• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Griles’ behavior may have been predictable, but this time around it proved more of a problem. Confronted by Oregon senator Ron Wyden, who was offended by Bush’s appointment of a minerals-extraction lobbyist to a high position at Interior, Griles feared his nomination was in jeopardy. So he promised to recuse himself from any decisions involving his clients or former clients—not permanently but for one year.

Such clever accommodations are always amusing. The Senate (and the public) has to buy the argument that after a year Griles will forget that Redstone Resources paid his firm $40,000 in 2000, that Devon Energy paid the company $80,000, that Dominion Resources retained his services for $20,000, and that each of his former clients were drilling for methane in Wyoming while the Senate was voting on his nomination. And that he was still, in 2003, being paid $248,000 a year from National Environmental Strategies.

To keep his promise, Griles would have to recuse himself from all issues involving coal-bed methane in Wyoming. On April 8, 2002, he sent his second letter of recusal to Interior secretary Gale Norton. Four days later he wrote to the EPA, attempting to block the draft environmental-impact statement on CBM in the Powder River Basin.

Griles should have bided his time. A regional director more friendly to oil and gas exploration has taken over at the EPA in Denver. The deck was stacked in Griles’ favor, and Ed Swartz was left with one fewer friend in the federal bureaucracy.

IN LATE SPRING the fifty-mile drive south from Swartz’ ranch in Gillette to Patricia Clark’s ranch at Pumpkin Buttes is so beautiful it makes your heart hurt. The sky is a brilliant blue. The hills are deep green. There are so many pronghorn antelope among the cattle and horses that a journalist from another state is tempted to ask the ridiculous question: “Are those antelope domestic?” (The answer is a bemused “no.”)

Clark is a short, stout woman with a freckled complexion and light brown hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. She and her teenage daughter and son live in one of three modest houses surrounded by outbuildings and corrals. With her sister and brother-in-law, Clark runs a fifty-thousand-acre ranch. They raise Hereford/Salis/Red Angus cross cattle, handsome red animals with a lot of body mass. Six of them graze in the dry bed of a creek on the Clark ranch. (“They’re not as gentle as they look,” Clark said. “You ought to see what one of them did to my sister’s arm when they were branding yesterday.”) Compared with the sleek pronghorns grazing alongside them, the cattle look like minivans.

Outside the oldest of three houses on the ranch is a tower of deer antlers that stands six or seven feet tall. “A hundred years of deer,” Clark said. The ranch was started by Clark’s great-grandfather 106 years ago. Clark runs the business side of the ranch and is more likely to be found at the keyboard of a computer than on horseback. She has an air of quiet confidence as she pads around the kitchen in her stocking feet. She also has the ability to instantly retrieve from a low bank of file cabinets in her office any photo, map, or contract she needs. What she pulls from her files are not photos of prize cattle for sale at auction, or maps of pastures. They are topographical maps covered with small dots that chart the progress of fifty years of drilling and mining. And photos of grass damaged by coal-bed methane water.

“This is our third boom,” Clark said. “We went through the uranium strikes in the fifties. It happened again with the oil boom of the seventies. Now we’ve got methane.” She pointed to section 36 on the map, which is covered by dots. “I don’t know how many,” she said. “Maybe five thousand holes on the ranch. There are holes all over the uranium beds.” Section 36 is “a pincushion.” In situ uranium mining is discreet. A well is drilled, and ammonium hydroxide is pumped into the shaft. When the chemical dissolves the yellowcake, it’s pumped to the surface. No uranium has