SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Aug. 29, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance on Wednesday filed suit in federal court to challenge the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s oil and gas leasing in the San Rafael Desert.
“Today, SUWA filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington D.C. challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) recent decision to reaffirm controversial oil and gas leases in Utah’s wild, remote San Rafael Desert region including a lease within the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness,” the wilderness advocate announced online.
Congress designated the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness Area on March 12, 2019, in the John D. Dingell Act, SUWA said in its press release Wednesday announcing the lawsuit.
“The lease within the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness, which the Trump administration BLM rushed to issue as a last-minute handout to its industry allies only a few days before the Dingell Act was signed into law, is literally located in the heart of this wild landscape.”
The decision was so controversial, SUWA said, that U.S. Senators objected to this last-minute fossil fuel giveaway arguing that development of the lease would “destroy [what] Congress sought to protect when it created the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness.”
The San Rafael Desert is a sublime area of Utah’s backcountry encompassing the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness, which is bounded on the east by the Green River, and on the south by Canyonlands National Park and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, SUWA said. The Labyrinth Canyon stretch of the Green River “is one of the most iconic in the United States and over 40 miles are designated as Scenic under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.”
In May of this year, the BLM “rubber-stamped” the lease in Labyrinth Canyon, SUWA said, as well as 50 others in the San Rafael Desert in Emery County.
For more information, visit: https://suwa.org/suwa-lawsuit-challenges-blms-decision…/
