The Great Divide - Southern Wyoming's Vast Desert Lands

The BLM’s Great Divide area takes in 3.5 million acres of public land stretching across southern Wyoming, a vast and windswept landscape that includes half of the Red Desert. Wildlands with sculpted badlands, an island mountain range with untouched lodgepole pine forests, and the largest active sand dune field in North America all fall within the Great Divide. The area also holds important habitats for wild horses, elk and rare or sensitive animals such as ferruginous hawks, mountain plovers, and black-footed ferrets.

Wyoming's Natural Heritage Under Siege

Historically, the BLM has managed the Great Divide almost entirely for oil, gas, and coal extraction – and has done next to nothing to protect its natural wonders. Now the oil-and-gas-hungry Bush Administration would like to revise the region's Resource Management Plan to allow for even more drilling – to, in effect, swallow up the Great Divide's last remaining wild places and critical wildlife habitat. For instance, crucial elk winter ranges near Rawlins have been targeted for a huge 3,880 coalbed methane well field, including wilderness-quality lands in Wild Cow Creek.

We Have a Chance to Save these Wild Wide-Open Desert Lands

The Bush Administration and the BLM are revising the Great Divide's Management Plan. While the administration’s goal is to ramp up drilling, they have a responsibility to protect the region’s irreplaceable wildlife and landscapes. So each of us, as American citizens and partial owners of these lands, now has a job to pressure the BLM to uphold this responsibility.

To this end, a coalition of conservation groups have created its own management plan for the area, called Protecting the Great Divide: The Western Heritage Alternative. This Plan would protect southern Wyoming’s last desert wildlands, its famous open spaces, and its rare and disappearing wildlife. This alternative would also ensure that future oil and gas production is done in an environmentally responsible manner. Needless to say, the BLM and the Bush Administration are going to do their best to overlook the Western Heritage Alternative. But by joining our voices together, we can become a force that simply can't be ignored.

Please Write a Letter to Protect the Great Divide by April 7!

In a letter or email, please tell the BLM that our last desert wildlands in southern Wyoming must not be sacrificed to the oil and gas industry. Please ask the BLM to:

• Protect all remaining wilderness quality lands as Wilderness. The rugged and scenic Pedro Mountains, the rolling hills of Wild Cow Creek, and the steep canyons and gulches of the Bennett Mountains deserve permanent protection. The Citizens’ Proposed Adobe Town Wilderness, with its steep badland rims and sagebrush flats, and the Citizens’ Proposed Ferris Mountains Wilderness, with its limestone cliffs and secluded canyons, should also be protected for future generations.
• Don’t drill in environmentally sensitive areas such as Wilderness Study Areas and roadless lands. The BLM should “withdraw from leasing” or require "No Surface Occupancy" for oil and gas drilling on floodplains, roadless lands, Wilderness Study Areas, crucial elk and deer winter ranges, prairie dog colonies, mountain plover habitat, and within three miles of sage grouse leks or one mile of raptor nests.
• Protect the Atlantic Rim from harmful coalbed methane development. The Atlantic Rim area contains extremely important wildlife habitat, including elk and deer crucial winter range. This is no place for 4,000 new coalbed methane wells.
• Mandate less environmentally damaging types of drilling. Directional drilling and the re-injection of coalbed methane wastewater should be required in the Great Divide’s new management plan.
• Reduce grazing to ecologically sustainable levels. Some parts of the Great Divide suffer from overgrazing and damage from livestock. Streamside vegetation must be protected and priority must be given to limiting damage to habitat crucial to animals like the sharp-tailed grouse, Colorado River cutthroat trout, elk, and antelope.
• Restore wild bison. These majestic animals once roamed across the Great Divide region. It's time to take down the fences and let Wyoming's state mammal once again roam free.

A mailed letter is best. But if you can't do a letter, an email will really help. Here are the addresses:

BLM Rawlins Field Office
Kurt Kotter
PO Box 2407
Rawlins, WY 82301

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