Fake bidder should stop using oil, gas

Listen up, Tim DeChristopher — if that's your real name. Here's your sentence for going all Ed Abbey on us Friday with those bogus bids at the BLM oil and gas lease auction.

You are hereby ordered to:

• Apologize to every one of the legitimate oil and gas developers whose day you disrupted.

• Likewise apologize to the BLM and the federal government for interfering with its legal business.

• And one other thing: Stop using gas and oil and any other products bequeathed to us humans by dinosaurs and other ancient creatures and plants.

It's your inheritance no longer, Tim. Cease and desist. Refrain and refuse.

You may not use fossil fuels to heat your home or power your car — or, for that matter, brush your teeth (petroleum makes the plastic in a toothbrush and is an ingredient in toothpaste).

The number of products now off limits to you is actually rather expansive. It includes trash bags, fishing rods, ballpoint pens, golf balls, life jackets, refrigerants, insect repellent, shoes, cameras, pillows, safety glass, cellular phones, eyeglasses, parachutes, fishing lures, shampoo, deodorant and about a hundred other items you might be familiar with.

I found a fairly comprehensive list you'll find helpful at a Web site called ANWR.org. It's published by a group lobbying to allow drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. You'd hate those guys, too.

Oh, and tires. You can't use rubber tires.

You won't be a man without a country. You'll be a man without an oil country.

Life is going to get a whole lot simpler.

You're going to make vegans look gluttonous. The Amish will appear downright progressive.

But presumably this won't be much of a problem for you, because it's more than worth it so you can do your bit to save the land from being further destroyed by developers, civilizers, prospectors, oil men, coal miners and the like.

Your only problem is that you were born 300 years too late, long after the whole of what we now know as the United States of America could have been turned into a national park or a designated wilderness.

If you think Canyonlands and Arches are beautiful, you should have seen New York and Massachusetts back in the day.

West Virginia before coal mines was absolutely stunning.

And don't get us started on Texas before oil derricks.

Your new toned-down, back-to-the-basics existence will allow you to reflect on what's really important: a world where beast and man, thistle and timber, coexist peacefully.

It will show the rest of us what the true environmentalist movement is all about.