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Sierra Club Lawsuits

Drilling in the Red Desert in Wyoming

Case Updates:

August 1, 2004

Hidden away in southwestern Wyoming is the Red Desert, one of the nation’s largest undeveloped tracts of high elevation cold desert. The area includes red-bottomed desert lakes, towering aspen-covered buttes, and shifting sand dunes with buried ice deposits from an ancient sea. It is home to a rich variety of wildlife, including a 50,000-head pronghorn antelope herd that is part of the largest migratory heard in the contiguous United States. For thousands of years the Red Desert has also been a sacred place of worship for the Shoshone and Ute tribes. Enter the Bush administration, seeking to further expand a drilling plan and threatening the wilderness quality of the area. The new project would create a huge system of drilling sites and seismic exploration without any attention to environmental impacts. If successful, our new lawsuit challenging the project and related local activism will force the administration to select an alternative that either protects the Red Desert from oil and gas exploration or mitigates the impacts of such exploration in order to preserve the area for generations to come.

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