Opinion-Editorial
Published in the The Santa Fe New Mexican
2/06/09

It's a "Western" scene all right - a little like seeing the cavalry come to the rescue in corny old movies:

New interior secretary Ken Salazar has lost little time canceling oil and gas leases on hundreds of thousands of public land around Utah's Arches National Park, Dinosaur National Monument and other sites dear to the hearts of environmentalists - active and armchair varieties alike.

Activists had gone to court to stall Big Oil's rush for leases before the Bush administration left Washington, while one enterprising enviro provided comic relief by blithely bidding up parcels of land when the federal auction took place in late December. Turns out that he had barely enough bucks for a few acres - but the Bureau of Land Management didn't discover his net worth until he'd bid successfully on 164,000 acres.

While aggrieved gas-and-oil guys called for criminal prosecution and snapped up every remaining parcel they could, the sand in the Bush-Cheney hourglass slid away ...

Onto the John Ford-John Wayne scenery strode Salazar, the former Colorado senator - who, with his brother John, the representative from the San Luis Valley, had skirmished against the hydrocarbon interests over industrial ambitions in western Colorado, just up the road from the raid on Utah.

Read the entire piece from the Santa Fe New Mexican