Home on the Range

a story of two nomads

MAP OF PRONGHORN WINTER MIGRATION AND NATURAL GAS PIPELINES IN WYOMING

ECOTONE OF PAPA/JONAH FIELD AND PRONGHORN WINTER RANGE IN THE GREEN RIVER BASIN

The region is a border zone between two adjacent communities, and this shared geography constitutes an ‘ecotone’. It is two places in one: the political and subterranean geography of oil and gas derricks create the Pinedale Anticline Project Area (PAPA), while the ecological and meteorological conditions define the pronghorn migration habitat known as the Green River Basin. The edges that rub together in the ecotone can create “new dynamic combinations while also, depending on one’s perspective, inflict causalities through habitat fragmentation.” The overlap in the anticline region poses the possibility for both safety and threat for each nomad, in turn creating opportunities for coherence.

To understand the ecotone, let’s briefly trace the paths of each nomad beginning with the zoomorphic derrick. Subterranean geography accounts for the high number of oil and gas rigs operating in the PAPA. All rigs operate through policies via the BLM that designate the parameters of extraction: where, when and how much. This organization reflects both the need for derricks to access underground formations and to move within a migration pattern of surface leases.
For the other nomad – 48,000 Pronghorn Antelope of the Sublette Herd – the Pinedale Anticline is the winter range. Every year, sagebrush and other food resources produced by the rolling ridges and riparian zones attract the herd to this mesa of the Green River Valley. At over 100 miles long, the migration is the largest in the lower 48.

In an arid region of Western Wyoming sits the Pinedale Anticline – one of the country’s most productive gas fields, situated amid a wildlife habitat and world-class trout fisheries. The majority of this land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which mediates energy demands, wilderness, and preservation needs.

This balancing act entails certain commitments, and over time has solidified relations between the various stakeholders in the region. However, impending and on-going ecological crises like climate change, the sixth mass extinction, and the collapse of crucial ecosystems, are forcing us to call into question the relationships that have structured our environments. For theorist Michel Serres, these challenges demand a new social contract that includes humans, flora, and fauna, where common legal status is shared equally between all stakeholders. What happens if we apply Serres’ Natural Contract – that nature is no longer an inert resource for extraction, but an active non-human actor – to the Pinedale Anticline? A new conversation emerges, legible in a choreography of the space as it is recast as a dynamic and complex plane of relations.

SECTION OF DRILLING PADS AND SUBTERRANEAN FRACTURES COMPARED TO THE SURROUNDING MOUNTIANS

OVERLAY OF PRONGHORN CRUCIAL WINTER RANGE AND PROPOSED DEVELOPMENT AREAS

DETAILED SECTION OF SPRAWLING DRILLIING PADS

AXONOMETRIC DRAWING OF DEVELOPMENT AREA 2 & 3 DRILLING PADS AND CRUCIAL WINTER RANGE FOR PRONGHORN

Ironically, the derricks currently offer an unintentional form of protection by establishing a “wasteland wilderness” in the crucial winter range of the pronghorn herds through piece-meal parcel management inside the Development Areas. The impact of the derricks has deterred other subterranean-dependent species, including humans dependent on water wells, from inhabiting the area, decreasing the number of stressors like fences and heavy traffic seen along the migration route.

Snowfall alters each nomad’s use of the ecotone during the winter months. In winters with little snowfall, pronghorn abandon the search for high quality habitat patches inside or near the crucial winter range, instead foraging within low quality habitats without interacting with the derricks. The consequences of low quality habitats are predicted to have several health impacts like malnutrition, and have expanded the territory of the pronghorn beyond their ideal habitat.

During months with heavy snowfall, pronghorn have been recorded using areas closer to the derricks, “perhaps using roads associated with the oil and gas rigs to facilitate movement.” Although these areas have high numbers of audio and visual stressors from the derricks and landscape disturbances, it is suggested that the pronghorn situate themselves in these crucial habitats because they provide freshwater, riparian vegetation from the New Fork River, and access to sagebrush. These patterns suggest the true impacts of gas field development on the pronghorn may only be seen during the most severe winters in the Upper Green River Basin, when animals are forced by higher snow depths to navigate the small and unorganized patches of crucial winter ranges between derricks.

If the derrick mobilization of the PAPA continues its seemingly random densification in crucial habitat areas, it can be expected that the usage of these high quality habitats by the pronghorn will decrease even more in winters with low snowfall. Consequently, usage of low quality habitat areas can be expected to increase, changing pronghorn habitation patterns. While the derricks have provided some form of refuge as “wasteland wilderness,” high quality habitats have decreased by 82% from 2005-2009, forcing the pronghorn outside their typical areas.

AXONOMETRIC DRAWING OF PROPOSED CORRIDORS IN DEVELOPMENT AREA 2 & 3 DRILLING PADS FOR THE PRONGHORN CRUCIAL WINTER RANGE

The ecotone, in its current form, does not acknowledge pronghorn rights. In an attempt to reorganize priorities and rights, Bruno Latour suggests human rights and non-human rights must create a totality that challenges existing hierarchies – disparate actors can no longer be defined by a single objective. Such a levelling of actors calls into question modernisms’ axiomatic split of ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans.’ Within this reorganization, the facts, values, and lines between stake-holders are redrawn. As opposed to regarding distributed agency as a relic of so-called ‘primitive societies,’ this reorganization acknowledges the potential of a relational ontology which casts animal and plant life in new roles.

Herein lies the crucial importance: derrick mobilization patterns have the power to redefine accessibility for both nomads within the ecotone because they have the ability to produce space. The space is the outcome of an activity in economic and technical realms, but extends beyond as a political and ecological by-product. In the case of the Pinedale Anticline, it combines two seemingly different nomads into same imagined geography.

If the spatial organization of the derricks was more accommodating to the migration patterns and habitat/resource areas of the pronghorn, it would provide an ideal winter range for the migrating pronghorn herd by identifying large crucial winter range areas as such while at the same time limiting its own access to these areas. DA informed by the pronghorn habitat terrain would in turn provide more efficient transportation networks and allow for an increase in derrick migration along the corridor. Along proposed corridors, a pipeline network links the derricks and wells into a direct system that efficiently transports and stores oil, gas, and water. Inclusion of liquid gathering systems and pressure pumps along the pipelines would maintain the infrastructure and reduce the amount of human traffic necessary inside the DA corridor. Further measures like mandated directional drilling, infill drilling, and derrick sharing practices can be taken up to encourage an increased density of wells.

The lease structure would need to be modified to allow for remote parcels to be associated with derricks, but not physically connected to them. With practices of derrick sharing and infill drilling, the remote parcels would begin to make up a separate spatial organization and preserve the ridges as crucial winter range habitats for the pronghorn herds. These areas become ‘...encoded in laws that restrict human use of putatively ‘primal’ lands of which humans count as ‘visitors.’” In doing so, they spatially acknowledge the prospect of a new symbiosis, one that questions species hierarchies.

As a case study, the Pinedale Anticline can be a reference for the cohabitation of non-humans and human infrastructure. The challenge is to reconceive of open land, beyond typical perceptions of emptiness. A survey of existing migration routes and habitat areas along with watershed boundaries and fresh water reserves could begin the process of formally ‘seeing’ the space as a shared ecotone, based on an understanding of interlocking patterns of movement.

Can we separate the PAPA from the Green River Basin, and should we? A reimagined choreography of movements in this ecotone begins to articulate something else. We propose a commitment to a new rapport between the users of the PAPA and the Green River Basin, collectively on the Pinedale Anticline. We suggest a possible architecture that facilitates the term ‘coherence’, as used by Tim Morton to describe when ‘an object appears so deeply linked with some other object that if the one orients a certain way, the other will immediately [defying the speed of light] orient in a complementary way.’

This stretch of BLM land has the potential to operate as a new kind of territory, both of and for a different futur e. An open dialogue between pronghorn and derricks, both nomads within such a political ecology, is possible.

The text and images are edited excerpts from the publication. For more information, including references, please contact the author.