Oil and Water

Oil and Water: In which well does the future lie?

Remarks by

Theodore Roosevelt IV
Member of the Board, University of Wyoming Institute for Environment

and Natural Resources (IENR)

Cody, Wyoming

May 9, 2002

The operating metaphor of the day is the web or connectivity -- which means essentially that none of us gets to escape any of the rest of us. In response to the cultural homogenization and economic pressure of globalization, many commentators have noted a countervailing trend: a surge of resistance to the break down of barriers and a rise in regionalism. At its best, this trend is about rediscovering the value of allegiance to particular places and unique cultures -- to all that engenders community. At it worse, this is about protectionism and a doomed effort to wall ourselves off from outside forces.

One of those forces is pounding on all of our doors and will not be denied, though most of our politicians are ignoring it, and that is the growing global demand on and depletion of the world’s renewable resources. There are national security experts today who speculate that the world is on a collision course with scarcity – water scarcity, not oil. And, while there are substitutes for oil and for most energy sources, there is no substitute for water.

I have to confess that, when I first thought about this lecture, I imagined talking about grazing on BLM lands or in the national forests, or about rationalizing the holdings of the BLM, or possibly the value of protecting endangered species and developing incentives to do so. Then, I realized that underlying almost any environmental topic and most resource conflicts in the arid Rocky Mountain west is water. Your region probably has a better understanding, than any other part of our country, of what constraints on this resource can mean.

Beneath the noise of the rancorous national debate over resource management and beneath the radar of many of our politicians and journalists, you are forging local collaborative solutions to some of your resource conflicts with the assistance of institutions like IENR. In the best examples, collaborative solutions leave behind a healed landscape, as well as a healed community: the stakeholders are transformed from outraged victims of outside forces to the subjects of their own destiny.

The question is -- can consensus building and collaboration survive what’s coming down the pike? Can consensus building and collaboration even offer the proper solutions to what’s coming down the pike? Can collaboration work where government and/or industry have no interest in aiding its utilization? where local interests are considered negligible? In the wake of September 11, we have all seen how quickly the ante can be raised on resource management and how quickly the disposition toward command and control will reassert itself – even among western Republicans.

In pursuit of an answer to those questions and in keeping with my global theme, this speech will take you on quite a tour – count your blessings, at least we aren’t walking.

Let me begin the tour by reading a short quote.

“The master planner is out. Consensus and process are in. The question is – how much has society won or lost in the process? Many question whether the fractious but more democratic process that has replaced command and control is any better in arriving at what is best for the most people, a measurement that used to be called ‘the common good.’ In an age of anti-government sentiment, market ideology, and self-interest who can say if the common good even exists anymore. When it’s so obvious that people are asking what’s in it for my group, it’s hard to ask with a straight face, what is the public interest.”

Or I might add for the purposes of this speech: where is the public interest and the common good?

But what do you think inspired that paragraph? the dispute over water rights in the Klamath Basin? forest management in Montana? rangeland management in your backyard? Nope. That was from an article in the New York Times about the battles that are expected to ensue over rebuilding the World Trade Center.

Here in peaceable, spacious Wyoming, I know that it’s hard to imagine the level of discord and strife that your average New Yorker can bring to debates about, well, just about anything, so I am going to indulge first in a New York story. The elements of this story seem pretty universal to me, even if the particulars are somewhat comic.

One of my good friends on Wall Street is an average New Yorker, and she consulted me not too long ago during an interminable battle she was waging against a pizza parlor and its outdoor café. The café was on my friend’s residential block in a picturesque, tree-grows-in-Brooklyn neighborhood. It was there because New York City’s zoning laws are so arcane, we think a mad wizard designed them. In fact, it took the zoning board a year to figure out what the law was for this particular 4-table café. And, while the zoning board puzzled its puzzles, even the Brooklyn borough president weighed in on the issue; he was on the side of the 4-table cafe because he wanted to send a “message” to the small business community that Brooklyn was “their friend.” Meantime, there were sleep-rending commercial garbage pickups at 2 AM, drunken unruly clientele, thugs brought in for a little neighborhood intimidation, the incessant noise from a huge not-up-to-code ventilator, and a residential neighborhood up in arms . . . literally.

This is what my friend called to ask me: “Can you tell me how to pump this dam shotgun? It doesn’t seem to be working.” The shotgun is a 10 gauge Winchester -- her grandfather’s. She said, “They want to intimidate me, well I’m going to intimidate them.” Needless to say, New Yorkers are not the most domesticated of Americans, though I often think they are the most widely underestimated.

New Yorkers understand that place is personal. Fiercely personal. And, if I didn’t understand that before September 11, I do now. There’s a problem for you here in the west though – and that’s my friend in Brooklyn. She feels almost as ferocious and proprietary about our nation’s public lands as she does about her own front stoop. Many Americans, as you know, claim a personal relationship to your place vis-a-vis the concentration of public lands in your states. My friend and fellow board member, Dan Kemmis, has written an excellent book, This Sovereign Land, essentially about just that: the well understood desire of all people to have sovereignty over their places -- to say this is our community, we will decide its shape and character -- and the unusual limits on the realization of that desire in the west.

Determining the “common good” is complicated for all of our places today. As the New York Times piece pointed out, the common good everywhere seems to have telescoped down to the smallest possible denominator – my interest group or me. In addition, here in the west, the common good is also required to expand, much like the horizon, to encompass the national agenda of the hour. Finding the common good anymore is a little like the search for a subatomic particle: we can only approximate its location. But I would like to pursue those two split directions – the smallest common denominator and the national agenda.

First, the national agenda. Will legitimate national interests and the global limits of resources like oil and water trump local or regional concerns?

As Dan Kemmis pointed out in a recent essay, the west spent 8 years fuming that environmental mandates were running your region; now – despite my party’s assertion that public lands management would be more responsive to local concerns – it looks as though energy mandates will dominate the landscape, whether or not you like it. The consequences of that are nowhere so amply illustrated as in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

As you all know, they hit the motherload of coalbed methane, or CBM, in the Powder River Basin. And the actors in this story, on a grander scale of course, remind me quite a bit of those in my opening story about the Brooklyn pizza parlor.

My Brooklyn friend certainly shows up in a resident of Campbell County. Apparently, a Mr. David Bullach expended a whole lot of effort complaining about the noise from a compressor station to the CBM company and to county officials; the only response he received was essentially “prove it.” The Director of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Quality Division did acknowledge that the noise must be “unpleasant” and said, “It would be nice if something could be done about it.” Shrug, shrug. So, one night Mr. Bullach decided to do something about it. He unloaded his rifle in the general direction of that compressor beast. One way or another, he’d slay it.

There are other similarities to Brooklyn, besides an armed citizenry. Instead of New York’s magical, mystical zoning laws, you have surface and subsurface property owners on the same piece of land and they may or may not be the same person; they may not be a person – could be the state, could be the federal government. When I explain this to almost any Easterner, they just blink back at me in abject confusion.

What is also similar to Brooklyn is that intimidation or strong-arm tactics are being used in the Powder River Basin; it almost always happens in these scenarios. Apparently, some CBM companies reward cooperative landowners with water well mitigation agreements; while those who speak out against the development are told they will not get an agreement. This means that the outspoken, the complainers, could see their water wells dry up with no future recourse.

Then, you have a local government that wants to be a “friend to business.” According to the Governor, state agencies will speak with a “unified voice” in moving this development along. This is what one rancher said about it: “While I am angry at what one CBM company is doing to me and my family, I am more angry at our state officials who are standing by and encouraging this behavior.”

What’s different, of course, is that in the Powder River Basin, versus Brooklyn, there are complex environmental issues, as well as issues related to the sustainability of these ranch operations and the ultimate resale value of possibly desiccated property.

As most of you know, mining for methane means, among other things, that billions of gallons of water are pumped out of the aquifer and to all intents and purposes dumped. Some of the mostly troubling aspects of this are the unknown consequences to the subsurface: we do not fully understand the damage that this assault will wreck on the structure and functioning of the aquifer itself. Florida – hardly an arid state – is facing exactly this problem: that the excessive mining and pumping of their aquifer may have irreversibly damaged it. The concern, as defined by a Wyoming geologist, is that there may be “degradation to the permeability and porosity of the aquifer due to mineral precipitation and compactation which will permanently alter the groundwater hydrology.”

Over the next ten years, they are projecting they will pump out over 4 million-acre feet of water to produce the gas. Generally, 1-acre foot of water is enough water for a family of four, so this is enough water for 16 million people. The State’s calculation on the costs and benefits of producing the CBM is not accounting for externalities – the value of the water and the cost of its loss to the community. And, I have only mentioned here the potential damage to the aquifer itself; there are a host of other harmful surface side effects from the dumping of abnormal amounts of water on the landscape. While the water in some cases is perfectly fine to drink, its sodic composition is not, for instance, a perfectly fine addition to local streams, rivers, or topsoil.

What many of you may not know, because none of our national leaders are discussing it, is what I mentioned in my opening: that some of the best international security experts today argue that water – not oil – will be the fault line along which future war develops. The U.S. National Intelligence Council, for one, has concluded that the likelihood of conflict between nations will increase during the next 15 years "as countries press against the limits of available water."

What you also may not know, again because no national leader is talking about it, is that we are running out of water – on every scale, global, national, and regional. The culprits pushing this resource to the verge of bankruptcy are a burgeoning world population certainly, global warming, and the one that all conservatives should find the most offensive and that is wasteful, irrational management practices.

And don’t think international corporations haven’t noticed the scarcity of fresh water. While international security experts eye water as the resource likely to trigger the next war, international corporations are viewing it as the next great “rainmaker” – no pun intended. There are even industry strategists who quietly predict that Alaska’s earnings from the export of fresh water will far exceed that from oil, even if ANWR is tapped. Now, there’s a picture: Frank Murkowski fighting clearcutting in the Tongass in order to protect the income from his state’s fresh water supply.

Thomas Homer Dixon, one of those international security strategists, argues that institutions in developing countries are more likely than those in the industrial world to be overwhelmed by nonlinearities or abrupt, unexpected changes caused by environmental disruption. We may find, for instance, that global warming does not heat like a pot on a stove, smoothly and evenly over time. The geochemist, Wallace Broeker, describes it this way: “Earth’s climate does not respond to forcing in a smooth and gradual way; rather, it responds in sharp jumps which involve large scale reorganization of Earth’s systems.” Unfortunately, hard-pressed social institutions in developing countries may not be able to respond to these kinds of problems with equally large-scale adaptations.

Mr. Dixon writes: “As global environmental damage increases the disparity between North and South, poor nations may more militarily confront the rich for a greater share of the world’s wealth. Scarcity disputes in developing countries could lead to clashes between ethnic groups, and civil strife and insurgency, each with potentially serious repercussions for the security interests of the developed world.”

An example of this can be found in Bolivia’s recent water wars. This story illustrates how the law of unintended consequences can prevail, despite good intentions. While this limited incident did not threaten our national security, it is an example of how larger-scale debacles may unfold in the future. The actors in Bolivia – or the stakeholders – included local farmers, union leaders, the participants in small water cooperatives, ambitious local politicians, an international corporation, and then the World Bank and IMF. While I have many friends at those last two institutions and respect them enormously, in the developing world the World Bank and IMF are frequently viewed in the same way the west regards federal land agencies. And, if you think Washington looks far away from here, try the view from South America.

The conflict in Bolivia amounted to a mini revolution. The issue, as the Bolivian farmers put it, was that a private international consortium tried to “lease the rain.” The attempted privatization resulted in price hikes beyond the ability of the poor to pay. Well, let me correct that, the poor never had water. The price hikes were beyond the ability of the slightly better than poor and the middle class. And when they failed to pay, the water was shut off.

At the end of months of protest with martial law declared and death in the public plaza, this was the result: the corporation is gone; foreign investment in Bolivia has dried up; the citizens still do not have a secure source of clean drinking water; and the valley’s aquifer continues to recede. And there we have an instance where the ecological and institutional capacities of a region were so abysmally strained that no stratagems, at any level, worked: not traditional command and control, not privatization (a World Bank solution), and not local collaborative remedies, though they did seem to have potential.

The point is that as our ecological capital runs out, the stakes go up on finding adequate solutions and our capacity to do so becomes far more limited.

This will be worse in developing countries than in ours, but their failures and their problems will ultimately amplify our own; or, if we do not respond to the warnings, may even be a harbinger of our future. As one writer put it: "The unprecedented degree of current water stress is creating more zero-sum situations -- in which one party's gain is perceived as another's loss -- both within and between countries."

Aquifers around the world are being drained. Beijing’s water table has dropped more than a hundred feet in the past 40 years; it’s almost gone. Groundwater depletion in northern China is currently placing up to 20 percent of their grain production at risk.

And the aquifer beneath the Arabian Peninsula? Almost gone. Why? Well, this is a good one: they decided to grow wheat in the desert. In your backyard, the Ogalla Aquifer is being drained eight times faster than it can recharge. And throughout the world, the story is the same.

Desertification used to be something that was only happening in developing countries; now, 225 million acres in the American west are affected. In the United States, we are seeing water shortages in regions that used to contain some of the world’s most bounteous fresh water supplies: the Great Lakes, the state of Florida, and the Mississippi Delta. In an article about this problem in Florida, I read this staggering sentence: “In a state that gets 53 inches of rain a year, water abundance is now an illusion.”

And, yes, most of the country is in the grip of a record-breaking drought; however, our water resources have been so poorly managed that there is very little resiliency left in them. We have lost the margin for error. We also don’t know if this drought is a fluke or if it represents a new cyclical trend due to global warming.

In short, the escalating demand for water, irrationally poor, wasteful management practices, and ecosystem degradation overall are leading us into a water crisis that will make the so-called energy crisis look like a folly of overstatement.

But the State of Wyoming has decided that there is no problem with dumping, so far, 1.85 billion gallons of water and a billion or two more to go.

As the example of Bolivia illustrated, nothing can be accomplished when you leave the community behind. Our nation may need to get the coalbed methane in the Powder River Basin, but it needs to get it the right way.

And, now, I will turn to another difficulty with locating the common good and that lies in its splintering into the smallest possible denominator. With collaborative stratagems, this problem resides in one little word “and.” Bill Ruckleshaus, a good friend of mine and Chairman Emeritus of IENR, discussed the merits of that word, “and,” in a talk he gave here several years ago. He described consensus building, or the facilitation process, as going from “or” to “and.” As he put it, “we stop saying fish or irrigation” and start saying “fish and irrigation.” This is a sound strategy for finding common ground and ending often unnecessarily strident polarization, as long as the ecosystem can still sustain our 3-letter word, “and.”

While I believe that we have not fully explored the virtues of “and,” I have nonetheless grown somewhat wary of that word. The American people seem to be moving further and further from the idea of sacrifice for the common good and toward the notion of unlimited personal entitlement.

Right after September 11, there were several articles about Americans who vigorously proclaimed their “right” to own a gas-guzzling vehicle, no matter what, even in the face of a war where oil might be at a premium for our armed forces. I can’t imagine how they would respond today to the idea of “rationing.” Both parties had encouraged this disgraceful attitude before September 11 in their respective energy plans. The American people are continually told that we can have it all: we can have this and this and this and this and no one will ever have to pay a price for our insatiability.

Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute is right when he says that new conservation technologies today do not translate into sacrifices for the consumer or business; they generally mean better products, consumer savings, and shareholder value. Nonetheless, our overall patterns of resource consumption are not sustainable. Our national culture has turned away, almost entirely, from the practice of good husbandry and from the idea that sustaining the commonwealth sometimes requires curbing our desires; it sometimes requires self-restraint, even sacrifice.

This valorization of selfishness is well illustrated in a statement from Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth. He said: “There is a belief on the environmental side that we’re running out of oil, that we have to conserve energy. I’m adamantly opposed to energy conservation. We’re not running out. All we have to do is go out and find it and produce it.” Since when did my party – supposedly the conservative one – become the party of the profligate?

No one claims that the world is running out of fossil fuels. Wait, I’m wrong, there is one oil industry expert, who has written a book called Hubbert’s Peak that theorizes we have seen peak production in the world’s oil fields and are now in the downhill slope. Who knows? He could be the oracle to whom no one listens until it’s too late.

But it doesn’t matter. Supply is not the issue. By most experts’ accounting, the world is still well stocked with fossil fuels. We could burn the world up several times over. We may not have water, but even America still has plenty of coal. America just doesn’t have much oil left on its own shores. We used that all up for the first industrial revolution and the two big wars; then we decided to take the risk and start importing energy. The real constraint on fossil fuel usage is not supply; it’s foreign policy and it’s the global carrying capacity – global warming and pollution.

It’s been said many times: globalization rewards efficiency and innovation. In terms of energy, this translates quite simply into two prongs: conservation and new technologies.

The amount of energy wasted in American homes and businesses is staggering. Amory Lovins estimates that we are now wasting $300 billion dollars a year on inefficiencies. According to a study by the Land and Water Fund of the Rockies, 40 percent of your new demand could be met by improved conservation alone. Even the business section of the New York Times opines that our ability to navigate our oil supply risk will depend on how well we can scale back what they call our “prodigious consumption.”

With regard to the other value which globalization rewards – innovation or new technologies -- a corporate strategist writes: “We now have the tools and technologies necessary to propel a revolution in energy that mimics that in telecommunications and computers.” The principal difficulty in bringing these on line is market barriers. Any first year MBA student knows that there are imperfections in the market: government subsidies are a big problem; lack of capital is another. Congress can do something about that, but instead Congress has chosen again to subsidize mature industries with unwarranted tax breaks in lieu of making a commitment to new technologies by simply providing an even playing field.

If we do not learn to ride the forces of globalization, we will be ridden by them.

As most of you know the White House has created a Task Force on Energy Project Streamlining. Much as Wyoming’s Governor has urged State agencies to speak with a unified voice on energy development, the White House wants federal agencies to do the same. The White House is even urging farmers and environmentalists to “work with industry” as exploration and drilling is stepped up in the Rockies. Of course, the Powder River Basin seems to pose the question: Will industry, in the absence of government safeguards and vigilance, work in good faith with local ranchers, farmers, and environmentalists? in short, with the local communities from whom they will profit. The Powder River Basin, in my opinion, has the potential for becoming the next poster child for national environmental ngos as they fight the Administration’s energy plans for this region.

So, where does this leave collaborative projects in the west? in a place where public lands dominate and my gun-toting Brooklyn friend claims some status in them as a stakeholder? Will collaborative projects be overwhelmed by command and control mandates in a world of dwindling resources? Should they be? And, if they aren’t, can these projects find the common good in a culture that irresponsibly encourages an unbridled sense of personal entitlement?

On September 11, Manhattan became America’s first city, probably for the first time in the memory of most New Yorkers. It is a place that now belongs to all of us in a deeper and more visceral way. Nonetheless, the closer you move toward New York, the greater the injury is felt. The “my” dimension to place is powerful, tribal even. You hardly know how or when it happens that you and a place become enmeshed. It’s a cumulative, slow and encompassing process. It has always required time; today, it also requires thoughtfulness.

I think that the west, in its understandable pursuit of sovereignty over its places, has mis-identified its adversaries: the protection of environmental health and the interest of the rest of the American people. A war on national environmental policies, as undertaken by western representatives, is not popular with the American people, and it is fueling a growing reciprocal antagonism toward the west and toward what is now viewed as unfair subsidies that hurt other rural regions.

As one fellow Republican wrote in an oped: “The constant stream of anti-environmental actions and policies which come from western Republicans is sickening to me. I have changed my voter registration to Democrat.” As a northeast apple farmer wrote into the National Geographic: “Here in Maine we also try to grow apples and potatoes. Our efforts have been in decline since about the time the Columbia was dammed and the water was made available to farmers on the west coast. The government subsidies that built and maintain the dam mean tax dollars in Maine are being used to our own detriment. Dams strengthening America? Maybe in their part of it.” And the fact is that western water reclamation farming has forced out of use 5-18 million acres of farmland in the east. Those lands in turn, in my neck of woods, become vulnerable to urban sprawl.

There is not one actor on the world stage today whose life is not materially affected by communities that he or she will never see. We are all struggling with a growing awareness that our decisions have ramifications that we barely grasp. Among other things, this is certainly straining our American passion for fairness.

But, while those letters that I just cited are good evidence that antagonism generates antagonism, they also are a sign that Americans – from all walks of life -- are wrestling with these topics; they are engaged and informed. People everywhere are struggling to save open space and ecosystem viability. Many are using collaborative models, even if they aren’t identified as such. In short: in whatever form Americans find their places, they are defending and protecting what makes those places livable, what makes those places theirs. Every community has its pizza parlor story.

And, in the universality of this struggle, I believe the west is failing to tap a huge reservoir of potential good will – community to community – good will that, in fact, could be ironically of assistance in securing more local standing in the west on public lands issues. In allowing its elected representatives to portray the west as anti-environmental across the board, the west is failing to stay focused on what it really wants – some degree of sovereignty over its places. Instead of building alliances, it is entrenching the opposition. We need to extend the communication models discovered through local collaborative endeavors to broader coalitions of Americans.

The challenge is to develop community to community relationships apart from the distorting rhetoric of national interest groups on both sides of the spectrum. Much of this will only be accomplished through the rehabilitation of that very small word “and” – its use must be directed toward the good of the commonwealth, rather than just the appeasement of special interests.

A flourishing ecosystem is essentially a vast network of relationships among inter-linked and inter-dependent entities. Our existence depends on healthy ecosystems and, to be part of one, we too must engage in a wide array of relationships.

A former head of the Forest Service, Jack Ward Thomas, once said that “ecosystems are not only more complicated than we think, they are more complicated than we can think.” And, yet, this is exactly the task before us: to think like an ecosystem, to understand our enmeshment -- that oil cannot be separated from water; that local can no longer be separated from global.