Precious resources are at stake

Dear Editor:

I am an author and family man living full-time in the Crawford area and I am against expanding oil and gas development here. Regardless of politics, we all stand to lose a precious resource, the quiet and open spaces all around us.

These make us who we are. This is the last place you would promote drilling and hydraulic fracturing. We have no pre-existing pipelines south of Highway 133. The geologic outlook for successful wells is marginal. And our wealth of untrafficked public lands could be hammered by drilling platforms and roads built to reach them. Even handfuls of test wells would dramatically alter the region for many of us from target shooters in the adobe hills to mountain bikers to more rural residents such as myself and my family.

If you have never seen what full-tilt drilling looks like, you can see it in the San Juan Basin south of Durango. You can walk 20 miles and never once be out of earshot of chugging pumps or the roar of compressors. The geology here would not produce enough oil and gas to support that level of development, but even a small percentage of what is happening in the San Juan Basin would change this place, and not for the better. A landscape of vineyards, orchards, ranchland and small towns surrounded by relatively untrammeled public lands does not need a host of wells and pumps, which would ultimately have a negative economic impact on us locally. Our region already supplies trainloads of coal every day, so we are doing our part for our country. To do our part for our region, I believe every one of us needs to write a letter to the BLM, telling them that putting these parcels up for lease would compromise a resource that can't be replaced, a resource rapidly becoming more rare than oil, which is the reason many of us live here.

Craig Childs

Crawford

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