Proponents of oil development in Alaska have been making promises, and breaking them, for decades. More than thirty years of industrial activity in Alaska have demonstrated that oil production is inherently a dirty business. Despite the industry’s best intentions to minimize impacts, environmental and social effects are accumulating and resulting in lasting harm to ecosystems and indigenous cultures.

Nearly a year after the Bush administration put some of Utah’s most pristine lands on the auction block for oil and gas leasing, the Department of the Interior has handed down a report with recommendations aimed to overhaul the Bureau of Land Management's oil and gas leasing programs.

There has been much discussion of natural gas as a “clean” fossil fuel. While natural gas can be relatively clean burning, compared to coal it requires extraction and production activities that can be extremely damaging to the environment and human health.

What would it say about our prospects for global peace and prosperity if the world’s first International Peace Park were strip-mined and drilled in search of coal and gas?

I wish that question was merely hypothetical, but with Canadian strip-mining and gas drilling threatening the water and wildlife of Montana’s Glacier National Park, the U.S. portion of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the question is all too real.

In a victory for America’s Arctic, a federal court today issued an opinion requiring that the U.S. Department of the Interior withdraw and reconsider the Bush Administration’s 2007 to 2012 oil and gas lease sale program for the outer continental shelf.

The court upheld the claim that the environmental sensitivity rankings in the lease sale program are irrational, and thus required that the lease sale program be “vacated” for reconsideration.