While the Congress is obsessing about the UAE port deal, the Bureau of Land Management is letting oil and gas companies kill wildlife in Wyoming (Dick Cheney's home state, of course; that probably explains some of it):
Recent studies of mule deer and sage grouse, however, show steep declines in their numbers since the gas boom began here about five years ago: a 46 percent decline for mule deer and a 51 percent decline for breeding male sage grouse. Early results from a study of pronghorn antelope show that they, too, avoid the gas fields.Yet as these findings have come in, the wildlife biologists in the Pinedale office of the BLM have rarely gone into the field to monitor harm to wildlife.
"The BLM is pushing the biologists to be what I call 'biostitutes,' rather than allow them to be experts in the wildlife they are supposed to be managing," said Steve Belinda, 37, who last week quit his job as one of three wildlife biologists in the BLM's Pinedale office because he said he was required to spend nearly all his time working on drilling requests. "They are telling us that if it is not energy-related, you are not working on it."
Belinda, who had worked for 16 years as a wildlife biologist for the BLM and the Forest Service, said he came to work in the agency's Pinedale office 20 months ago because of the "world-class wildlife." He has quit to work here for a national conservation group, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, as its energy initiative manager.
Not only that, but the BLM seems to be issuing permits beyond even the oil and gas industries' capacity to make use of them: "In the past two years, the BLM issued a record 13,070 drilling permits on federal land, but industry drilled just 5,844 wells."
Raping and pillaging the landscape isn't confined to Iraq alone, it seems. What a miserable bunch of eco-terrorists this Administration is.
Posted by Linkmeister at February 22, 2006 03:25 PM | TrackBack