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‘The refuge includes the birthing grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, as well as the prime denning area for the Beaufort Sea polar bears (a threatened species, numbering only 900).’ Photograph: AP
Language is everything.
Those who argue for oil drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge, a place of stunning wild beauty in far north-east Alaska, seldom call it what it is – a refuge.
They talk about “opening it up”, as if it is closed. It’s not. It is public land. They talk about “exploring” for oil because that is what we do. We find stuff, dig it up, process it, sell it, then burn it or eventually throw it away. They talk about drilling in an “environmentally safe” manner without mentioning the hundreds of oil spills in Prudhoe Bay and along the Trans-Alaska Oil pipeline, including a 267,000-gallon spill that went undetected for days. They talk about America’s “can-do spirit”, and invoke President Calvin Coolidge, who said, “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”
On 6 January, the Bureau of Land Management, directed by the Trump administration, is scheduled to hold a virtual oil and gas lease sale – an “aggressive, competitive exploration and development program” – for drilling in ANWR. More specifically, in the 1.5m acre coastal plain, the refuge’s biological heart: the birthing grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, the prime denning area for the Beaufort Sea population of polar bears (a threatened species, numbering only 900), and the breeding sites for birds that every year fly across oceans and continents to raise their young on undisturbed, flower-embroidered tundra.
Ten thousand years of natural beauty and balance – America’s last great wilderness – will soon be “open” to the highest bidder, beginning at $25 an acre. The winner could initiate seismic testing: shaking the earth with massive vibration trucks, awakening polar bears in their dens. If the testing shows a strong promise of oil (which is presently unknown), they may build an industrial complex of roads, well pads, desalinization plants, airstrips and pipelines, all tied into Prudhoe Bay, some 80 miles to the west. If not, the seismic testing alone will produce many scars visible for decades.
How can this happen? Easy. On the final page of the massive 2017 feed-the-rich federal tax bill, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski added oil and gas exploration as a “purpose” of ANWR. She and her Republican colleagues said it would pump significant revenue into the treasury, a claim which Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog organization, has called “blatantly irresponsible and fiscally reckless”.
ZAWYA