Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve is home to a vast array of plant and animal life, including mangroves, orchids, alligators, and the highly endangered Florida panther.
But that rich biodiversity is one of the key reasons environmentalists were outraged last week when the National Park Service approved Burnett Oil Company’s proposal to explore for oil in the southwest Florida preserve. The Park Service completed an Environmental Assessment of the proposal, and found that the oil exploration outlined in the plan wouldn’t significantly impact the preserve.
Environmental groups, however, aren’t so sure. The oil company plans to use “vibroseis” trucks to test for oil in the preserve — vehicles that weigh 60,000 pounds and which send sound waves down through the earth to help discover where oil reserves are located. It’s similar to the seismic testing technique that scientists and marine activists are protesting in the Atlantic, but in this case, it’s being used on land.
“We’re concerned these trucks could do a lot of damage to the ecosystem,” Amy Mall, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told ThinkProgress.
The Park Service states in its final assessment of the project that the trucks “wouldnot create new trails; they would use mostly existing trails” and roads in the preserve. In the case that a truck needs to go off-trail, the NPS says it is emphasizing a plan in which trucks don’t pass over the same area twice, and that “a single pass of a vehicle would not constitute trail creation.” The NPS also doesn’t think damage to vegetation or soil from these trucks going off road would be long-term. The most recent seismic survey in the park was completed in 1999, and now, “evidence of this past activity … would be extremely challenging to find.”
For Mall, however, any passage over unpaved or undisturbed regions in the park is concerning. The trucks will be “disturbing the soil,” she said, as well as posing a risk to the park’s wetlands and the “very large and important aquifer beneath the surface” of the preserve. “They’ll be destroying vegetation, and so they’ll be fragmenting habitat and also literally destroying habitat,” she said.
Other environmental groups — and even some lawmakers, including Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) — agree.
“All of their own research indicates that this operation will likely lead to significant impacts to the preserve’s natural resources,” Matthew Schwartz, executive director of the South Florida Wildlands Association, told National Parks Traveler. “Those include rutting and oxidation of fragile soils, hydrological changes due to compaction of soil, destruction of vegetation, and the spread of invasive plant species such as Brazilian pepper into parts of the preserve which may never have seen motor vehicles.”
The oil company’s survey area encompasses 110 square miles of the 1,139 square-mile preserve. The NPS notes that the “maximum footprint” of the buggies would actually be smaller than that — only about 1.16 square miles. But environmental groups are quick to point out that this is just the first of four seismic testing phases that the oil company is interested in pursuing — future phases could cover more of the preserve, though those phases would have to undergo their own environmental assessments, as would any plans to drill for oil.
The seismic surveys that the National Park Service signed off on won’t be the first Burnett Oil attempted in the preserve. Last year, the company tried once to survey for oil in a small part of the park, but ended up getting its truck stuck in the soft, wet soil. Notes from the National Park Service said that the test was “clearly a failure” and pointed out that the oil company was unfamiliar with the wetland environment of the preserve.
That unfamiliarity isn’t limited to the oil company, Mall said. There isn’t enough good data on how this type of wetland ecosystem responds to disturbances like these, and Mall said she didn’t think there had been “enough testing and assessment done for the park service to approve large scale project.”
The National Parks Conservation Association agreed, calling the Park Service’s decision an “abdication of the agency’s responsibility to protect the lands, flora and fauna under its jurisdiction.”
“Preserve staff conducted the minimum amount of environmental review necessary to approve a plan that would create up to 1,000 miles of new rutted trails through the habitat of nine federally endangered species in a previously roadless area, with other lasting impacts to soils and water quality,” Nicholas Lund, senior manager of the organization’s Landscape Conservation Program, said in a statement. “The Park Service gave only the sparsest consideration to potential alternatives which could have drastically reduced the physical impacts to the preserve.”
As a preserve, Big Cypress doesn’t have quite the level of protection as a national park. Hunting, mining, or other “consumptive activities” generally aren’t allowed in national parks, but they are allowed in preserves. Still, oil and gas drilling has been creeping into public lands that do allow drilling: As of 2012, 12 federally-protected areas had oil and gas operations within their borders, and 30 were facing possible drilling activities. And many are also concerned that seismic testing and increased drilling in Big Cypress, which is currently home to two active wells, would harm the adjacent Everglades National Park.
Environmental groups are looking into options for blocking the seismic testing in Big Cypress — including legal options, Mall said.