Viewpoint Midnight hour for Alaskas coastal plain
The law locks up both man and woman who steals the goose
from off the common but lets the greater felon loose who steals the
common from the goose. -- Anonymous
By MARJORIE KOWALSKI
COLE
In 1620, a common was the acre of
green in a New England village. Villagers grazed their animals there or met for
a revival. In 2001, a common is something we fight over. It is a battleground
of values.
The latest and most fragile common in public dispute is the
coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska. The
Porcupine caribou herd, 180,000 animals strong, arrives on the coastal plain
every summer after a migration of over 400 miles from the Yukon Territory,
through Alaskas Brooks Range.
On the coastal plain, the living is easy for the caribou. Sea
winds keep the mosquitoes away, and the tundra provides a salad bar. Here,
crowded onto the narrowest strip of tundra in all of Arctic Alaska, tens of
thousands of females give birth. Birthing would not be possible on such a scale
anywhere else on their route, due to the difficulty of finding food, the
torturous presence of insects and the threat of wolves and bears.
The coastal plain is also a den area for the polar bear, a
magnificent marine mammal that is increasingly traumatized throughout the
circumpolar north. Over 150 species of birds nest here. Year round, the tundra
is home to musk oxen and other mammals. And now as the Prudhoe Bay and other
North Slope oil supplies run low, the oil industry wishes to drill for oil
underneath the coastal plain.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been called
Americas Serengeti. Lobbyists for the oil industry despise
that term for its emotional appeal and counter with their own broad strokes.
Oil executive Harold Heinze called the coastal plain a flat, crummy
place, and pro-development Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska describes it as
a barren wasteland. Repeatedly it is called a frozen, treeless desert. Those in
favor of oil drilling on the plain also describe it as a mere fraction of a
refuge that stretches from the ocean to the Yukon River. How much
wilderness is enough? lobbyists ask, dismissing the vital ecological
function of this particular strip of land.
The debate has been ongoing for decades. The Alaska National
Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 enlarged the Arctic National Wildlife
Range, renamed it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and gave it wilderness
status. The range had been established in 1960 following grassroots efforts of
biologists and conservation-minded citizens, who succeeded in keeping this
ecosystem intact and passing it on to the stewardship of the next
generation.
One paragraph of the act, Section 1002, set the coastal plain
apart from wilderness status, pending further studies of its oil deposits. The
fate of the coastal plain now lies in the hands of the president and Congress.
The oil industry anticipates considerable profits from drilling in the coastal
plain, although estimates released by the U.S. Geological Survey range from 3.2
billion to 5.7 billion recoverable barrels. This would last U.S. consumers less
than a year at present rates of consumption.
In a sense, then, the coastal plain might become our next
filling station, as Rep. Ed Markey D-Mass., who is opposed to
drilling, recently said. There is absolutely no evidence that the oil in the
refuge will solve any problems, real or imaginary, for American consumers in
anything but the short run.
In a burst of glee after George W. Bushs election, the
Alaska legislature approved $1.5 million toward lobbying in favor of drilling
on the coastal plain. In March, Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski brought Secretary
of the Interior Gail Norton to the North Slope of Alaska to see for
herself what a tiny footprint the oil industry is likely to
leave. On her weekend in Alaska, Norton was spared a close look. She
overflew the refuge, a guest of the oil industry. She met
representatives of the pro-drilling Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the
profit-making corporation of the Inupiat people set up by the Alaska Native
Claims Settlement Act.
Norton was asked to imagine the future as her hosts demanded, and
she complied. Like any politician, she doesnt have time to study the data
for herself. She requires interpretations. The line to which politicians like
Norton are being asked to subscribe is that the oil industry can, in fact,
coexist with healthy wildlife populations -- that just like backpackers, the
industry can take only pictures [or oil], and leave only footprints
of the most innocuous kind. Her comments since the trip suggest that she is
convinced.
But there is another direction in which we might focus our
imaginative power -- toward the particulars. Taking an honest inventory of the
resources of the coastal plain can be a moral act. Think of a couplet by poet
Mary Oliver: She said, The fox hunt is good for the
fox./Which fox? I said. How far apart the first speaker
and the second are in their thinking: One abstracts the world to serve her
interests; the other wonders about particulars.
Debbie Miller of Fairbanks, Alaska, is the author of Midnight
Wilderness, a record of her many backpacking trips through the Arctic
Refuge. She describes what happens when you look more closely at the
treeless wasteland. What do you see? A good arctic blow
reminds me why tundra plant life is so dwarfed. Any plant daring to grow more
than a few inches above the ground falls prey to the wind. The mountain avens,
for example, is well designed for the strongest of blows. Its short stem is
flexible, bending to the ground the way our fiberglass tent poles do. From the
tent Robin and I watch hundreds of these dainty white flowers hammer at the
tundra, their petals shivering against the ground.
The title of Millers book has a double meaning. In the
summer, midnight is filled with sunlight, perfect for observing wildlife. The
title also suggests that it is the midnight hour for this wilderness.
It is also the midnight hour for the Gwichin culture of
northern Alaska and northern Canada. The Gwichin Athabascans oppose
drilling on the coastal plain. Inupiat people of Alaskas North Slope have
received enormous benefits from the oil development at Prudhoe Bay, and their
profit-making corporation, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, is
pro-drilling, although more cautious about offshore oil development that
threatens the whale populations on which their traditions depend. The
Gwichin live on the migration route of the caribou, and their way of life
connects them to the caribou as intimately and thoroughly as the plains Indians
were connected to the buffalo.
In a Washington Post editorial in January of this year, two
members of the Gwichin Nation were blunt: The Gwichin people
do not trust the promises that oil drilling in the refuge will not harm the
Porcupine caribou. Indeed the U.S. Department of Interior estimates that the
birthrate of the migrating caribou may fall by 40 percent if oil drilling
begins.
Oil drilling in Alaska is fraught with perils and broken
promises.
The council of the Gwichin community of Arctic Village,
Alaska, has stated, We, the Gwichin Indian people of Arctic Village
must never turn our backs on the land and animals given to us by God and left
for us by our ancestors.
Gwichin people also live in the Yukon Territory of Canada.
In the Porcupine Caribou Agreement of 1987, the United States and Canada
pledged to protect the health of the herd and to maintain its habitat. Gail
Norton has stated repeatedly that the concerns of local citizens should be
considered in making decisions about development in wilderness areas. Will she
acknowledge the Gwichin Nation? Will she give an honest reception to
their concerns?
Although the oil industry likes to point out that the Central
caribou herd in the vicinity of Prudhoe Bay has not suffered from oil
development, such comparisons are inappropriate, and the statement is untrue.
The Central caribou herd is less than one-fifth the size of the Porcupine herd
and is not migratory. Its females have far more area in which to give birth (on
the calving grounds of the North Slope, density is five animals per square
mile; on the coastal plain, it is 50), and calving has indeed been disrupted in
the oil fields. According to a November letter to President Clinton signed by
225 zoologists and other scientists, Research on the Central Arctic
caribou herd at Prudhoe Bay indicates appreciable losses of preferred calving
and summer habitats in response to petroleum development.
Oil spills,
contaminated waste and other sources of pollution had measurable impacts on
this environment.
Today a tourist can visit museums in the West that show what the
grasslands were like before they were disturbed with the plow. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is no museum: It is an intact ecosystem, a place of
wonder fresh from the hands of the creator. It is a place to confront realities
we no longer confront anywhere else. It thrills us with its size and abundance.
But this plenty can vanish. It has vanished repeatedly in our history. The
imagination would do well, in this case, to learn from the past.
In 1987, energy industry spokesman Jamie Linxweiler stated in a
televised debate that the environmental record of the oil industry was
unblemished in Alaska. Two years later the Exxon Valdez spilled at least
11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. The spill hit all Alaskans
as a tragedy. Pride rushes back, however, at the first opportunity. The oil
lobby assures us that now our technology can guarantee a happy outcome.
One hears the sound of language in service to addiction. On a recent PBS
News Hour, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute
labeled conservationists as energy suppression groups, a faintly
evil-sounding phrase that polarizes the debate even more.
Wouldnt it be wiser to improve the fuel-efficiency of our
cars before we put our wilderness heritage at risk? In surviving the
depression, our forbears endured experiences far more severe than a pinch
at the gas tank. Anyone caught behind a line of motor homes in the summer
(many of them towing cars) may even wonder if gasoline isnt too cheap in
this country. The future belongs to our children and their children. It would
do them no harm were we to learn from the native people and reclaim our
spiritual connection to the land itself.
Marjorie Kowalski Cole is a writer in Ester, Alaska, and a
member of the Alaska Boreal Forest Council, an environmental education
group.
National Catholic Reporter, May 25,
2001
|