Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old University of Utah student committed a grand act of civil disobedience to help protect some U.S. National Parks in southern Utah from oil and gas drilling. Here’s a video from The Rachel Maddow Show about it:

These National Parks are some of the most beautiful, pristine areas in the entire world. Oil and gas drilling close to these areas and the development that would come with it will destroy these lands forever. It took the Earth 4.5 billion years to build these beautiful places and if we don’t protect them we can’t get them back. The federal oil and gas leases for these lands must be stopped.

I’m very impressed with Mr. DeChristopher’s resolve to do the right thing, even if it means he has to go to prison. If he is convicted and sentenced, I hope President Obama will pardon him, especially if it turns out the lease auction violated the law.

How serious are you about protecting our environment? Are you willing to commit acts of civil disobedience, face federal legal charges and even go to jail if it will protect the Earth?

I’m older and more pragmatic, and would be willing to do a lot of things to protect the Earth. I would be willing to trespass and lie down in construction areas to prevent it from proceeding. I and any others who performed such acts would likely be arrested and released, but those acts would not carry fraud charges and significant federal jail time.

So this begs the question: how serious are we going to have to get to make this huge ship, the USA and developed world, turn around in time to prevent catastrophic environmental changes on our planet?

We already face some changes that will be difficult to deal with, but can be handled with fast action and good technology solutions. But if we don’t make significant changes within the next 10 years, we may face far worse catastrophes that may effect large populations of humans with mass starvation, insufficient clean water, pandemic disease outbreaks, and increased flood and tropical storm activity that could wash entire cities out to sea.

Technorati Tags: Bush-Cheney, civil disobedience, Environment, Lame Duck Actions, National Parks in Utah, Rachel Maddow, Tim DeChristopher