oil and gas drilling

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Utah's Bureau of Land Management went on a tear.

In December, it auctioned off 77 leases -- to 100,000 acres of federal land -- to oil and gas companies intent on drilling Utah.  Some of the leases would have allowed drilling within view of the Arches and Canyonlands national parks.

Now, 60 of those leases have been deemed illegal and revoked by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in response to a federal restraining order that halted the sale of the drilling rights. 

He based his decision on a report that "found that people in the Bureau of Land Management's Utah office, which oversaw the sales, believed that energy concerns should override environmental or recreational ones," according to the LA Times, which quoted Salazar as saying, "There is no such preference for the use of the land."

Environmentalists hailed Salazar's decision, which was decried by energy groups as antithetical to the Obama Administration's wish for energy independence.

Sportsmen, businesses and conservationists in Alaska banded together this week to send a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar requesting he block a plan that would open nearly 1 million acres to potential oil and gas leasing and mining, reports Elizabeth Bluemink of the Anchorage Daily News. The plan to open federal land in the Bristol Bay region would harm rivers and streams that support already-troubled populations of salmon, the groups say.

The Bureau of Land Management is behind the plan to open the land, although studies it issued last year indicate the nearly 1 million acres "didn't appear to contain valuable resources." This has many questioning the validity of the studies, since the land is downriver from the highly-valuable proposed Pebble Mine. Critics ask: If the land doesn't have viable mineral deposits, why open it to mining?

The BLM says reasons to keep the land closed are outdated. The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created native corporations in Alaska and allowed them to select parcels of holdings before anyone else could stake claims. Now that most of the parcels have been divvied up, the BLM doesn't see the point in waiting longer before leasing remaining lands. Those in favor of opening the land counter that the sportfishermen wouldn't have hooks if it wasn't for mining.

It all comes down to resource value. Competing interests for mines, dams, recreation and wildlife habitat have been exacerbated by recent concerns over salmon population declines throughout the Pacific Northwest. This has led to some surprising partnerships, like the one between loggers and environmentalists as InvestigateWest reported earlier.