By Rebecca Huntington
 

No signs point the way to the Jonah Field. From a two-lane highway south of tiny Pinedale, Wyoming, an unmarked turnoff simply slices west through the sage — a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. 

Then, after about a dozen miles, just when you expect to see pronghorn running across the open plain, you’re suddenly somewhere: Lighted towers bloom from the high desert. Traffic signs and metal structures sprout. A tart chemical smell hangs in the air, engines hum, brakes grind, and dust shimmers in the evening haze.

“The oil patch,” as Jonah is sometimes called, unrolls like a bleak quilt as far as the eye can see — 60,000 acres in all. Tanker trucks crawl along roads connecting well pads where the earth has been scraped and leveled and topped with mammoth storage tanks, casings, fittings, tubes and valves.

Nearby, pits the size of hotel swimming pools hold contaminated water. Above them, rows of carnival-colored flags, like the ones at car dealerships, flap in the wind, warning away waterfowl. Amid the miles of road and bladed ground, uniform fields of green represent efforts to replant and revive shrubs and grass cleared and crushed by drill rigs.

Welcome to Wyoming’s second-most productive natural-gas field, well on its way to tapping 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Before the latest energy boom hit the Cowboy State full throttle this decade, Wyoming’s Green River Basin — a high-desert plain bookended by the Wind River Mountains to the east and the Wyoming Range to the west — represented one of the nation’s last remaining strongholds for large, intact sagebrush ecosystems and the species that depend on them.

In this cracked-earth country, wildlife needs room to roam, room to find enough food and water to survive. Some of the world’s largest herds of pronghorn antelope migrate through the basin to their winter range. And while energy development, even in Jonah, leaves fingers of sagebrush where pronghorn still graze and burrowing owls attempt to raise their young, biodiversity begins to decay as habitats get carved into ever-smaller slices.

“We’ve already lost so much of the sagebrush, it’s frightening,” says Joseph Kiesecker, a scientist for The Nature Conservancy. As a result, pronghorn have been impacted; so, too, have burrowing owls, mule deer, sage grouse and rare plants, such as the cedar rim thistle.

Two years ago, Kiesecker was asked to figure out how to make up for the loss. Capitalizing on a $24.5 million fund created by the gas companies operating at Jonah, he set out to make recommendations for how to mitigate for the damage.

Of course, his options were limited; he was coming in after the fact. It’s not as if he could relocate a migration corridor.

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Nature picture credits: Photos © David Stubbs