"While the public is terrified, grieving, and distracted by a worldwide health emergency and economic collapse, the U.S. government is taking the opportunity to sell our public lands at rock bottom prices.What kind of human being would snuff out so many little lives for "fun"?" - NRDC
Add your name if you want to stop this, before it's too late!
"The Department of the Interior (DOI) has defied repeated calls to stop the Trump administration's reckless public land giveaway to oil and gas companies.
"Since March 13, when the Trump administration declared a national emergency because of COVID-19, DOI, through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has offered up more than 200,000 acres in five different lease sales in Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. And it is already barreling ahead with preparations for the next round of leases, scheduled for September.
"BLM manages these lands in the public trust, ostensibly for the benefit and enjoyment of all Americans, but is handing them over to oil and gas companies," said the same source.
200,000 acres.
Let that sink in.
But it gets worse.
"This is especially troubling at a time when the public has little if any ability to monitor, review, and protest BLM's actions.
"BLM claims that there is no issue with carrying on its business as if nothing is going on, but officials appear to be using the cover of COVID-19 to escape public oversight and put hundreds of thousands of acres into the hands of the fossil fuel industry.
"Consider the New Mexico BLM office's early insistence that it would only accept protests sent by mail (with no electronic filing option) — a policy that was reversed three days into a 10-day public protest period. Then there are the 10-day protest periods themselves, unreasonably short amounts of time for public participation that came under scrutiny even before this major disruption.
"Indeed, prior to January 2018, the period for public protest was 30 days (preceded by a separate 30-day public scoping period), a policy that BLM should seriously have considered reinstating, at the very least, after the official declaration of a national emergency," said the same source.
Don't you think this is ridiculous?
Don't you want to stop this, before any more land is sold off?
That's why we're calling on David Bernhardt, secretary of the United States Department of the Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, to stop this NOW.
Don't you want to save America's precious land, and all the wildlife that rely on it?
Then add your name to demand that David Bernhardt stop selling America's land to Big Oil!
