Save our home on the range from Bush’s last stand

Hi all,

In keeping with his Drill, Baby, Drill ethos (er, pathos?) George W. Bush has made a last stand with yet another backwards, cynical, and destructive policy.  Did you know that on Nov 4, otherwise known as Election Day! when most people were utterly distracted, Bush pulled a fast one by opening up 360,000 acres of pristine land surrounding Canyonlands and Arches National Parks for gas and oil drilling?  This shows that he’s not only doing disturbing things but he’s doing them in disturbing ways.  I heard about this on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC the other night (okay, I’m a huge fan!) when she interviewed Robert Redford, the handsome, articulate actor/do-gooder.

Rachel made an important point which is that these are pristine lands and once altered they will never be pristine again.  In other words, we should be extremely careful before doing anything that will affect this landscape, especially things that only give short-term gains.  Please read Redford’s eloquent blog post to learn more about this.  And if you’re so moved you can write to your representatives in Washington to say For the Love of God, STOP this senseless, shortsighted destruction of one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Perhaps the silver lining to this will be that when politicians are faced with the choice between supporting the development of alternative energy solutions and losing these landscapes that I think tug on our collective heart strings they’ll be more inclined to say Green, Baby, Green!  Okay, I know that’s cheesy and overly sacchariney optimistic but I think that it’s truer than for, say, ANWR because unfortunately that area is not as connected to our national identity as are these classic open, home on range, western landscapes.

What do you think about that?

-the compost maven

P.S. See the top ten reasons why ANWR is a bad idea here: the Climate 411 blog.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.