From the Los Angeles Times, via the Duluth News Tribune, by Julie Cart
GULFPORT, Miss. - Tucked away in the 96-page emergency military spending bill signed by President Bush last month are four paragraphs that give energy companies the right to explore for oil and gas inside a sprawling national park.
The amendment written by Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., codifies Mississippi's claim to mineral rights under federal lands and allows drilling for natural gas in the Gulf Islands National Seashore -- a thin necklace of barrier islands that drapes the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico.
As a preliminary step to drilling, the rider permits seismic testing, which involves detonating sound-wave explosions to locate oil and gas deposits in the park. Two of the five Mississippi islands are wilderness areas, and the environs are home to federally protected fish and birds, a large array of sea turtles and the gulf's largest concentration of bottlenose dolphins.
The legislation marks the first time the federal government has sanctioned seismic exploration on national park property designated as wilderness -- which carries with it the highest level of protection.
Energy exploration has been allowed on rare occasions in other parts of na- tional parks over the past decade. Since taking office, the Bush administration has been pushing aggressively for oil and gas drilling in traditionally protected areas. Administration officials also have been whittling away at a long-standing policy aimed at sheltering parks from the ill effects of oil and gas exploration initiated outside park borders.
Mississippi officials and the Department of the Interior have not agreed on the extent of energy exploration in the park. And there are still unresolved conflicts, the most pressing of which is how setting seismic charges on wilderness islands is compatible with the constraints of the federal Wilderness Act, which prohibits ground disturbance and almost any type of development or construction.
"Seismic testing inside a park, in wilderness, with endangered species, arguably inside a place where the mineral rights arguably belong to all of us.... I think that's particularly outrageous," said Dennis Galvin, former deputy director of the National Park Service. Galvin testified before Congress in 2000, warning of environmental havoc if energy development was allowed in the national seashore.
Jack Moody, a geologist with the Mississippi Development Authority, which is responsible for energy leasing, said the authorization shouldn't be cause for alarm. The law pertains only to Mississippi's mineral claims. "We want the right to develop the minerals that the state owns," he said. "But that doesn't mean we will go through there with a bulldozer."
The Gulf Islands National Seashore has long been a Gulf Coast playground. The small islands, with white sand beaches ringed by clear, shallow water, sit perched on the edge of what locals affectionately call the Redneck Riviera.
The islands extend in a thin network from Mississippi to Florida. Alabama's Dauphin Island, which is surrounded by extensive oil and gas development, is not included in the park.
Walking amid Horn Island's expansive dune system, park ranger Ben Moore pointed to the island's unblemished vista -- a tabletop of water running unbroken to the horizon.
"A lot of people don't understand that this flat horizon is what people from Nebraska come here to see, it's what people from New York come here to see," he said, adding that oil rigs, even if planted a mile away from the boundary of the park as anticipated, would be highly visible structures on the horizon.
The Cochran amendment sets the stage for sinking 16-story drilling platforms in state waters.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former head of the Republican National Committee and one of Washington's most powerful lobbyists, laid the groundwork for drilling in the Gulf Islands National Seashore by signing a bill last year allowing oil and gas leases in state waters surrounding the islands.
Barbour also signed legislation transferring authority over drilling from the state's environmental quality agency to the Mississippi Development Authority, an economic department with no regulatory power over the environment.
Until recently, national parks had been spared much of the oil and gas prospecting taking place elsewhere on public lands. But new policies have removed some of the barriers to drilling. Today, oil and gas platforms sprout in a dozen national parks. The Park Service's traditional objection to energy development near its lands has been eroding steadily in recent years. The change of approach is reflected in a November 2003 memorandum that said the Park Service didn't have the legal right to block energy exploration projects that originated outside a park, even if drilling extended under park property or was likely to cause harm to the park.
