Buck In Brief

Return to Yovimpa Point

In Brief: Can the lands surrounding Bryce Canyon, the Grand Staircase, and the Kaiporowits Plateau be protected from mining and other destructive activities? This month, Deputy Director Bill Curtiss explains the role Earthjustice has played.

06/15/06

A note from Buck: Recently, Deputy Director Bill Curtiss visited the site of an early Earthjustice victory in the red rock country of Utah. This month, he reflects on our efforts in the desert southwest, and on the work ahead to protect these precious public lands.

In May, I was lucky enough to see a dawn standing alone at Yovimpa Point in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park. The panorama looking south from the edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau stretches to Arizona in a series of giant limestone blocks broken by faults and thrust a mile upward tens of millions of years ago to form the Grand Staircase. On the left, I could see the Kaiparowits Plateau, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, then Navajo Mountain and the Kaibab Plateau 90 miles away, and finally the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the right. "It is a country of long views," wrote Utah’s Edward Geary, "a spacious country, yet the horizon, however distant, is always clearly defined, the ridgelines providing a proper edge to the immensity of the sky." In between the faint puffs of an awakening breeze, the silence was as black as night. It was, as always, a powerful experience.

Yovimpa Point, in Bryce Canyon National Park

Photo: NPS

Just below Yovimpa Point, crumbling spires glowing red in the sunlight gave way to rolling dark green hills covered with juniper. There, more than 25 years ago, the U.S. Department of the Interior proposed to approve a giant strip mine at the edge of the park that would supply coal for two new power plants as part of the Allen-Warner Valley Energy System. AWVES, as it was known, was the last of the big coal-fired power plant projects proposed for the Colorado Plateau hyped by their backers as essential to provide enough electricity. Even though the strip mine would destroy the view enjoyed by more than 600,000 park visitors every year, and fill the air with dragline dust and blasting noise, and despite the fact that coal is the worst of fossil fuels for public health, the Carter administration was willing to support the project as part of its response to the "energy crisis" of the 1970s. Sound familiar?

But the hills were still silent and green in the growing light of that May dawn. As a brand new attorney in Earthjustice's Denver office, I helped to block the strip mine and to defeat AWVES. That took four years, from persuading the Secretary of the Interior to place federal land next to the park off-limits to strip mining to defending that decision in federal district court against the mining company. I thought again about the courage of our clients living in small southern Utah towns who risked ostracism by sticking with us.

Looking back from a sunrise atop the Pink Cliffs, the effort seemed worthwhile. The $5 billion AWVES project, as it turns out, was a scheme we've done fine without -- it wasn't necessary to sacrifice this landscape as part of a national stampede to burn more and more fossil fuel. It's ironic to think that projects like AWVES, had they been built, might have bankrupted their utility sponsors. And helped to overheat the world.

But on that May morning, I could also see that the story isn't finished. It was not a very clear day; the outline of Navajo Mountain was fuzzy, obscured by a haze of tiny pollution particles and droplets in the once-clean air that often hangs over the region. That's now common here in the spring and summer -- only in winter is the pollution swept away by northerly winds. Utah isn't the only part of the country where the views and scenery in parks or wilderness areas are degraded by air pollution -- the Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, and Shenandoah National Parks are also hard-hit -- but Yovimpa Point makes the problem plain. The federal Clean Air Act was amended in 1977 to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt new rules requiring large polluters to cut emissions that contribute to the haze over Navajo Mountain, including some big coal-fired powerplants built in the 1960s that still have no pollution controls. When the weak-kneed rule finally adopted by EPA after 22 years of delay was invalidated by a court in 2002, Earthjustice had to sue the agency to write a replacement. As I can see looking south, the replacement rule has a long way to go.

The latest energy crisis has brought the story around full-circle. Earthjustice recently fought off a proposal to build a coal-fired plant that would dim the vistas at Yellowstone National Park and nearby wilderness areas, but the project is likely to return. Although the closure of the Mohave Generating Station last year near Las Vegas has at least temporarily reduced air pollution at Bryce, there are new proposals such as the Desert Rock project waiting in the wings.

The Wahweap roadless area, part of the Kaiparowits Plateau in Utah

Photo: SUWA

Off to the east, the Kaiparowits Plateau is now protected from coal mining as part of a national monument created in 1996. Bryce Canyon, like many other national parks, was also first set aside as a national monument. The new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was not popular with local counties and pro-development interests. Once created, though, the monument cannot be taken for granted. It took until 2003 to finally defeat lawsuits attempting to undo the protections imposed, and today Earthjustice is in court defending rules limiting off-road vehicle use in the monument against southern Utah counties who claim many monument trails are "highways" subject to local rather than federal control. From far away, the Kaiparowits Plateau looks eternal on that May morning, but from close up the land's delicate balance is easy to see. And so are the long-lasting effects of abusing that balance.

The complexities of my dawn view from Yovimpa Point involve decades of work by Earthjustice, and at the same time represent less than an eye blink when measured by the millions of years that stretch out before me. I'm happy to have played a part, and glad that a new generation of Earthjustice lawyers will play parts of their own. For as far into the future as I can see, those parts need to be played.

My thanks to Bill for for sharing his thoughts this month. As always, feel free to contact me with your views.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org