The uranium-rich land around the Grand Canyon has been given another stay of execution by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. On Monday, Salazar extended a two-year moratorium on mining in the area for another six months, buying time for the Bureau of Land Management to work through the final stages of evaluating a plan for long-term withdrawal (which, when approved, will put the kibosh on new mining activity in the region for the next twenty years).
In romantic, grandiose language, Salazar implored his opponents on this issue to think of our natural resources in a greater historical context. Speaking from an amphitheater on the Canyon's south rim, Salazar invoked Grand Canyon explorer John Wesley Powell and Teddy Roosevelt in making his case to let the land be:
To be here—for John Wesley Powell or for any of us—is to be overwhelmed and humbled by the scale of geologic time. The minutes, hours, and days by which we measure our lives are hardly an instant in the life of these canyons. Yet, all of us—by the decisions we make in our short time here—can alter the grandeur of this place...As Teddy Roosevelt famously implored from this very place: "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."
Source: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/06/salazar-grand-canyon-uranium-mining
Aisha Tyler K. D. Aubert Sara Spraker Alexis Bledel Kim Kardashian
