Helium is important to the United States of America. Western Colorado and eastern Utah together will play a modest but important role in providing America with this lesser known naturally occurring gas central to the nation's modern standard of living. In 2016, The Wild Earth Guardians protested mineral leases north of Grand Junction auctioned by the Bureau of Land Management. The leases were nominated for drilling within an existing historical gas production area. The Wild Earth Guardians' indiscriminate, copy-and-paste approach to stopping commercial production of all public minerals reveals an eco-opposition business model that doesn't consider how such mineral leases might matter to the greater national interest. The group's dogmatic opposition to all development, in this case though, left them humorously blind to a fact: the Wild Earth Guardians are opposing helium production all the while thinking they're trying to stop
Helium in the high desert highlands