Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard reports on a protest at the Utah Bureau of Land Management, where young people are demanding an end to leasing public land for oil and gas drilling.

• What might this tell us about the passion and priorities of next-gen advocates? How can we support these future conservation leaders?

• Here's more on why looking after the environment is a collective responsibility.

From the back of the police car, I looked out into dense smog. The air quality was so bad I couldn't see the Wasatch Mountains that hug Salt Lake City. During wintertime inversions, cities along the Wasatch Front often have the worst air quality in the nation, as emissions released from cars and refineries get trapped in cold air near the ground. Now, with wildfires across the West during the summer, Salt Lake rarely gets a reprieve from air pollution. It felt dystopian: I was getting arrested for protesting fossil fuel extraction while the air outside was verifiably unhealthy to breathe.

A few hours earlier, on the morning of December 10th, I had walked with 15 other young people into the Utah Bureau of Land Management Office. We were there to protest the agency's December of 2018 oil and gas lease sale, during which 150,000 acres of public lands in Utah were auctioned off.

We carried a letter with over 150 signatures and 80 personal comments—but before we handed them over, we intended to read the messages aloud.

Read the full article about the young people's demand for an end to oil and gas leasing by Brooke Larsen at Pacific Standard.