A southern Utah environmental group is suing the U.S. Department of Interior and Bureau of Land Management over its leasing public lands with plentiful remainders of ancient civilization for oil and gas development, and is asking the court to vacate the lease sales.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA, alleges the departments didn’t properly analyze how leasing the land for oil and gas development in an area of southern Utah, known as the Alkali Ridge, could affect the cultural relics left behind there, including cliff dwellings, pueblos, kivas, petroglyph and pictographs and sites American Indian tribes consider sacred, according to the lawsuit.