For eight years, the United States has suffered under BushCheney environmental and public lands policies which almost without exception shared one overriding goal - the extraction of natural resources for corporate and personal profit. As a result, millions of acres of American public land has been despoiled, most of it in ways that will not be rectified in our lifetimes.
So it was wonderful news today to read that the course set for this nation by the environmental rapists of the BushCheney administration has begun to turn:
Court halts Utah oil and gas leases
A federal judge late Saturday halted the Bush administration's efforts to open 110,000 acres of federal land in Utah to oil and gas exploration, ruling that the danger of damaging the pristine land required further study before leases were awarded.
The leases to the parcels had been auctioned off Dec. 19 in a move that environmental groups complained was a last-minute gift to the energy industry before Bush left office . . .
The administration announced the lease sales on election day. The original package of 360,000 acres included land that abutted popular national parks such as Arches and Canyonlands.
Here's the best part:
[The judge's] order postpones any sale until after he can hear arguments on the merits of the case, a delay that will potentially place the fate of the land into the hands of the incoming Obama administration. Obama aides have objected to the sale.
Heh.
It won't happen overnight, but we'll get this country headed in the right direction.