A Land Out of Time

Time is running out for vast swaths of the Rocky Mountain West as the Bush/Cheney Administration turns over millions of acres of public land for oil & gas drilling. Western ranchers who have lived on the land for generations expose the dramatic changes to the landscape and their heritage and spark a backlash.

Just who is in charge of our public lands, the oil & gas industry or the American people?

The gas drilling boom here in the Rocky Mountain West caught me totally off guard as it has many Westerners. Unless you were an energy analyst, it just didn't occur to you that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management would suddenly be leasing millions of acres to the gas and oil industry and then issuing tens of thousands of permits to drill all over the heart of the West.

But when the gas boom really got going, it was obvious that, left unchecked, it would transform the Rocky Mountains forever. We're seeing thousands of miles of roads being built on unspoiled ground to develop gas wells, billions of gallons of water pumped from the aquifers of Montana and Wyoming to develop coal-bed methane wells, and the ruin of the wild places we depend on to hunt, fish, and hike. We're watching great swaths of America's Western geography being rendered into an industrial landscape.

And for what? A few days or weeks supply of natural gas, spread over the next couple of decades. It's woefully short of the kind of supplies that would lower prices or make us energy independent. This land grab is short-sighted in the extreme, the modern equivalent of breaking up the furniture for firewood.