Removable and Place-Based Economies: Alternative Futures for America’s Deserts - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 290

at any previous period. Most studies of the amenity migration phenomenon note these
contradictions; some treat the migrants as outright hypocrites.
Poorly managed, amenity-driven population growth, like tourism, can be destructive
to existing interests and to the sought-after amenities themselves. Nonetheless, this
demographic can create healthy local economies that are viable alternatives to more
conventional Western industries.* In doing so, amenity migrants are on a collision course
with the resource-extractive users who have dominated the desert Southwest for so long.
Many established domestic mines and well-fields are becoming depleted (e.g., “peak oil”)
while foreign ones are politically unstable. At the same time, recent arrivals who have
come to the desert for its amenities are resisting the “resource sacrifice zone” concept—
even as their numbers and lifestyles contribute, in varying degrees, to rising worldwide
resource demand.
Oil, gas, mining, timber, and ranching interests are not just threatened, but outraged by
place-protective public activism, and are fighting back. † The previously mentioned Western
laws (most from the late 1800s) are all on industry's side. Split estate allows oil corporations
or uranium mines to take whatever surface land they want, including people's homes,
often without recourse or recompense. Rocketing mineral demand (much of it from
developing nations, e.g., China and India) is pushing new exploration and production into
residential areas that until recently would have been off-limits, while amenity migration is
pushing residences further into “empty” countryside. New extractive technology exploits
previously marginal resource deposits, often near settlements. Bitter conflicts and local
disasters are inevitable. These battles are intensified by the American-Dream belief that
one's home is sacrosanct and by the amenity migrants' environmental and health concerns,
which industry often scorns.
This is important background—in very coarse strokes—to any discussion of whether
sustainability can be achieved in the deserts of the United States.
These current trends imply several train-wreck scenarios. If those are to be avoided, one
critically important goal is resolving the conflict between removable resources and livable
places. A central goal in any discussion of sustainability, it is cast in a more extreme light
by desert conditions.
* Headwaters Economics, 2000-2009, at least nine published studies of energy economics in the U.S. West, avail-
able online from http://headwaterseconomics.org/ (accessed August 12, 2011).
† An example of such a counter-attack by oil and gas producers has been documented in “Split Estate,” a film
by Debra Anderson, which has been aired on the Discovery Channel and will be released in theaters in 2010.
For details, see http://www.splitestate.com/ (accessed August 12, 2011). Similar industry tactics against citi-
zens are recorded in the recently released “Crude,” a documentary on irresponsible oil development in Latin
America. In their publicity, industry spokespeople focus on portraying surface owners as whining NIMBYs
who knowingly bought cheap land (i.e., split estate property), and hypocrites who drive SUVs but don't want
the scenery near their mansions littered with oil wells. These are near-quotes from charges leveled by oil
industry lobbyists on radio call-in shows against activists trying to prevent unregulated drilling in New
Mexico's Galisteo Basin. An archive of news reports and other documentation on this conflict, culminating
in the Santa Fe County ordinance referenced in this chapter, can be found at http://drillingsantafe.blogspot.
com/ (accessed August 12, 2011). Industry representatives also like to portray secret “proprietary” chemicals
used in drilling and production as safe enough to eat. In fact, many such products are extremely toxic; they
have killed livestock and even sickened a nurse whose contact was entirely indirect (through contaminated
worker clothing after a spill); this occurred in La Plata County, Colorado, and was widely reported. See High
Country News , http://www.hcn.org/wotr/gas-industry-secrets-and-a-nurses-story (accessed August 12, 2011).
Unfortunately, little if any scholarly attention is being given to the medical, environmental, and social impacts
of petroleum production itself, or of the public relations methods used by the industry.