Bureau of Land Management Natural Resource Specialist John Hodge lights a naturally occurring oil seep in McKittrick, California, April 29, 2013. The vast Monterey shale formation is estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to hold 15 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, or four times that of the Bakken formation centered on North Dakota. Most of that oil is not economically retrievable except by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a production-boosting technique in which large amounts of water, sand and chemicals are injected into shale formations to force hydrocarbon fuels to the surface. Picture taken April 29, 2013.
In this April 19, 2013 photo released by the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) shows dead bluebirds on top of a white plastic hollow mine claim marker in central Nevada. Wildlife officials and conservationists in Nevada say they are making progress knocking down the white plastic pipes that miners traditionally have used to stake their claims but can also become death traps for hundreds of thousands of small birds that get stuck inside. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management estimates there are more than 3.4 million of the white polyvinyl chloride pipes sticking out of the ground across the western United States, more than 1 million in Nev. alone in a 2011 survey.
File-This Aug. 11, 2012 photo provided by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management shows the Holloway Fire outside Denio, Nev., which burned more than 525 square miles of remote rangeland straddling the Oregon-Nevada border. Federal statistics show that efforts to douse the largest of the nation's wildfires last year cost more than $580 million, and some fires burned for more than three months. A summary by the National Interagency Fire Center also shows more than 80 percent of the 51 largest fires were sparked by lightning. That includes the Long Draw and Holloway fires, which together burned more than 1 million acres and were among the largest in Oregon's history.
Bureau of Land Management ecologist Carla DeYoung describes how waste shale from a federal oil shale research site had been dumped in this valley. Contractors removed the waste from the valley and buried it in repositories because of concern that contaminants could run off into the intermittent West Sharrard Creek; pictured at the left side of the photo; and eventually reach the Colorado River. The edge of one of the repositories; which includes liners on its top and bottom; rises on the photo's right side.
In this July 11, 2012 image provided by the Bureau of Land Management, firefighters work the Long Draw Fire near McDermitt, Ore. Snow and reseeding have begun to bring the green back to this landscape in far southeastern Oregon, where the Long Draw fire, the most extensive in Oregon history, burned across nearly 900 square miles of grass and sagebrush country.
A damaged Paiute Indian petroglyph located at a major rock art site on the Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, California is shown in this handout image released to Reuters November 20, 2012. Four petroglyphs carved into volcanic rock more than 3,500 years ago have been hacked out and stolen by thieves who also damaged other engravings at a historic site in California, U.S. authorities said on Tuesday. The Bureau of Land Management has offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people responsible for the theft.
