WE CAN DO THIS!

Wildlife and Energy: Making the Connection

By Bill Schneider, 4-19-07

We all have our tipping points, so one of these days on my early morning commute to my little downtown office, I might get off my bicycle and go up and knock on this person’s door and ask, “Don’t you care about the leks?”

Or at least I’d like to have the courage to do it. Here’s why.

A few days ago, I posted an alarming story about the new Gold Rush, or Gas Rush, the runaway fossil fuel leasing throughout Montana and how it has already severely affected wildlife populations in similar terrain in Wyoming and Alberta. But while I was writing it, I kept wondering if people would make the connection?

Will hunters and other wildlife enthusiasts understand that their personal actions help make large-scale destruction of wildlife habitat a reality? Will they understand that electricity doesn’t come from the outlet on the wall and gasoline doesn’t come from the gas pump?

Since I posted the article, more alarms went off. Collaborating their “red alert” claims in the article, officials at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks discovered that sales of oil and gas leases have skyrocketed more than 300 percent from 2003 to 2006--and continue at a rapid rate so far this year. 

Nowadays, one law seems to drive just about everything, the law of supply and demand. We have too much demand for energy, but instead of reducing it, we seem more interested in increasing the supply to meet our ever-growing demands. Regrettably, securing the supply means leasing private and public land for oil and natural gas everywhere possible in Montana and anywhere else with the potential to find it. To do this, we have to give up viable wildlife populations, give up hunting, and give up the openness that sets Montana apart. That’s the connection we need to make, linking our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels with loss of the wildness and openness we value.

We tend to consider energy shortage and independence issues as far away and out of our control in the Middle East or up in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s right here in the New West, staring us in the face. We can feel it--and should think about it--every time the furnace or air conditioner kicks on. Yet, we seem to be in denial about the need to conserve. Perhaps if we made the connection to the end of hunting and the disappearance of the wildlife we cherish and open space we enjoy, we’d get it.

I’m not radical about it (witness my air conditioner and fishing boat), but I try to do my part with many small things to reduce the amount of fossil fuel I use. It saddens me when I see so many others not doing the easy things they could to reduce demand. Almost every morning, for example, I ride my bicycle to work instead of driving my pickup truck. It doesn’t make me better than anybody, but it makes me feel good because I’m helping the cause of conserving our wildlife and open space. I can afford to drive my truck. I can even afford to pay the parking tickets or permits, but instead, my rig sits abandoned in the garage waiting for the next fishing trip.

On many of those dark, crispy mornings (thanks to daylight savings time, which incidentally, is hardly an energy conserving policy), I notice a big white Yukon idling in a driveway along my normal route. Apparently the lady who drives it also goes to work early, but she doesn’t ride her bike or walk. Instead, she punches a button on her key chain to automatically start her big SUV without even leaving the house and lets it idle for twenty minutes so it’s nice and toasty when she’s ready to go.

That’s the door I’d like to knock on and say, “Hey, lady, we are you destroying the leks?”

I’d be talking about sage grouse dancing grounds, called leks, where the males go to dance, hoping to attract females. It’s an age-old spring mating ritual on the plains of Montana and Wyoming, and one rapidly disappearing because of fossil fuel development. Wildlife officials have focused on the loss of sage grouse leks as a key indicator of the impact of energy development. It only takes one nearby gas well to scare the males off the leks, which means no reproduction.

I could say the same thing to the guy I often see on my evening walks, out “walking the dog,” which for him means driving his full-sized pickup truck and letting his dog run behind it.

On second thought, I probably won’t say anything to either person--for the same reason everybody else doesn’t. It’s not nice or neighborly.

But I suppose that reluctance is the crux of the problem, isn’t it? So, how do we make the connection between our established lifestyle and the loss of wildlife habitat?

We could write to Mr. Bush and ask him not to do it, but I suspect that might not change anything, even if millions of us did it. But we still have the power to reverse the ominous trend by reducing demand.

I fear that when people read articles like this, if they do, they really don’t change their behavior. They don’t walk or ride bicycles to work or put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat or move from the country into the city or build smaller houses, but they still like watching wildlife and enjoying our world famous scenery, both now disappearing. They don’t make the connection.

But they probably will put a comment in the box at the end of this article that says, “You missed the point again, Wild Bill. The wolves really are eating all the elk.”

Or… “The democrats still want to take away our guns and that the end of freedom as we know it.”

Okay I’m being negative and showing my frustration, but to me, it doesn’t seem that hard to conserve the 20 or 30 percent of the energy we get from foreign sources. Detroit could do it easily by increasing gas mileage on all vehicles, but we have the power to do it ourselves. We can make the connection and conserve.

I’m not talking about sitting in a cold, dark house eating raw food. I’m talking about doing the countless little things we can do to conserve enough energy to stop the Energy Rush--many so simple we won’t even consider it a sacrifice.

We all know what needs to be done. Yes, some of it does involve changing lifestyle such as getting by without a vehicle too small to pull a four-horse trailer or sleeping in a motel instead of a RV that sucks up $250 in gas at each station or moving within walking or bicycling distance of your place of work. But many other things involve no or minuscule change to our chosen lifestyle.

I haven’t seen these statistics, so perhaps an informed reader can put them in the comments section, but I bet we can come close to reducing demand by 20 percent without major, unattractive changes in behavior--by doing all the little things like taking our re-usable bags to the grocery store or turning off the heat and A/C in seldom-used rooms or consolidating shopping trips or using a bicycle for a river shuttle instead of driving two vehicles or unplugging unused appliances or using the sleep mode on our computers or taking the stairs instead of the elevator or using mass transit when available (which is not nearly enough in the New West) or using compact fluorescent bulbs or putting the washer on warm-cold and the water heater down a few degrees or a million other small things that can add up to a huge success.

We can do this! There are endless ways to conserve energy, and most of them are remarkably painless. A good way to start is making the connection with our lifestyle and how it affects the reason we like living in the New West--wildlife, outdoor recreation and open space.

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