Vernal is not alone in its fight to protect its natural resources.
Drilling Could Affect Our National Parks
Even though we have protected these national park units to allow them to achieve their full environmental, cultural, historical, and economic potential, threats to their preservation do arise. One of those threats today is the potential for future oil and gas development within national parks.
Protect Moab Water and Air
The BLM is slated to put up an estimated 80,000 acres on the auction block for oil & gas development in the Moab region.
Switchback - Utah House Bill 148
If Utah Governor Gary Herbert succeeds in his war on our public lands, it will be a disaster for human powered recreation. Herbert’s been claiming that he can seize 30 million acres of public land, pay to manage them, raise new revenues, and not harm Utah’s crown recreation areas. This is just another politician’s promise of the impossible.
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In the Crosshairs of a Western Water War: Great Basin National Park
ReplyDeleteWhat's at Stake
This is a war you need to know about - a war of consumption versus conservation, a war over water that pits Utah against Nevada and rural ranchers against urban dwellers.
At stake? An unknown quantity of groundwater contained in an underground aquifer that begins in central Utah and stretches across the state of Nevada as far west as Death Valley’s Badwater Basin.
The frontline? Great Basin National Park– mountainous, scenic and located in a remote stretch of the Utah-Nevada border – threatened by a proposal to pump 40 to 50 million gallons of groundwater each year at the park’s boundaries.
Southern Nevada Water Authority, a powerhouse metropolitan water agency, contrives to build a 300-mile pipeline from Las Vegas to the boundaries of Great Basin National Park to satiate the future growth of this desert city. The pipeline would, in all likelihood and as admonished by the Environmental Protection Agency, draw down the water table in the area, dry up vital vegetation, and create dust-bowl conditions harming agriculture and human health.
NPCA opposes the pipeline based on scientifically-supported and identified impacts groundwater pumping would have on Great Basin National Park, and those concerns were made clear in NPCA’s responses to environmental impact statements.
A few years ago, NPCA’s Center for Park Research evaluated the natural and cultural resources of Great Basin National Park. A short list of the national park’s values includes varied ecosystems that range from desert to alpine, dark night skies that can be attributed to the park’s remote location, endemic species like 4,000 to 5,000 year-old bristlecone pine, and a vast and unique underground cave system that was recently found to support seven newly-identified species of millipede cave creatures.
NPCA recognizes that providing water and planning for the long-term sustainability of southern Nevada is a complex issue with no easy answers. That’s why NPCA is working with allies, such as the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, to counter the proposal while also identifying other sources of water and ramping up water-conservation practices in the region.
Take Action: Please ask Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to scrap this kind of divisive decision-making and open a dialogue to consider reasonable proposals.