Chewing Up a Fragile Land
Terry Tempest Williams is to Utah as Katha Polit is to politics. She's a lapsed Mormon who gets published because she has master political correct speech. She loves to rhapsodize on the environment, so the pseudo-intelligentsia here love her.

Here she claims that the public lands in Southeastern Utah are too sensitive to allow seismic testing for oil and gas resources.
These lands are the way they are because they are tough and rugged. They've been explored by pioneers and prospectors and were never settled because they can't be. They are mostly vertical, and what is level is very hard to get to. The mesa tops and plateaus are impossible to irrigate, and the bottoms are subject to spring floods.

As for their being sensitive, it is important to remember that they were formed by erosion from wind and water. The tracks of man here are pretty puny.

The more serious implication of this kind of blather is that it proposes to deny lessees the property rights they have paid for.
This is what is most insidious about environmentalists, they don't respect any human rights, particularly contract and property rights. Every other consideration is trumped by Saving the Earth, and, of course, they are the self-appointed arbiters of what that means.

Of course they claim science, referring to the cryptobiotic soil, which is the crust that forms on desert land when lichens grow in it. They love to say that it takes 100 years for this crust to regrow after it is once disturbed Williams extends it to 300.

But their real argument is emotional. They always speak in religious and emotive terms: treasure, precious, pristine, holy, sacred, blessed, sacrifice, etc.

The real howler in this piece is the description of the BLM official who showed up to see what Williams and her fellow activists were up to:

A manager from the Bureau of Land Management suddenly appeared, and I felt a flash of relief, thinking he had come to stop this sacrifice of wild country that might at best yield a tiny fraction of the supply of fuel this oil-hungry nation uses every year. He was perturbed, but not by the trucks plowing through the cottonwood wash. He had come to monitor us � the public, walking on public lands.

Williams and her friends are not the public. They are a tiny segment of the public, but they claim that their agenda comes ahead of anyone else's. They are demanding that 9 million acres in Southern Utah be set aside as federal wilderness, which would close all historic access, close public rights of way, and prohibit any conveyance other than by foot and, possibly, horseback. Apparently feet and horsed don't impact the precious, fragile cryptobiotic crust. They say these are public lands, but they don't want the rest of the public to have any access to it, except as they decree.