Mission

With Defiende Nuestra Tierra and community leaders, we flew over the Piceance Basin to vide fiedls of oil and gas wells.

We flew above the Piceance Basin in Western Colorado is an area rich in natural gas, a valuable resource used for indoor heating, cooking, and other industrial purposes. Mineral extraction has been central to Garfield County’s economy for many years, however extracting this fossil fuel comes with environmental tradeoffs. The scale of extraction can be difficult to conceptualize from ground level, but from the air, we clearly saw some of these impacts, like the spider web of access roads that dominates the Colorado River Valley landscape from Rifle West to the Utah border and beyond. There are also impacts we don’t see as clearly, like carbon released into the atmosphere that contributes to climate change and in turn drought and changing weather patterns that are becoming more noticeable in Western Colorado.

Our overflights also discussed the Thompson Divide, roughly 250,000 acres of pristine public lands that are newly protected from new oil and gas and mining leasing for the next 20 years! EcoFlight has been flying stakeholders over the Thompson Divide since the early 2000s and helped a coalition come together to fight for the preservation of the Thompson Divide. It has been a joy to showcase the Divide’s beauty and diverse values to Colorado’s congresspeople, governors, county commissioners, and city councilmembers, and to finally celebrate the mineral withdrawal for this beloved place.

As the Thompson Divide success shows, community input is critical to guiding our land management agencies and representatives toward solutions that balance resource demands and protect community and environmental wellbeing.

Click for photos from your flight and geo-referenced photos (download and open in Google Earth).