North Dakota oil boom brings worry to Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Effects of nearby fracking trickle into the park, raising the question of how to balance development with conservation.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-roosevelt-dakota-20131103,0,1861453.story
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"The purpose of the park is to provide for future generations," said Winthrop Roosevelt, a great-great-grandson of the late president. The ability to do so is compromised, he said, if developers expose the parks to that type of drilling "without having a really good knowledge of the long-term effects it may have."
Animals that live in the sparsely populated Badlands are seeing their habitat threatened, conservationists say. In addition to oil and light pollution, critics say, as many as 1,000 trucks a day kick up heavy dust on dirt roads made for light residential and tourist traffic. Winthrop Roosevelt and other descendants of the 26th president are concerned about these effects trickling farther into the park, of which the ranch is a small but important part, while drilling bumps up against its borders.
But keeping such development away from the park is complicated by the oil boom that is driving the economy of North Dakota.
"No one is saying, 'We're against the oil boom,'" said Jim Fuglie, a former North Dakota tourism director who writes about Badlands issues. "This is a huge economic benefit to North Dakota. But with a boom comes all kinds of problems."
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= new reply since forum marked as read
to make a quick buck selling crude oil. You see, extracting the oil is more expensive if you have to capture the gas instead of burning it at the well and polluting the air while wasting the energy.
A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mysterious-patch-of-light-shows-up-in-the-north-dakota-dark
