Recreation’s Influence on Land Conservation

Moab’s Dilemma: Can Recreation Coexist With Energy?

The Maob region of Southeast Utah has been known for its fertile grounds and scenic beauty. And this beauty has long been admired and coveted. But around the middle of the twentieth century, uranium ore was discovered, as well as oil and other mining possibilities. Suddenly the rivers and vistas were not the only thing being coveted. In Amy Joi O’Donoghue’s article, Moab’s Dilemma: Can Recreation Coexist with Energy, published in Desert News, the increasing struggle between recreation and the energy industry is brought to light.

Since the initial discovery of uranium, many other discoveries have been made. The Grand County region holds the largest producing oil well found in the lower forty-eight of the United States, and is relatively being untouched. What used to be too difficult to uncover, the oil is now being extracted thanks to advances in technology such as horizontal drilling. This is bringing large numbers of developers increasingly closer to national and state park boundary lines. Public and management alike are beginning to worry that the oil development, as well as the potash mining that is becoming increasingly popular, will harm the nature resources of the soil and the river as well as hinder scenic attraction.

And for what some consider the “world’s favorite outdoor playground,” this could be a major issue.

For decades, outdoor recreationalists and enthusiasts  have come to the Grand County area for hiking, biking, climbing, water sports, horse back riding and a whole slew of other outdoor activities. Both in the front and back country, the area’s economy has certainly noticed the mecca that this area has become. In fact the outdoor recreation economy brings in 856 million in state and local taxes. And 70% of the jobs in Grand County derive from tourism.
Now compare that with the mere 2% of jobs that come from the extraction industry. However, the industry is continuing to push to be allowed to buy and extract on adjacent land. The zoning regulation and permitting is still up in the air, but the outdoor folk are not going to give up easy.
What I think is really fantastic about the outdoor recreation community is how much of a voice they do have. When an area and land is loved so much, people want to protect it. Especially for areas that have so much revenue from the recreation tourism industry, we are seeing conservation and land stewardship simply because the economy points the way.
As Lisa Bryant from the Bureau of Land Management in the Moab field office states: “We ask a lot of the land, so the more we can minimize the footprints and disturbance from any one of these demands, to lesson those cumulative impacts, we should.”

Link to article:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865600868/Moabs-dilemma-Can-recreation-coexist-with-energy.html