Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area. Just a day after the House voted largely along party lines to gut the Antiquities Act (which is how land can be designated as national monuments and national parks by the President), a Texas GOPer is looking at gutting the whole purpose of national parks by opening up the parks to oil and gas drilling.

Texas Congressman Wants National Parks Opened To Drilling http://t.co/Tn1mP81mFL

— lawhawk (@lawhawk) March 27, 2014

It’s absolutely asinine. These parks are part of our legacy and heritage, and these guys want to drill and spoil the very land that had been previously set aside in perpetuity.

As it is, drilling is going on in close proximity to the parks. On my drive through the area around Moab to Canyonlands Islands in the Sky and Dead Horse Point, there were signs of drilling everywhere. There were pipelines being laid, and drilling rigs being installed at any number of vista points - and this is along the designated scenic byway.

The area already suffers from a long term drought condition, and the drilling operations require quite a bit of water, and fracking can and does affect groundwater, meaning that the drilling could poison the groundwater as well.

I’ll have to dig through my photos to find a couple of shots I took of the drilling operations.

But this is part of the larger resentment by people, primarily in the Western States, where the federal government has set aside land for national parks or monuments. That’s even though the feds also give cut rate usage for grazing on federal lands and mineral rights and severance fees/taxes are still all too low.