2 million acres of New Mexico grasslands latest battleground over drilling

...The Bush administration is making a big push to produce more fuel - especially clean-burning natural gas - from public land. That raises questions about the best use of public land, and whether any of it should be off-limits to drilling.

After putting energy exploration in the Otero Mesa on hold for several years, the Interior Department announced in late January that it would permit limited drilling for natural gas and oil here. The move came days after similar announcements opened areas in Alaska and Utah to drilling.
....Two of the leading industry proponents who call for opening up drilling here say they won't even bid for drilling rights because they'd probably lose money.
...
Chuck Moran, the president of the Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, posing next to a quiet, clean natural-gas well outside the mesa's borders, said he and his fellow wildcatters until now had been "denied the American dream" to take their chances drilling in Otero Mesa.

The land they're fighting over is yours. The Otero Mesa, like 48 percent of the 11 Western lower continental states, is federally owned. The Interior Department administers lands that produce about a third of the country's domestic energy supply.

Drilling on these public lands is skyrocketing. In the 2004 federal budget year, the Interior Department issued a record 6,052 drilling permits for public land, up 59 percent from the year before. The number of permits issued has nearly quadrupled in the last five years. Last year, the Interior Department issued, on average, a drill permit every 20 minutes of the federal workday.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10906689.htm

and no, nobody out west owns the mineral/oil/gas rights to their land. Theoretically, they can drill in any suburban neighborhood in this city, and the kids will just have to face the loss of their back yard swing set and lump it.

The wholesale sell off of OUR citizen owned lands to corporate interests makes me absolutely crazy. Add these acres to the opening of the Roan Plateau in Colorado, and the reversal of the protected region of southern Utah and you pretty much made a mess of much of America's most beautiful land.