Oil and Natural Gas Drilling
Oil and natural gas drilling is allowed within the park due to the inability of Congress to approve the purchase of the mineral rights within the park's boundaries after surveying the land in 1957. This has caused some controversy because the land is a protected seascape under IUCAN and the necessity to use heavy equipment within the park as well as its transportation across beaches that are nesting areas for not only sea turtles but many birds, including the piping plover, least tern, and other animals that may nest within the park.
Read more about this topic: Padre Island National Seashore
Famous quotes containing the words oil, natural, gas and/or drilling:
“Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.”
—Sir William Osler (1849–1919)
“When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man’s soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Don’t spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)