Yesterday I posted Gretel Erlich's rant about potential oil and natural gas drilling in the Upper Green River area of Wyoming.

Part 2 of her appeal is for as many folks as possible to voice their opposition to the BLM's Resource Management Plan:

These lands are form the ecotone between river-bottom meadows, sage grasslands, kettle ponds, and the superb subalpine and alpine areas of the Wind River Range. Most of the land is between 7,500 and 8,200 feet in altitude. It’s open and wide and beautiful, full of elk, deer, moose, bears, wolves, domestic livestock, badgers, wolverines, lynx, mountain lions, tundra swans, all kinds of ducks and songbirds.

We have been opposing drilling in this area for many years, but now the real possibility of losing the natural beauty of this unique area is upon us. It only takes one well to industrialize a landscape. The oil companies (and they are all here), have already destroyed the area just south of Pinedale with 1000’s of wells. The effects are apparent everywhere: air quality  -we now have smog year around; water quality - wells are contaminated; social ills -meth labs and meth use has gone wild—read Alexandra Fuller’s piece in the New Yorker. Yet the BLM’s mandate from the Bush administration and the Department of the Interior tells our local Field Office representatives to push leasing and drilling at all costs, regardless of environmental impacts, and to minimize public comment periods (they’re always midwinter).

The deadline at the BLM office for comments on their Resource Management Plan is June 18th.

PLEASE HELP US! A very short postcard, letter, or email to those listed below, opposing oil and gas drilling on the Upper Green, will be of great help. This is public land. It belongs to all of us. It is as beautiful and special as any national park. We all need to weigh in on this and say, NO!

If you would like to look at the Resource Management Plan, you may do so online at: www.blm.gov/rmp/wy/pinedale/

Thanks so much for contributing to the health of the land and the sanity of our nation. If we destroy the beauty of the natural world (and we have destroyed so much of it), we lose our humanity, our sanity. The biologist E.O.Wilson says, “Nature is our matrix. Without it we devolve. We are devolving.”

Written comments can be mailed to the BLM at the following address:

         Pinedale RMP/EIS, attn: Kellie Roadifer
         Bureau of Land Management, Pinedale Field Office
         PO Box 768, 432 E. Mill Street
         Pinedale, Wy. 82941

         Secretary Dirk Kempthorne
         Department of the Interior
         1849 C Street, N.W.
         Washington, DC. 20240       

Or electronically to:
        
         PRMP_WYMail@blm.gov
         (please use RMP/EIS in the subject line

         Govenor Dave Freudenthal
         governor@state.wy.us

Please include your full name and address, and title if applicable.

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