public lands

One of the first things I ever had published in a book was a chapter in The Environmental Handbook, a Friends of the Earth/Ballantine Books number, published for the first Earth Day, in 1970. It was called, "Ecopornography, or How to Spot an Ecological Phony."

It's time to dust it off and send it around again.

Ecoporn, as defined by us, is image advertising run by large enterprises, often engaged in enriching themselves and their shareholders via the exploitation of public resources. Oil companies, in other words, and mining companies, and so forth.

The State of Colorado is about to adopt new rules governing oil and gas development in the state.

The strangely named Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission will soon change the state's permitting process for oil and gas extraction. (If the Commission is supposed to conserve oil and gas, why is everything it does concerned with taking fuels out of the ground?)

Photos tell story of the energy boom's threat to wild Wyoming.

The natural gas industry has boomed nowhere like it has in southwest Wyoming, in the Upper Green River Valley at the south end of the Yellowstone ecosystem.  Hundreds of well pads have been scraped and an industrial web of facilities and roads have gone in to the Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline area.

In the late 1980s, the country celebrated the 200th anniversary of our most important legal text: the U.S. Constitution.

To do so, a commission was established, headed by respected former Chief Justice Warren Burger. And to lead a celebration in Washington, D.C., an equally distinguished American was chosen: Wayne Newton.

Wayne Newton!!?? The original Las Vegas lounge lizard? What were they thinking?

Us young, hip kids (at least we thought then we were then) imagined the following conversation leading to this decision.