So, over here where things grow the BLM has thought it should put up all the remaining public lands for gas and oil drilling. That would be the North Fork. Colorado. Hippies, coal miners, farmers. Libertarian, generally, from the left to the right. God’s country. If God went on an extended sabbatical, in a Deist sort of way.
I am not a clock-maker and I have never stumbled upon a watch hiking, say up Dark Canyon on the lookout for stray billionaires building Disneyesque empires. So I don’t pretend to know what He intended, but its nice up this ways. People like it. Think it is worth defending.
The Bureau of Land Management thinks we are all stupid rubes up here. And they are trying to turn our farms into gasfields.
All the local towns, which is three, and both counties-Delta and Gunnison told the BLM in no uncertain terms to at least wait until they got a new management plan in place, which BLM has been working on a while, but they keep getting distracted helping the drillers get at the public’s treasures.
Reagan Zombies Threaten Agricultural Paradise
The so-called ‘current’ management plan is anything but, from sometime back when James Watts was roaming the territory with his diverse band of equal-opportunity-in-action bureaucrats.
Apocalyptic asshole was covered in that posse, certainly, and from that was spawned the Uncompahgre Field Office Resource Management Plan, which has reanimated Mr. Watts-so to speak-in the form of 30,000 acres of oil and gas leases up Paonia-way.
BLM first ‘scoped’ it’s proposed action to lease 30,000 acres and received the massive shit storm described above-which mostly said the ‘current’ (i.e. ancient) management was not sufficient and the BLM should wait to finish its revised land use plan that it is already working on.
And on top of all the locals and local governments, agricultural businesses,ditch and water companies, realtors…pretty much almost everyone told BLM its 1980s-era management was not current, not appropriate, not sufficient to protect the resources and communities that exist today-decades and decades after the BLM decided that oil and gas development would likely never come to the sleepy backwaters of the Bum Fork…
So what did the BLM do? It came out with a ‘refined’ proposal-to lease 25,000 acres and spelled out the ancient management so as to help the dense country and small town folk better appreciate how wonderful land use planning under James Watts really was.
Which is to say that the BLM thinks we’re all fucking stupid up here. Now we are at the start of a 30 day public comment to either dissuade them of that notion, or at least to show them what a shit storm really looks like. And once shit goes flyin’ its hard to keep it off everyone around.
The lease sale is currently scheduled for August right in the middle of a hot campaign season and the BLM answers to Obama. That will certainly be something we’re thinkin’ about up here in the summertime, as we pick our tooth with a cherry stem and ponder how important it really is to bother with voting, again, for change that never came. James Watt reanimated. Thanks.
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BLM has one. Lots of paper to shuffle. ‘Management.’ Stick around 30 years and get a fat retirement.
Some of my best friends are petroleum geologists…
his policies expanded my universe into environmental and natural resource issues. Otherwise he was a real loony tunes.