Wyoming's Bighorn Basin Faces Oil And Gas Development (PHOTOS)

From Dave Showalter:

It’s a critical habitat for grizzly bears, wolves, sage grouse and Yellowstone cutthroat trout. It boasts some of the West’s most stunning landscapes and historic wintering grounds for migrating big game. It is the Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin and it needs your help.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is finalizing a 20-year management plan for Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin — more than 5 million acres of your public lands, including the wildlife-rich Absaroka-Beartooth Front.

Significant portions of this magnificent area have remained intact and undeveloped, but face threats of intensified oil and gas development. We need you to speak out today to ensure the plan protects this critical habitat.

The BLM is taking public comments on its draft Resource Management Plan through Sept. 7. Please tell the BLM to protect the Bighorn Basin’s most special places from oil and gas development.

While some public lands in the Bighorn Basin might be managed for a variety of uses, areas with outstanding wildlife, scenic, or recreational values should be kept intact. Fortunately, there isn’t much overlap between critical wildlife ranges and areas suitable for energy development. [Text continues below photos.]

Images and captions courtesy of Dave Showalter.

The BLM has a unique opportunity to put forth a new approach in the Bighorn Basin plan that recognizes the world-class values that large, undeveloped areas hold for traditions such as scenic values, solitude and wildlife. But if the BLM’s current draft plan is finalized as it is written, some of our most treasured public lands and wildlife will be at risk.

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC) supports protection of the Absaroka-Beartooth Front and other important wildlife and recreational areas in the Bighorn Basin. The GYC was founded on a simple premise: An ecosystem will remain healthy and wild only if it is kept whole.

This past week, photographer Dave Showalter joined the GYC, Lighthawk, and the International League of Conservation Photographers to document this landscape and support the campaign to protect this stunning landscape.

“The Absaroka-Beartooth Front is one of the last great vestiges of wild frontier left in America, and the work that Dave Showalter and the International League of Conservation Photographers are doing with the Tripods in the Mud expedition will go a long way toward keeping it that way for current and future generations," said Barbara Cozzens, Northwest Wyoming director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a regional conservation group. "Dave's stunning images tell vivid stories about the magnificence of this place and its inextricable link to the cultural fabric of Wyoming and the Northern Rockies

Be a part of this movement and let your voice be heard. Find out how you can be involved here.

Dave Showalter is based in Colorado and focuses primarily on landscapes and wildlife of the American West.

"I'm thunderstruck by the beauty, immense scale, diversity, and wildness of the Absaroka landscape. I'm sure that I belted out "Wow" many times each day while traveling from rolling sagebrush to alpine tundra below tilted granite peaks. It's exhilarating to go for a solo hike, knowing that I'm sharing the forest with grizzly and black bears, and all of the Yellowstone ecosystem wildlife that criss-cross and migrate through Absaroka country. I returned to Cody after my outings and met kind folks, all interested in helping me tell the story of the AB Front. I got a kick out of the Cody Night Rodeo too, where real cowboys and cowgirls put on a great show every night. Some call it "Yellowstone's wild side", which is pretty good; but the Absaroka-Beartooth Front stands on its own as one of the wildest, most special, and uniquely Western places left in America. We would do well to keep it that way." -Dave Showalter

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Comments

[HowthCastle]

01:05 PM on 09/09/2011

The animals in Slide 5 are pronghorn, often miscalled "antelope". They are a different genus, unique to North America. Pronghorn are unusual in that their horns are rooted in their skulls, like cattle horns, but the bulk of the horn is an outer sheath that is shed, like an antler. They are the only creature that has this kind of horn. They are beautiful creatures, and can run like the wind!

[rhettcbowling]

09:29 AM on 09/09/2011

When an average power bill is $1,200.00 a month and $10.00 a gallon for gasoline is the norm, no one will be able to afford to travel to the area in question to enjoy it anyway. Just like the Frank Church Wilderness Area in Idaho, you can not use any gas or diesel anything there. You either have to get there by hiking or horse back. The other name for it is "Land Of No Uses".

[horhay]

02:26 PM on 09/09/2011

There's nothing wrong with keeping gas-powered vehicles and equipment out of wilderness areas. It's one of the only ways to keep wilderness & undeveloped land intact. In order to preserve wilderness we need to keep roads out of it.

Oil & gas development in pristine places like this will ruin the area until it is another used up, polluted, scarred wasteland that will be abandoned once the wells run dry. Always moving on to the next wilderness to rape.

[Bugweed]

09:28 AM on 09/09/2011

Rip it up, tear it apart. We needs the energy and no bunch of liberal tree huggers is going to prevent us from raping this land.

[heikhali]

08:00 PM on 09/08/2011

Nobody said anything when the real estate and construction moguls carved her up with houses. Oil and gas is no different.

[Bon1042]

02:05 AM on 09/09/2011

Isn't it??

[oakhilliron]

06:35 PM on 09/08/2011

Wildlife has adapted well to the alaskan pipeline-fear of the 'possible' should not stop us from utilizing all of our national resources. After all we expect no less from our foreign suppliers.

[Stayalert]

12:58 PM on 09/08/2011

WYO is republican terroritory.
They don't care about how other places are ruined, so let them -drill baby drill- here.

[whyworry]

12:10 PM on 09/08/2011

this is beautiful country...however, it's nothing new. Please read...
http://harvestpublicmedia.org/article/488/oil-reserves-nebraska-maybe-potential-alone-ignites-demand-mineral-rights/5