purchase of water rights and from the destruction of acquifers by 

 industry? Can they protect their lands from the impacts of industry, 

 including pollution and the needs of energy developments? Questions like 

 these are real and living in various parts of the West already, including, 

 but not limited to the Four Corners area of the southwest, the upper 

 Green River in Wyoming, the Gillette, Sheridan and Colstrip areas, Tongue 

 River and soforth. Asking those questions of course, is directly related 

 to a concern for the future of the outdoors and the West. For my point is 

 that as the farming and ranching economy goes, so goes the outdoors, or 

 the outdoor life that is equated with the West. And that leads to a second 

 point that interests me, namely the impacts that the expanding energy 

 industry and its support elements, as well as all other types of large scale 

 development that now face the West, will have on those current assets and 

 virtues that we can lump together as recreation opportunties: fishing and 

 hunting, pack trips, river running, the wilderness experience, visiting 

 wildlife preserves, mountain climbing and tourism. 



A few years ago an environmental impact statement prepared in 

 connection with the proposal to build the Mammoth Kaparowitz Coal-Fired 

 Power Plant in southern Utah, included a good blueprint of what would 

 undoubtedly happen in that area, which was an unspoiled outdoorsman's 

 paradise. A large new town was going to be built in the middle of what 

 was a very sparsely populated, even wild and extremely scenic area. 

 Population was going to zoom and many new roads were going to be built. 

 In short order, it was expected that people would be exploring and 

 adventuring in off-road vehicles all over the place, that the delicately 

 balanced ecosystems would be disrupted and destroyed, that all manners of 

 pollution and degradation would affect the scenic values of the area and 

 that an immediate increase in hunting and fishing demands would very 

 quickly end hunting and fishing because the animals and the fish would be 

 gone. The outfitter, the boatman, the providers of recreation in the West 

 are all very unique and important elements in western life and to a large 

 extent their fate is limited to that of the rancher and farmer, and to the 

 maintenance of a status quo in which outdoor values are preserved and 

 conserved as far as is reasonably possible. The building of dams affects 

 lhem--as anyone can vouch for who sat in hearings for the building of low 

 dams on Snake River and heard Idaho Power's promises to safeguard the 

 salmon, cutthroat and sturgeon in that river, one of the last great 

 stretches of unspoiled waterway in America, full of historic, archaeological 

 and scenic values is the wild Missouri between Fort Benton and Fort Peck. 

 It's a miracle that it hasn't already been dammed, but now I am told that 

 the miracle may end. You can multiply the inroads that have already been 

 made... the changes that growth, development and so-called progress have 

 brought to many areas of the West in the last two decades. I'm not only 

 talking about the impacts on the base of farming and ranching, but also 

 the enjoyment of the outdoors. 



Even so, this is just a microcosm of what could come in a massive 

 assult by the energy industry in the next two decades. With the help of 

 the Department of Energy and its authority under the Energy Mobilization 

 Act, no forest, no preserve, no rivei — neither the Bob Marshall Wilderness 

 nor the Chinese Wall itself here in Montana for example--would be 

 protected if some energy conglomerate or the defense department found 



