Mission

Get highschool students involved in the Buddy Program up in the air for an exciting way to delve into the concepts they are learning in the classroom. Paired with in-class education, we flew students over oil and gas fields in the Piceance Basin to educate on the important of preserving our wildlands and climate, and to discuss the threats oil and gas poses to this region.

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. However, extracting this fossil fuel comes with environmental tradeoffs. From the air, we clearly see 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.

Thank you to the Buddy Program for coming out to fly with us and taking the time to learn about local public lands! Students' voices matter for the future! We are inspired by the enthusiasm, questions, and the discussions we had about these lands from the cockpit of the plane. Keep up the good work Rifle and Glenwood Highschool and good learning!