Abstract
ABSTRACTThe alternative mitigation program that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) established in 2008 to address impacts to the archaeological resources in the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico, now one of the most active of the nation's oil and gas energy fields, has supported more than $10 million in field research programs and is poised to be able to fund about $1 million in field research annually for the foreseeable future. The financial success of the program is mirrored by the program's outstanding contributions to our understanding of the Permian Basin's long and complex history of human occupation. Surprisingly, although other public lands under the auspices of the BLM are seeing similar rates of energy development, the critical elements of this program have not been picked up elsewhere in the BLM. The Permian Basin program appears doomed to be an example of a “one-off” alternative mitigation solution. The factors barring more widespread adoption include the ebb and flow of energy production activity, complications arising from mixed land status and the ability to work across jurisdictional boundaries, hesitation to change procedures that are working adequately for the time being, and a lack of capacity to institute systemic change.
Highlights
The alternative mitigation program that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) established in 2008 to address impacts to the archaeological resources in the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico, one of the most active of the nation’s oil and gas energy fields, has supported more than $10 million in field research programs and is poised to be able to fund about $1 million in field research annually for the foreseeable future
Judging by several critical measures, including research results, educational products, participant satisfaction, and, to this point, longevity, the Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement (PBPA) is an excellent example of alternative mitigation that has been successful for cultural resource management on the public lands of southeastern New Mexico
What we look at here is why this mitigation program has not been adopted elsewhere within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for use on the public lands that agency administers
Summary
There are no landscape-scale pooled mitigation programs for oil and gas development currently in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, California, Colorado, or the San Juan Basin of New Mexico. In Utah and the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, stakeholders are calling for more inventory, more identification of cultural resources, and more consultation This has slowed efforts to engage in developing a programmatic agreement for mitigating direct impacts, let alone indirect and cumulative impacts. This situation may change as stakeholders develop a higher level of trust in one another, but at present, the perceived conflicts between highly valued cultural resources and landscapes and developing oil, gas, wind, and solar fields are leading to litigation efforts rather than mitigation programs. Once the distribution of materials on the surface is sufficiently clear, we can consider moving on from recording many more similar surface distributions to archaeological investigations that answer more complex questions
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