Land-Use Decisions In American West Largely Favor Energy Industry

The last sanctuary of the West Douglas wild horse herd is a desolate, forbidding place, which is just how the horses like it. As many as 60 skittish sorrels and bays make their home on the steeper slopes and stony ridges north of here, abandoning the valleys to growing throngs of oil and gas men looking for places to drill.

Now, even this refuge may soon be lost. The U.S. Interior Department, which has leased 93 percent of the horses' preserve to energy companies, recently unveiled plans for evicting the entire herd. Under the proposal, the animals will be rounded up with nets and tranquilizer darts and then hauled away for adoption. The reason cited: Wild horses are incompatible with the region's intensive gas production.

The removal of the horses, if accomplished, will be little felt outside the area. But the move to strip Colorado's West Douglas Herd Area of its only herd is emblematic of a larger effort underway to rewrite the rules governing millions of acres of undeveloped federal lands in the West. With few exceptions, the changes decisively favor energy development at a cost of reduced protections for some of the country's last wild spaces, a Washington Post analysis shows.

From his first days in Washington, President Bush has built an environmental record marked by extraordinary controversy, with decisions that have outraged environmentalists while drawing praise from industry trade groups and political conservatives.

In the view of the administration and its supporters, Bush's solutions to problems such as global warming and mercury pollution reflect pragmatism and a preference for consensus over confrontation. Opponents contend that Bush's policies unabashedly favor industry at the expense of the environment. With support from Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress, environmentalists have rallied to block or stall several key initiatives, including a high-profile effort to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

But the administration's most enduring environmental legacy may lie here in the West, where a series of policy decisions and little-noticed administrative actions have eased development restrictions on millions of acres of federal lands. More than 60 million acres -- an area twice the size of Virginia -- are more vulnerable to logging or drilling as a result of policies that weakened federal restrictions on their development. Other administration actions have made it harder for government officials to apply the most stringent protections to federal wild lands. As part of a legal settlement reached last year with Utah, the administration banned government workers from surveying public lands to identify areas worthy of being set aside by Congress as federal preserves off-limits to development of any kind. More than 3 million acres that had been nominated for a congressional designation lost their protected status.

In addition, Interior officials have worked rapidly to revise dozens of federal land-use plans. The documents, developed without congressional oversight, determine whether large swaths of federal territory will be protected or thrown open to businesses seeking gas, oil, grazing lands or timber.

Under the Bush presidency, this little-known policy tool is being used to increase energy companies' access to federal lands, an analysis of the documents shows. Draft plans that have been made public in the past year would open millions of acres that were previously off-limits to drilling.