I quote from today's New York times:

"By FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: December 14, 2003

INEDALE, Wyo. — A herd of 100 pronghorn antelopes were trotting over a ridge here, then meandered to a halt and foraged meditatively a few hundred yards from a natural gas wellhead and its squat companion tanks, filled with the petroleum byproducts of the drilling.

The pronghorns were stragglers in the winter migration of antelopes across the Upper Green River Valley, a landscape that has been tied to this ancient pattern for millenniums and is now being remade by the nation's thirst for clean-burning, environmentally friendly natural gas. Energy companies eager to slake that thirst while prices are high are accelerating the makeover of the longest wildlife migration route in the continental United States.

Whether this harms the wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem or affects the air or water in the Wind River Mountains is unclear. But it is clear that here in the Upper Green, as the area is called, the Bush administration's energy policies have come to life. The antelopes' migration route and the winter range of thousands of mule deer lie atop an estimated 7 trillion to 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — more than 4 percent of the nation's reserves, according to Don J. Likwartz, Wyoming's oil and gas supervisor. "

Well we may not know if it will damage the environment other than the obvious scars of drilling rigs and the mess of spilt chemicals on the ground right now, but we will pay for this rape of nature in the future. This generation may not pay, but the next generations will. (Typical Bush decision. He does not care about the future consequences of anything he does, as long as it makes him look good to his mindless following right now.)

Future generations will pay for our constant taking from nature without taking care of the ground and all that depends on it. This sucking gas and water from the earth to satisfy our unbridled needs will come back to haunt us. It is time we learned that we cannot keep taking without bound and simply to satisfy our greed. For every action there is a equal and opposite reaction. This is a basic law of physics. Well it applies more broadly in life. There are consequences for all we do and it is time for us to realize this and start taking action more carefully to make the future a better place for us all.