford was their top choice.

They offered him a flat fee of $3,000, a figure that "works out to about three dollars an hour," Whitford quipped. "I have a contract with British Petroleum right now for environmental consulting in Azerbaijan that pays a lot more than that."

It was love, then, that inspired Whitford to cull all the research ever done on Otero Mesa. He and SEC director Kevin Bixby completed and printed the report, titled "The Last Desert Grasslands: the biological case for protecting Otero Mesa," in December 2005.

In it, he posits every reason why the place is special: because of its diverse and rare animal and plant population, its limited number of shrubs and vast tracts of rare black grama grass all of which are endangered qualities and, he claims, all of which are vulnerable to disturbance.

Citing over a hundred academic and government sources, as well as Whitford's and his colleagues" observations, "The Last Desert Grasslands" argues that oil and gas development would fragment and ultimately destroy Otero Mesa.

According to the report, the grassland’s blue and black grama grasses grow in fine topsoil only a foot or two deep. Below the topsoil lies a thick, cement-like layer of caliche. Because it lies so close to the surface, the caliche prevents many deep-rooted plants like mesquite and creosote from growing in the area.

"That caliche layer is the only reason the grassland is intact," Whitford said.

Any oil and gas development that disturbs the surface would threaten both topsoil and caliche, Whitford warned.

The damage would start before the drilling does, with preliminary seismic exploration. The practice often involves driving heavy "thumper" trucks off roads and onto the land itself, where the trucks send shock waves into the ground. How the ground vibrates in response tells geologists what lies beneath the surface.

The trucks" weight and "thumps" could compact the soil and damage its ability to store water and grow grass, Whitford said in his report.

Drilling operations would pose an even greater threat to the soil and underlying caliche. Each well requires clearing or "blading" the grass and topsoil from a five-acre pad area, exposing the caliche layer to erosion from the wind and hard rain familiar to all desert-dwellers.

Developers then link the well to the outside world with roads, underground pipelines and power lines. Building this connecting web necessitates breaking the caliche at some point, possibly producing "hedgerows of shrubs cutting through the grassland, transforming it into a checker-board separated by shrubs," Whitford wrote.

The result is a grassland split into pieces like most other grasslands in the Southwest, or, as Whitford put it, "You fragment the last extensive desert grassland in America."

Restoration as myth

Whitford predicts a chain of events like a row of dominoes, unstoppable once tipped until every piece falls. Disturbed soil means disturbed grasses, which grow less while disturbed animals feed more an irreconcilable situation that threatens the survival of the soil, grass and wildlife.

But the paradigm that allows development on public lands is restoration, the idea that developers can pick up the pieces and return a place to its prior state. The BLM touts the reclamation stipulations in its management plan for Otero Mesa as its toughest ever. They require evidence that restored plants are healthy and match the surrounding growth.

"That’s a higher standard than we had before," said Ed Roberson, BLM Las Cruces District director. "So the (oil or gas) company can’t just throw seed out there and say, "We just didn’t get it (to grow), sorry.""

Whitford’s report questions the possibility of ever restoring a black grama grassland. Past attempts to grow black grama on range land and even in labs have almost all failed, Whitford noted, because the seed is fragile; it’s not commercially available; and scientists themselves don’t fully understand what makes it grow.

Those three statements are ecologists" only consensus on the issue, said Brandon Bestelmeyer, research ecologist at the Jornada Experimental Range.

"In general, if you were to make a guess based on what’s happened black grama has universally failed with just seeding," he said.

The problem could be drought, or the absence of an insect or fungus necessary for black grama survival, he said. The grass has naturally reestablished itself in some cases, and scientists don’t yet know how that happens, either.

Bestelmeyer is careful to add that all the failures have taken place in hotter, drier environments, like Jornada. No one has attempted a reseeding experiment on Otero Mesa.

Black grama growth depends on other factors like the condition and type of the soil and the weather that further complicate the picture, noted Jornada ecologist Jeff Herrick.

"The thing we might know is the type of soil. We don’t know what the weather is going to be like," he said. "You might get lucky and get five years of above-average rain that’s not too hard or you can get five years of wind storms. Like you do in life, you’re playing the odds."

"The one thing you can say is scrape off the soil in very large areas and leave it in piles, and you’ll end up with an area that’s very hard to reclaim," he added. "There are ways to minimize degradation and facilitate reclamation it depends on how much energy you put into it."

Whitford said that’s energy the BLM will never see, and shouldn’t count on.

"Trying to restore black grama grassland is damn near impossible without the expenditure of huge amounts of money," Whitford said. "Oil and gas companies are not doing that There’s no financial penalty for the oil and gas people to force them to do anything."

'Beyond the realm of science

"When I got involved in this, I tried my best to keep my scientific objectivity," said Whitford.

Then, he paid a visit to Rep. Steve Pearce as part of a delegation sent to discuss Otero Mesa.

"Pearce’s office manager said, "We don’t represent you we represent oil and gas. You’re not the kinds of people who got us elected,"" said Whitford. "There’s a political agenda here that the federal agency can’t do anything about, that no one can do anything about."

He believes that agenda interferes with scientific fact, and readily shares his suspicions that political bullying has opened the way for oil and gas development on public lands, and will continue to do so.

"Government agencies have a way of editing the science so they get the result they want," he said. "It’s difficult to get people to think about the big picture, especially when the short-term objectives seem very important.

"If we lose the biological resources of Otero Mesa, that may not affect too many lives right now. But somewhere down the line, someone’s going to say, "I wish I could see an endless grassland from horizon to horizon."

Bestelmeyer said he understands Whitford’s opinion, as well as his outrage.

"I see where that comes from, and it’s a really big question," he said. "It’s a general statement of a scenario that someone’s professional opinion leads them to believe. Often, that’s all you have."

But he adds that it may not be science’s place, or its choice, to set the course for future oil and gas development.

"No one is saying you can drill out there and nothing will change. The real question is: are the changes unacceptable to society at large?" said Bestelmeyer. "It’s beyond the realm of science at that point."

Note: The first article in this series, "BLM strives to monitor Otero Mesa balancing act," identified Otero Mesa as a "2 million-acre Chihuahuan Desert grassland." Although the BLM's final record of decision and management plan for Otero and Sierra counties does cover an area of 2 million acres, the BLM estimates that Otero Mesa itself only spans 500,000 acres. Whitford’s report puts that number at 1.2 million acres.