Apropos nothing in the text, just a pretty spot in Wyoming*
R forwarded me this story from MSNBC about the degradation of air quality in rural Wyoming as a result of the rapidly spawning gas industry during the last few years. Nothing we couldn't have predicted.
Since 2003, I've watched how the BLM's "oversight" and the gas industry exploitation have impacted Sublette County, everything from dangerous meth-high equipment drivers on the highway to ripping up miles of virgin landscape to lay pipelines. The industry spokespeople are asking for trust and cooperation to solve these air quality problems. Have they earned that trust? Sublette County should have seen this coming. In fact, the county commissioner called the ex-governor a "whore for the industry" back in 2003. Them's fighting words. I hope the good folks of Sublette County has it in them to fight hard, because the Wind Rivers are some of the last great country left.
Meanwhile, the BLM is reviewing a proposal to allow 4,000 more rigs in the field. The formerly gorgeous winter landscape of the Wind River basin could end up like the Wasatch Front on a bad inversion day, and we'll have only ourselves to blame.
*Granite Creek Falls in the Bridger-Teton National Forest
Comments (1)
A rant:
Having traversed Sublette County countless times to commune with the Tetons, the Winds, the Gros Ventres; to flyfish the Hoback in the autumn; to watch the pronghorns wend their way south; to catch the most beautiful aspencade on the planet; watch the dories drift the Green in search of trout; witness the elk hunt; pay homage at spring calving time; spy the red-tails kiting the ridges ... the idea of a Salt Lake-like inversion in some of our last pristine lands makes my stomach hurt.
Is no land sacred? Not to men in grey suits in steel towers in New York, Miami, Houston, Amsterdam, London and Calgary. They may hunt and fish also, but only in their special recreational places. Polluting our places is irrelevant to them, for we are a lower order of being.
I grew up in west Texas and watched what oil exploration did to land and people. It made a some people rich (the apologists), bought some pickup trucks (now rusted away), and suborned generation after generation of young, strong and gullible kids to be their army: Kids who didn't make it in math, science or letters but who were still smart, beautiful and resilient.
Afterwards, they were cast away. I knew many a gentle, broken, 'holic, lost Texan from that world. I don't criticize them - you have to work to feed your kids. But the industry just consumed them and moved on to the next generation. It always does.
The new oil towns are vast fleets of RVs and trailers parked on the Wyoming plains with minimal environmental, health care, and law enforcement resources. Some are meth villages.
Who will restore the sagebrush ocean? No one.
Trust them? On what grounds? The exploration industry never cleans up after itself unless forced to. Then they hire some photographers to photograph pretty snowy egrets in the Louisiana swamps for PR. And how will the oil exploration industry will "help" the elk, the pronghorn, the hawks, the trout, the calves, the ranchers, the hunters? What pretty picture will they shoot with haze filters for their next ad so someone can Photoshop ® the last traces of smog away?
Posted by Robert Marc | May 9, 2008 10:40 AM
Posted on May 9, 2008 10:40