Speak Out Against Out-of-Control Oil and Gas Development on Public Lands!

Attend the BLM Listening Session on Oil and Gas Streamlining

Tuesday, November 14th, 2-4 p.m. or 6-8 p.m.
Renaissance Denver Hotel, 3801 Quebec St., Denver

November 8, 2006

The Bureau of Land Management is holding a public hearing to discuss its "streamlining" program in selected field offices across the West. This project has funneled extra money and staff to selected offices to speed up the permitting of oil and gas development, without increasing the amount of environmental oversight to protect lands, waters, fish, and wildlife. The result has been development at a breakneck pace, with little or no enforcement of even the token mitigation measures required as conditions of approval of drilling.

Let's give the BLM an earful about how oil and gas drilling is out of control, and how the health of land, wildlife, clean air and water are being neglected!

The BLM is supposed to manage public lands for multiple use, including wildlife, public recreation, watershed health, and wilderness. But instead, the agency is sweeping aside all of its responsibilities and concentrating just on speeding up oil and gas development, which is becoming the sole viable use across much of the BLM-managed public lands. It's time to tell the BLM:

Oil and gas development is already proceeding too fast, with too little consideration given to conservation and the health of the land.

Instead, the BLM should slow down and use phased development, where new lands cannot be converted to industrial use until current oil and gas fields are returned to their natural state.

Better planning of oil and gas projects is needed, using directional drilling to radically reduce the impacts of gas fields, instead of approving the quick-and-dirty oil and gas projects designed by oil corporations to bring the highest profits with the heaviest possible environmental impact.

Oil and gas development needs to avoid sensitive wildlife habitats, like sage grouse breeding grounds, big game winter ranges, and raptor nest sites. The current trend of sacrificing our wildlife heritage through gas developments sited in the wrong place is a needless and bitter waste.

The streamlining project is accelerating oil and gas intrusions in special places where they don't belong, like the Adobe Town proposed wilderness in the Red Desert and the Fortification Creek proposed wilderness in the Powder River Basin. These lands should be protected from industrial use for the benefit of native wildlife and public recreation.

When BLM biologists are spending all of their time processing drilling permits, and none of their time enforcing wildlife protections (as reported by Steve Belinda, who recently resigned as a biologist with the Pinedale BLM for this very reason), the agency has its priorities backwards. It's time to stop catering to industrial interests and start catering to the public interest!

Let's pack the house with conservation supporters, and drown out the oil industry's call for more and faster destruction of our public lands!