FROM THE WATER, the White River canyon appeared to be a scene worthy of Ansel Adams. Swallows darted in and out of mud houses packed on the underside of the soaring sandstone cliffs. A lone elk wandered the hillside, while sheep noshed along the riverbank, tended by a man on horseback who completed the iconic Western scene. But as we drifted peacefully around a bend, the stench of oil and other volatile organic compounds (VOCS) engulfed our flotilla of rubber rafts in an invisible cloud of toxic gases, blotting out the scent of sagebrush that had followed us down the river for the past two days. Eventually, the reason for the fumes came into view, and it wasn’t the sheep.
Gas lines draped over the cliffs and crosshatched the swallow nests, serving as the most visible indication that high on the plateau above us lay Utah’s most productive oil and gas fields. There are currently more than 13,000 active oil and gas wells in eastern Utah’s Uinta Basin. Local environmentalists have dubbed this sparsely populated desert region “Mordor,” after J.R.R. Tolkien’s industrial hellscape. Hemmed in by high mountain ranges on three sides, the basin stretches over 9,300 square miles. Yet it suffers Los Angeles–level air quality that frequently violates the Clean Air Act. “The place is completely decimated,” says Taylor McKinnon, the southwest director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s one of the oil and gas sacrifice zones in the US.”
Last year, I went down the White River with photographer Russel Albert Daniels to take a closer look at what’s happening in the Uinta Basin, where fossil fuel development overshadows the basin’s critical ecological role as a watershed of the endangered Colorado River. Some 40 million people depend on the Colorado for water. But the flow of the West’s most important waterway is predicted to shrink up to 40 percent by midcentury because of rising temperatures caused, in part, by the oil and gas extracted from its Utah watershed. And while scientists warn that the planet needs to stop burning these fuels to prevent ecological catastrophe, Utah’s political leaders are actively pushing to quadruple production in the basin—with an assist from the Biden administration.
The federal government plays an outsize role in the Uinta Basin, and indeed in Utah as a whole, where more than 70 percent of the land is public. The basin encompasses much of
