Fall / Winter 2007 / 2008

Vulcun Geothermal Threat is Quiet but not Extinct

–by Michelle Berditschevsky

The Forest Service is still under orders to process geothermal lease applications for approximately 13 square miles on the north and east sides of Mount Shasta, immediately adjacent to the Wilderness boundary. The process is moving slowly, scoping for the project has not begun, and our local Ranger District is in the information gathering stage. Congress, appropriated funding under the 2005 Energy Bill for the environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act that will lead to a determination of whether the Forest Service consents or does not consent to leasing the area for industrial geothermal developent.

Five lease application areas

This past year, Vulcan Power Company dropped six out of the eleven original lease applications that the corporation filed in 1990s. Geothermal exploration was conducted in 1988 east of Black Butte and high up in the Hotlam area on the north side, but did not yield adequate temperature gradients to indicate an economically feasible resource.
However, our concerns are not relieved by this reduction, which left two-thirds of the original lease-application area still vulnerable to air and water pollution, landscape fragmentation from power lines, pipelines, clearcuts for huge power plant and well pad sites, and the visual and auditory blights of 24-hour lighting and years of intensive drilling. Vulcan's plans call for developing two 30-megawatt power plants in the lease areas.

The sections being considered for leasing comprise pristine roadless areas and near-pristine lands immediately adjacent to the Mount Shasta Wilderness, including Whitney Falls, Bolam Plateau, North Gate, Inconstance Creek, and winding around toward Brewer Creek. The Forest Service issued a revised map showing the current extent of the area under consideration. While quite a bit of logging has taken place on lower elevations from the last century, when the northside was treated as the timber sacrifice zone, these areas are now covered with plantations that are slowly diversifying back into multi-species forests with interspersed islands of old growth.

Water is a vital issue

Water, the ubiquitous issue of our time, is a prime concern in light of Mount Shasta's huge pure aquifer, and geothermal resource extraction is known to have adverse effects on water, in addition to needing lots of it. The northside of the Mountain is the chief source of the Shasta River and the Shasta Valley aquifer. Its lava tunnels are conduits for numerous springs that surface in the Valley, gushing up through Big Springs. These hydrologic resources water the ranches, farmlands and wildlife preserves that lie in Mount Shasta's rain shadow to the north.
Mount Shasta's north side receives only a fraction of the precipitation, as compared with other parts of the Mountainonly 10 inches annually, while the south side gets over 40 inches. Here, what's critical is what you don't see. The underlying contribution to the groundwater aquifer in Shasta Valley comes from several glaciers, including California's largest three-mile-long Whitney Glacier, that seep their way into underground lava tubes surfacing miles and years later.

As with the Medicine Lake Highlands, adequate water monitoring is rendered virtually impossible because of the extreme complexity of the subsurface hydrogeological configuration, due to the extreme porosity of the soils, the presence of fractures in the rock strata and, of course, unpredictable lava tubes. Disturbance can cause subsidence, blockage, disappearance of springs, and contamination, in what is now a miraculously working system.
Mount Shasta holds the largest total volume of ice (4.7 billion cubic feet) of any peak in California. Fallout and drift from toxic geothermal steam plumes could affect the purity of the ice and the waters that derive from it.

Seismic activity is a significant danger for miles of pipelines and well casings, reaching thousands of feet down into the deep geothermal aquifer, bringing up fluids that contain dangerous levels of arsenic, mercury, toxic hydrogen sulfide, among other noxious substances that mother earth in her wisdom committed to the deep strata. This is yet another reason why geothermal development on Mount Shasta is a bad idea. Why risk contamination right at a major source of waters?

Native American Cultural Values a prime consideration

Of all the sacred features in the mythological landscapes of our bioregion, that are invested with ten thousand years of attunement and meaning, Mount Shasta is at the pinnacle. The Mountain holds the top position, both geographically and in terms of its cultural position in the creation stories of the five surrounding Native American Tribesthe Pit River (Ajumawi), Wintu, Shasta, Karuk, and Modoc. Mount Shasta is the Home of the Creator in Native cosmology that regards landscape features as a living scripture, each with its consecrated spiritual meaning within an interconnected world. Interpretations fall far short of describing the profound Native connection with sacred places. We are talking about keeping a deep cultural dimension alive in our bioregion that is intimately tied to the land and how we experience it. For Native Americans, the Mountain is viewed as a sacred whole that must not be fragmented or desecrated in any way.

On a practical, procedural level, this translates into reactivating our awareness of the values that, in 1994, led the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places to designate the whole of Mount Shasta, down to the 4,000 foot elevation, as a Traditional Cultural District in recognition of its value for Native American culture. Ninety percent of that designation was undone due to a private property backlash within that same year, so the now the Traditional District boundary starts at 8,000 feet, above treeline, and descends to 7,200 feet at Panther Meadows. It is clearly time to revisit that original designation, and to consider that the current boundary does not reflect the area and level of significance of Mount Shasta. Another goal is to create a cultural management plan for Mount Shasta that reflects protective traditional land care practices.