Thunder Basin National Grassland: Coal Country and the Price of Cheap Electricity

The Powder River Basin lies beneath roughly sixteen million acres of the northeastern Wyoming plains, and it holds more coal than any other region in the United States. The Thunder Basin National Grassland sits on top of some of it. Drive east from Casper on Interstate Ninety and the open-pit mines become visible from the highway: vast terraced excavations cut into the pale Powder River buttes, the black seams exposed, draglines the size of apartment buildings moving back and forth along the walls.

The Thunder Basin Grassland was created the same way every other national grassland was created. The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of nineteen thirty-seven authorized the federal government to purchase failed homesteads across the Great Plains and convert them to managed grazing land. This corner of Wyoming had been homesteaded beginning around nineteen ten, plowed for wheat, and bankrupted by a combination of drought, depleted soil, and collapsing commodity prices by the nineteen twenties and thirties. The federal government bought the land back. The grassland designation followed.

What Thunder Basin has that most other national grasslands do not is coal. The Powder River Basin's coal seams run close enough to the surface to strip-mine economically, and the Thunder Basin Grassland is administered by the Forest Service in a way that accommodates coal extraction on federal mineral rights. The Bureau of Land Management manages the mineral leases separately from the surface grassland. The two bureaucracies operate on the same ground under different mandates.

The result is a landscape where pronghorn graze around the perimeter of open-pit mines, where meadowlarks hold territory on the reclaimed terraces above old excavations, and where the federal government simultaneously manages recovery of the original prairie ecosystem and the extraction of the coal seam underneath it. The Dust Bowl families who sold this land to the government in the nineteen thirties did not know what was underneath it. The coal companies who came later did.