| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Habitats For a Few Days of Fuel The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be pristine, and it may have caribou, wolves, and polar bears, but in terms of biological diversity, and the number of endemic and rare and endangered species, it has nothing on California’s Los Padres National Forest. This forest contains some of the most beautiful, rugged, and inaccessible terrain in the state. Its 1.75 million acres cover six counties from Monterey to Ventura. Unlike California’s other mountain ranges, those in Los Padres run east-west and mark a transition zone between the foggier, cooler climates of the north and the hotter, more arid zones to the south. For this reason, these mountains mark the northern limit for many southern species and the southern limit for many northern ones. The overlap of these groups, and the unique climate and terrain, create conditions supporting extraordinary species diversity and endemism: 26 threatened or endangered species call it home. For example, there is an area of about 100 acres in the Upper Cuyama Valley in Los Padres where two species of leopard lizard (Gambelia sila and G. wislizenii) overlap and appear to be hybridizing. “This is a scientifically important area; it is one of the only places where the common and the blunt-nosed leopard lizards interbreed and is critical for understanding their relationship and ecology,” says Monica Bond, a biologist with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. Also remarkable about Los Padres are its vast stretches of roadless land, saved from development by their inaccessibility. The same craggy cliffs and steep valleys that provide its dramatic scenery also make it hard for humans to gain a toehold here. And without roads, no logging, mining, drilling, or other exploitation can take place. But Los Padres’ age-old barriers may be about to break. This spring, the Forest Service released a report identifying about 400,000 acres of Los Padres as High Oil and Gas Potential Areas (hogpas). It also announced its hopes to begin new oil and natural gas drilling in the forest. The plan was met by a chorus of opposition from conservation groups and local businesses that rely on visitors to Los Padres. This May, in what seemed a parallel universe, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer introduced a bill that would designate huge roadless tracts as big-W wilderness, and hence off-limits to almost everything anthro but footprints. The bill goes head-to-head against the Bush administration’s efforts to open the area to oil and gas extraction. It is hard to imagine two more different visions for the future of Los Padres. About three-quarters of the 400,000 hogpa acres in Los Padres fall in roadless areas, most of which are currently being pushed for wilderness designation. “This is a huge area of overlap,” says Tim Allyn, a regional organizer with the Sacramento-based California Wild Heritage Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups working to establish new California wilderness. “It reminds me of Ronald Reagan tearing down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House,” says Allyn, also an organizer for the Sierra Club in Los Angeles. “It was a slap in the face to those who care about wilderness and Los Padres.” Allyn is referring both to the efforts to open Los Padres National Forest in particular, and, more generally, to President Bush’s recall of Bill Clinton’s moratorium on building roads into roadless areas in national forests. About 58 million acres of such roadless areas had been temporarily protected by the rule, which Bush scrapped in May 2001. Clinton’s moratorium was lauded as a major step forward in the effort to preserve the best of California’s remaining roadless lands, especially those that qualify for protection under the Wilderness Act. To qualify, lands must be roadless, undeveloped, and clear of other human imprint. Bush argues that American dependence on foreign oil is reason enough to open Los Padres to drilling. In April, when Iraq halted oil exports to the United States as a protest of America’s support of Israel, and domestic oil prices rose, President Bush said it was proof that supplies at home must be more fully exploited. The debate parallels that of the much higher-profile battle over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (anwr). When the proposal to open anwr to drilling was stymied by the U.S. Senate in April, supporters vowed to reintroduce it later this year. The United States consumes about seven billion barrels of oil a year. Geologists estimate that oil reserves under Los Padres may total 84 million barrels of oil and about 36 billion cubic feet of natural gas. By comparison, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge contains between 6 billion and 12 billion barrels of oil. Opponents of the drilling, such as Michael Summers, an organizer for the California Wild Heritage Campaign, insist that even the most optimistic projections of how much oil lies under Los Padres show that extracting it would not be worth the environmental costs. “It’s only enough oil to fuel the U.S. for a few days,” Summers says. “That’s not worth selling a national treasure.” As with many things in California, the Los Padres drilling controversy may come to revolve around celebrities. And Los Padres’ most famous residents wields plenty of star power: the California condor is both the biggest bird native to North America and among the rarest in the world. After decades of study, hand-wringing, and agonizing debates, by 1987 the last condor left in the wild was captured to join 26 other birds in a captive breeding program. Since then, numbers have climbed, but the condor recovery business is a slow and harrowing one. A mating pair typically lays only one egg every two years, yet over the past two decades, breeding programs have nursed the species up to 184 individuals, fewer than 40 of which now ply California skies. Many of these live in and around the Los Padres National Forest. Twenty-five more condors have been released in Arizona and the rest remain in captivity at zoos in Los Angeles and San Diego. Since reintroduction began, only four eggs have been laid in the wild. Two were laid in Los Padres on the eastern edge of Santa Barbara County in an area identified by the Forest Service as having a high potential for oil. Those two eggs never hatched. The two condor chicks born successfully in the wild hatched this spring at the Hopper National Wildlife Refuge, which is just below and adjacent to the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. The Sanctuary itself borders Los Padres National Forest. While the Forest Service insists that nothing will be permitted to threaten the condor or hinder recovery efforts of other endangered species, others say that oil and gas extraction will make recovery more difficult. Oil rigs have been operating in the National Forest since the 1930s, and they already pose considerable challenges for condor biologists, says Bruce Palmer, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s coordinator for the condor recovery program. “There are serious concerns, not only with the habitat alteration, but all that goes with it,” says Palmer. “The power lines, roads, people. Condors regularly land on the rigs. They get into the oil and solvents that are around the rigs. The worst thing that could happen to a chick is that it fledges and gets twanged by a power line.” Two weeks after the first wild-born condor chick emerged, its father got doused with crude oil. Apparently, he dunked his head in a puddle of oil at one of the nearby wells. According to some reports from the field, he transferred some oil to the chick. While condor biologists report that the chick and its father both survived, the incident illustrates the perils of sharing the neighborhood with oil wells. “More oil rigs would mean more challenges,” Palmer says. No one can predict what new oil rigs will mean to condor recovery, but one thing is clear: the biggest impediments to the birds’ recovery up to this point have been human encounters of one kind or another. Whether they are towers, or power lines, or spilled antifreeze, all of which have killed condors since their reintroduction, less is definitely better when it comes to condor-human interactions in the wild. How much other environmental harm would result from oil and gas extraction is also a matter of debate. Proponents of the plan say it is minimal. Endangered species habitat would be protected by buffer zones, says Al Hess, the project manager for the Forest Service. In those zones, no “surface disturbance” would be allowed. Existing wilderness boundaries would be honored. Creeks would be protected. Opponents of the plan aren’t impressed. “An oil rig is an oil rig, whether it’s in Texas, or the Arctic, or Los Padres,” says Allyn. “They require roads to be built, heavy machinery, pipelines, truck traffic. And the towers are visible from far away in an open landscape like this one. That’s a problem for the creatures that use the forest. And for the humans that use it, too.” In a letter to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, Senators Boxer and Feinstein and Congressmen Louis Capps and Sam Farr wrote of Los Padres “[t]he opening of these spectacular, unspoiled lands to oil and gas drilling, threatens one of California’s most pristine and wild places.... Oil and gas drilling...can cause irreparable damage to the fragile habitat.” That’s true for condor habitat, and it’s also true for the hybrid leopard lizard. The 100 public acres on which the creature occurs has also been identified as an area likely to contain gas. “That kind of disturbance could devastate the endangered animal, as heavy equipment used in oil and gas development as well as oil sumps and spills have been identified as having severe impacts,” says Bond. The condor and the hybrid leopard lizard may be the most vulnerable species in the forest, but the 25 other endangered species found there are also sensitive to human incursions. These include the mountain plover, Swainson’s hawk, southern rubber boa, short-nosed kangaroo rat, mule deer, brush rabbit, California spotted owl, arroyo toad, red-legged frog, steelhead trout, and California flycatcher. Each one has its own history of abuse and reasons for hope. Oil drilling would amplify the abuse and diminish the hope, all in the name of a few days of oil-business-as-usual. “If you had to pick one national forest not to drill in,” says Keith Hammond, communications director for the California Wilderness Coalition, “this would be it.” Gordy Slack is a freelance science writer and contributing editor of California Wild. |