No less than The New York Times — joined today by the Tribune — has put out a call to save the Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake. Few Utahns know it, but our state not only has a world-class lake, but, in it, a world-renown work of art.

Against the pinkish-violet water of the lake, Robert Smithson's sculpture is a holy s**t! sight too few Utahns have seen. It's all the more wonderful that it takes a day's drive over dirt roads and a quarter mile hike to visit it. Yet people from around the world do it.

But Utah's place in art history texts is threatened because a Canadian company plans to begin oil-drilling from a pair of barges near the jetty. Hence, the NYTimes plea:

It is the most important and familiar of Smithson’s earthworks — a giant swirl of basalt and soil that redefines the landscape it inhabits. In that terrain, drilling within five miles — as the company hopes to do — is not much different from drilling through the heart of Smithson’s earth sculpture.

Here's what scares me: What better way to turn oil hungry, environmentalist-hatin' crazies like Rep. Mike Noel against the Spiral Jetty than a bleeding-heart NYTimes editorial? Talk about throwing down the gauntlet.