Something to think about.

So I just finished the book, RED by Terry Tempest Williams, which my older sister Kalli bought me for my birthday last year. It was fascinating and I highly recommend it. It is all about the red rock deserts of Utah and how they need to be protected from development and human destruction. The interesting part is that she tells of this need not through lecture or facts, but through stories and poems.
"Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. Story offers a wash of images and emotion that returns us to our highest and deepest selves, where we remember what it means to be human, living in place with our neighbors." -Terry Tempest Williams
The ranch I am living on for the summer is very reminiscent of the wilderness she seeks to protect. The Nature Conservancy has tried to restore this land, and I think has done an admirable job. Sometimes I ride out to this field. In the foreground are herds of bison, followed by the natural sand dunes, and then the mountains off in the distance with their snow capped peaks. Not a building in sight, no fences, no electric wires, just nature in a patchwork of browns and greens for as far as the eye can see. It is like an amazing time warp. You can almost get a sense of what it must have been like to be among the Ute Indians roaming the land centuries before.
It is also a wake up call that sights like this, untouched land, are becoming far less common...Especially as our current administration seeks oil under every rock, usually in vain. For instance, the author laments that the Bush Administration is currently trying to revoke the National Monument status of the Grand Staircase-Escalante area of Utah, set up by President Clinton in 1996, in order to drill for oil. The answer isn't finding more oil, it is decreasing our reliance on it while increasing our efficiency of use. The following was taken from an OnPoint interview conducted with environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr on 2-17-05.

"If we raise fuel economy standards by 1 mile per gallon, we produce double the amount of oil that's in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If we raise fuel efficiency economies by 2.7 miles per gallon, we can eliminate 100 percent of the imports from Iraq and Kuwait combined. If we raise fuel efficiency standards by 7.6 miles per gallon, we would yield more gasoline than we now import from the Persian Gulf. So that's the solution to our energy problems right now. You cannot drill your way out of an energy dependence that's in this country. We have less in our country. We have less than 2 percent of the global reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the global reserves of oil. So, if we get every ounce of buried oil in this country out of the ground, it will have zero impact on our foreign oil dependence. The way that we need to reduce foreign oil dependence is through conservation efficiency, and by expanding our portfolio beyond fossil fuels." http://www.eande.tv/showAssets/related/021705/021705transcript.html

Something to think about.