During Bush's two terms, I wrote a bunch of magazine stories about oil & gas development on public lands. I never encountered so many pissed off people. Many of them felt steamrolled by the energy boom-- ranchers in Wyoming and New Mexico, environmentalists in Colorado, and archaeologists in Utah. Lots of career staffers in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) felt impotent too, and their anger built up over the years. Last December, one of them finally exploded, after I asked him what he thought about Bush's last minute energy lease sales in Utah, ecologically and archaeologically rich land that abutted Canyonlands National Park and Dinosaur National Monument, among others:
What can I say that has not already been said? Just more of the same from a Department of the Interior that has no sense of ethics and no moral compass. It is like we are playing in some reality ...
