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Utah has been a second home to me for nearly 20 years. In fact, as I write this, I am looking forward to spending a week at our house near Park City for the upcoming holiday. The state has also long been home to silver mines that continue to taint the local water supplies and force residents to install double osmosis filtering systems just to have potable water.
Public lands within the Utah region and elsewhere have been a longtime target for oil drilling and government granted leases but always with the understand that wilderness and public lands in close proximity to national parks were typically off limits. That is, until the Bush administration decided to green light drilling near national parks in Moab, Utah in 2002. Although park scientists protested that the national parks could take decades to recover from the shock waves caused by local oil derricks, the administration claimed that parks would “barely notice changes,” according to a New York Times article published on February 8, 2002.
In February of this year, proposed oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake region was met with great resistance from residents and local and national environmental groups, such as The Friends of the Great Salt Lake and the Wilderness Conservancy who at the time I wrote this had received nearly 10,000 signatures in protest of the drilling from around the world.
Ecosystem will be severely fragmented by fence
The Bush administration has announced it will wave more than thirty federal laws to finish building a wall along the Mexican border by the end of this year. The Washington Post calls the move the most sweeping use of the administration’s waiver authority during the wall’s construction. The waivers allow the Bush administration to bypass mandatory reviews on how the wall will affect ecological areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson called the waiver “an extreme abuse of authority.”
Environmental groups have filed petitions challenging the waivers before the Supreme Court siting several potential ecological hazards that would be created by the fence. Biologists are especially concerned about a handful of extremely rare jaguars that prowl up from Mexico over mountain trails in some of the wildest country in the southwest.
By Max Lindberg •
January 2, 2008
I have two concerns for the year 2008, the first is the proliferation of uranium mining and nuclear power stations, and the second is that George Bush and Dick Cheney will be in office for the entire year.
Before going on, I’ve made a podcast of this article, and if you’d rather listen, the link is here.
It’s difficult to say which one of the two options above concerns me most, but the Bush/Cheney administration, in its own way, is about as scary as nuclear proliferation. Their environmental record may well go down in history as one of the worst ever, and there’s still plenty of time to make it even worse.
Image Credit: Rolling StoneRolling Stone joins about every other magazine on the planet (score!) by publishing an environmental issue, specifically, a "special report on climate crisis". Apparently, that warrants a sleeveless Sting, along with the rest of The Police, gracing the cover, but I kept reading anyway. In any event, Rolling Stone's environmentally-focused content runs the gamut from clueless rock-star flightiness (sorry, Roger Waters, but I'm
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Utah has been a second home to me for nearly 20 years. In fact, as I write this, I am looking forward to spending a week at our house near Park City for the upcoming holiday. The state has also long been home to silver mines that continue to taint the local water supplies and force residents to install double osmosis filtering systems just to have potable water.
