By Will Roush
Wilderness Workshop Executive Director
For the past 20 years, our community has dedicated itself to protecting the Thompson Divide. This issue has unified us like no other and inspired activism across generations, backgrounds, and political persuasions.
It has shown in no uncertain terms that we have far more in common than we might think.
On April 3, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland signed a 20-year Administrative Mineral Withdrawal banning all new mining and oil and gas leasing across 221,898 acres of the Thompson Divide. Comprised of vast aspen groves, critical wildlife habitat, prime grazing allotments and beloved outdoor recreation areas, these spectacular public lands stretch south and west from Glenwood Springs and Carbondale, reaching into the North Fork of the Gunnison Valley and wrapping around Kebler Pass to Crested Butte.
In the wake of this protection, and on behalf of all of us at Wilderness Workshop, I want to express my deep gratitude to the countless and dedicated activists and community members without whom this wouldn’t have happened. The Thompson Divide is protected because of all of you who wrote letters, attended rallies and town hall meetings, volunteered, donated money, signed petitions and just plain showed up for the love of a place. You are the reason elected officials at every level, from town boards to Senator Michael Bennet to the President himself, have used their power to protect the Divide. You are the reason staff at the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management were moved to enact plans, cancel leases and issue decisions that time and again increased the level of protection for the Thompson Divide.
You stuck with us when the threat seemed overwhelming and through the myriad intricacies and bureaucratic machinations that got us to this point. As Peter Hart, Wilderness Workshop’s legal director recently wrote, “The best opportunity to protect special places like the Thompson Divide is at the ‘planning’ stage when federal agencies decide which areas are ‘available’ for leasing. If lands are made available to leasing, protection from drilling requires fighting the sale of individual leases. If leases are sold, drilling is a foregone conclusion … or so conventional wisdom went.”
And yet, when we got into this work, leases had been sold — more than 80 across 100,000 acres of the Divide. But instead of letting conventional wisdom rule the day, we pushed back and found our voice. We dug deep and exposed the lack of public participation, the lack of environmental analysis and the legal deficiencies that led to the sale of those leases.
If Wilderness Workshop has a superpower, it’s our ability to combine technical, legal and policy expertise with community engagement and action. There is no better example of that than the Thompson Divide success. We could have discovered 1,000 legal deficiencies and exposed countless examples of oil and gas companies exploiting regulatory loopholes, but without the deep well of community activism and passion for this place all our technical work might have fallen on deaf ears.
Since the announcement of the withdrawal, I’ve had a moment to reflect on what this achievement means. First, it speaks to the power of place: the sway lands and waters of home have over a community. All of us who live here are profoundly moved by the forests, streams and wild country that make up the Thompson Divide. The lands speak to us and so, in turn, we speak up for the land.
Second, the effort illustrates what’s possible when a community comes together, sets aside differences and speaks with one voice. It might sound simple, but it’s not. Yard signs and bumper stickers rarely encapsulate the essence of an issue as complex as protecting nearly a quarter of a million acres of public lands, but in this case there was no truer principle than the fact that we were truly “Unified for Thompson Divide.”
Perhaps most importantly, the 20 years of protection we have achieved shows that the wheels of power can and do turn to benefit a local community and its surrounding ecosystems and wildlife. It may happen less frequently or slower than we would like, but the momentum and power we built demonstrate what’s possible when a community not only knows the value of our public lands but is willing to fight for them.
On Friday, June 7 from 5:30 to 8:30pm, join us at Carbondale’s Sopris Park for Wilderness Workshop’s Community Party. Come early for a parade. Let’s raise our glasses and recognize some of the most dedicated activists, dance to live music and celebrate what our community has achieved for the protection of, as Teddy Roosevelt once described it, “A great wild place.”