Gas warfare

摘要

Aeons ago, the colliding plates of the earth buckled in the area now called Montana, sending great fins and towers of rock soaring into the air and trapping pockets of natural gas underneath. The Black-feet Indians called the Rocky Mountain Front the "backbone of the world". Environmentalists call it "the American Seren-geti", because of its pristine forests, elk, grizzly bears, wolves and bighorn sheep. The wind-blasted Front may now be the site of the biggest energy battle since the fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the ANWR, in Alaska. Both the Front and the ANWR were named in a list drawn up by the incoming Bush administration as places it wanted federal managers to open up for exploration. The Senate tossed out the Alaska project in 2003. Now greens are calling the Front "the ANWR of the lower 48" (the United States minus Alaska and Hawaii).