The impact of new drilling on wildlife may be severe, say biologists. Along with reddish egrets and the speckled swimming crab, visitors to the Padre Island National Seashore can now hope to spy 18-wheelers -- as many as 20 a day -- lumbering down the beach to service the 100-foot-tall BNP Petroleum Corporation rigs that will probe for natural gas.

Not to be confused with South Padre Island, an annual Mecca for hard-partying spring-breakers, Padre Island National Seashore is the longest undeveloped barrier island in the world, including 65 miles of preserved beach along the Gulf of Mexico.

"You're making what is otherwise a pristine national seashore into an industrial zone," says Randall Rasmussen, acting southwest regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association.

There are already two active wells on the seashore's parklands, including one drilled earlier this year, which brought five months of truck traffic across the nesting grounds of the endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle, during the spring and summer months when turtle eggs are laid and hatched.

"For reasons known only to God and the Park Service, they're making them drive up next to the dunes precisely where the turtles nest," says Johnny French, a retired biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who worked on federally funded turtle restoration projects at Padre.

In the case of Padre Island, which became a national seashore in 1962, the mineral rights are largely owned by the state of Texas and a single private concern, the Dunn-McCampbell Royalty Interest. The oldest national parks, which are in the West, were formed from lands that had been federally owned since the Louisiana Purchase. But newer parks such as Padre were purchased from private owners and local states. Since 1951, there have been some 57 drilling operations on Padre Island, but drilling had been tapering off in the past two decades, until the new development interest from BNP Petroleum.

There is some recourse for preventing drilling in parks like Padre. Even if the Park Service doesn't own the mineral rights, the federal government may retain "condemnation authority": the right to buy out those rights at a fair-market price.

In 2001, President Bush pledged $120 million of federal money to purchase the mineral rights in Big Cypress to prevent further major drilling efforts planned for the preserve, as well as $115 million to buy back oil and gas leases off the shores of Pensacola. It was a commitment praised by environmental groups, even as Democrats decried it as a cynical political move to bolster the reelection campaign of his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

"Dubya managed to work something out for his brother Jeb off the coast of Florida," says French, the retired Padre biologist. "Some people would like him to do that here in his home state."

The feds could legally take the same step in Padre Island, but there's no evidence that they wish to do so.

In the absence of a federal bailout, the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club has gone to court to try to halt the Padre drilling. The group filed suit in April 2002 on the grounds that the first of the new BNP Petroleum wells posed a threat to the Kemp's ridley sea turtle, whose only U.S. nesting site is on the Padre beach. The suit challenged the Park Service's official assessment that the truck traffic will have no significant impact on the turtles. Now, the group will likely amend the complaint to include the two wells approved last week, according to attorney Robert Wiygul.

But for now, the beach has been opened up to BNP Petroleum's 18-wheeler traffic. "It's just like a freeway. I mean literally," says Pat Suter, chair of the Coastal Bend Sierra Club. She helped get Padre designated a national seashore back in the 1960s. Suter and other environmentalists hope to persuade the Park Service to at least limit the drilling truck traffic to the months when turtles don't frequent the beach, a regulation that would be within the service's power.

But even environmental activists such as Suter aren't optimistic that the drilling at Padre can be stopped. "The current administration is proud to say that they believe that public lands, all of them -- national refuges, national forests, national seashores -- should be available for exploration."

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