SENSITIVE PLACES

Pigeon River Country, Michigan
In the summer of 1968, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) decided to open for oil and gas development a 550,000-acre region of forests and streams in northern Michigan known a "Pigeon River Country." Covering parts of Ostego, Montmorency and Cheboygan counties in the upper part of the lower peninsula, the area encompassed a huge region of wildness with few roads and clear streams, covered by maturing, second-growth forest. Ernest Hemingway had hunted and fished in the area and wrote about it. Aldo Leopold, the famed ecologist and writer, called it "The Big Wild." The oil and gas industry, however, called it opportunity. For beneath the region being leased — which also included 57,000 acres of the Pigeon River State Forest — lay the Niagaran-Salina formation, a vast deposit of oil and gas running for about 150 miles in a 20 mile-wide swath between Manistee and Rogers City. State officials at the time had no idea of how rich the play was, which in the 1970s would touch off the most drilling activity in the US outside of Alaska’s North Slope. By the time the leasing sale ended, the state had something over $1 million in revenue, while Shell Oil, Amoco, and Nomeco snapped up most of the acreage in Pigeon River Country.*

In February 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the environmentalists, blocking Shell from drilling its ten wells. But that wasn’t the end of it by any means. Shell decided to play hard ball. It drafted a bill with 28 of Michigan’s 38 Senators as co-sponsors that threatened to gut the Michigan Environmental Protection Act, using the backdrop of the national energy crisis as the political wedge. Governor Milliken suggested he would veto any such bill if it did not, at a minimum, contain protections for the contested Pigeon River region.

Shell & The Everglades
Elsewhere in the US, Shell has not always worried about entering sensitive habitat. In the early 1990s in southern Florida, Shell sought permission to explore and drill in the Everglades Water Conservation Areas in western Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties. Shell, Exxon, and Sunniland Pipeline Company were among companies at the time that had sought or obtained leases in or near the area. Shell, in fact, leased 70,000 acres of land from the Miccosukee Indians, whose Broward County reservation sits on the northern edge of the Everglades National Park. In January 1991, Shell requested a permit from the US Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to drill an exploratory well. The Miccosukee’s land, where Shell wanted to drill, was just outside Water Conservation District 3, a recharge area for the Biscayne Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to South Florida. The Water Conservation Area is also a vital source of recharge water for the Everglades National Park.

Shell in The Forest
From its earliest days in Borneo in the late 19 th century, through more current times in South America, African, and elsewhere, Shell’s oil and gas projects have run into conflict with forests — tropical and otherwise. But apart from its direct oil and gas drilling conflicts within forests, Shell has also been involved in the forest as a business. Throughout its history, dating from the 1920s, Shell has been involved periodically in various kinds of forest ventures in at least 11 countries. It has planted eucalyptus plantations in Chile, the Congo, Uruguay, and Paraguay. It has also planted pine plantations in New Zealand, and has run or attempted to develop other forest operations in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Thailand, and Tanzania. In 1989, Shell invested $420 million in a venture with Scott Paper and Citibank to cultivate six million trees in Chile. The trees were to be used in part to fuel Shell’s $285 million short fiber pulp plant.

Places Not To Go Shell today sees itself very much on the leading edge of compa-nies that are now mindful of the importance of protecting wildlife, sensitive places, and biodiversity.

But rather than designate a list of significant or important places, or fragile ecological zones where it will not go, Shell appears to take an ad hoc, site-by-site, "never-say-never" approach, deciding, as the times may warrant, whether it will drill or build in a particular location, sensitive or not. Shell typically states that it can produce in such sensitive areas without creating harm to the environment or wildlife, or that it will attenuate the harm as it goes or clean-up later. Yet history shows all too frequently that harm is more typically the result.

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