1. 08 October 2006

    698 days ago

    Inside the Endangered Arctic Refuge

    Alaska is probably top on my places to go list. Of anywhere, if I were to take off on a trip, I’d be Alaska. There’s the draw of it’s massive and almost mythical beauty and ruggedness, plus the impending fouling being forced upon it by today’s congress (none of whom are likely to have even been there to see the terrain from which they are trying to strip of it’s purity). This kind of thing just makes me sad.

    Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.

    I feel bad for stealing so much directly from the article, but I really think that this is an issue with an extreme amount of gravity – both in terms of those pulling at it from either side and in the meaning and implications of sullying arguably the last best place on earth. So bear with me.

    Should the two chambers reconcile their differences in this congressional session, our rarest and most precious wilderness may be lost for good. Despite all the oil industry’s talk about “safe drilling” with environmental safeguards (less than credible at a time when, at corporate behest, a primitively pro-business administration is dismantling many decades’ worth of hard-won protections), mining fossil fuels from a fragile, treeless plain will permanently deface, contaminate, and gut it, while accomplishing almost nothing to offset the so-called oil crisis.

    Insert politically meaningless barb directed towards the sheer sloth, willful incompetence, politicized greed, and horrific-ness of today’s american government. It’s too easy for me. But I will say: fuck every single thing about every one of them, if not for everything they do and have done, for just the fact that this is even a debatable issue. Their mothers too.

    through a new indigenous activist organization called “Red Oil,” the Inupiat were making common cause with Indian communities all over Alaska in a desperate struggle against the disruption of habitat and the disappearance of sacred animals such as polar bears and seals, dangerous chemical contamination of their wild fish and game, and the fatal damage to their culture and their future that is already on the wind with the retreat of polar ice and the onset of global warming. Most biologists agree that the polar bear is doomed to vanish entirely in this century.

    Does anyone else think about how horrible it is that we can’t drink ground water? Unless, of course, we boil it or mix it with chemicals. What are we doing to the world, consequently ourselves?

    Our idea in June 2006 was to look at wild regions in the Petroleum Reserve that should be spared during its imminent transformation from our nation’s greatest roadless wilderness to a road-scarred, marred, gouged, and contaminated wasteland, stained by leaks and spills of petroleum and toxic drilling fluids and littered with rusted drums and pipe and gear.

    Scarred, marred, gouged, contaminated, stained, littered. Shouldn’t we all be a bit scared with that word string coming at us? I sure am.

    via Kjell Olsen698 days ago

  2. 02 September 2006

    Alaska

    734 days ago

    A good read, though long. I started this a month+ ago, I pulled it off the shelf looking for something to read for the car ride to montana and back. Got 700 pages into it then; but just couldn’t quite finish the last 400. Interesting fictional look at Alaska (but based off real history), somewhere I really want to go.

    While reading it, a prof at my school managed to take a trip there, and I felt great injustice sitting around reading about it as he put up his photos.

    ...neat in his ways, and content to remain aloof. 464

    ...the kind of flight that can re-order a man’s perceptions. 812

    Whitepass Railroad 856

    The Worst Journey in the World 1025

  3. 22 July 2006

    776 days ago

    Grizzlies, on the internet

    Grizzly bear webcam. Someone is pointing the camera at all the action on a salmon stream, bears are frolicking. If it weren’t for the grainy 200×200 video stream it might feel like you were actually there. (Impressive tech setup, there’s a remote control wireless video camera hidden in a faux boulder, wireless signal is relayed 100 miles than sent over land to seattle.)

    via Kjell Olsen776 days ago

  4. 22 February 2006

    Grizzly Man

    926 days ago

    Grizzly Man.

    I caught wind of the film from a review on kuro5hin. Quite the review of the film, I read the first few paragraphs about a guy living 13 summers in Katmai National Park, in the middle of nowhere, for the most part all alone. (I applied for a job at Katmai maybe a month ago, and would really love to get it – but I’m grossly underqualified, and doubt it will happen.)

    He took rolls and rolls of photo and video footage of bears roaming, romping, playing, fighting, eating. Right in the park, in an environment where over the course of a summer a few planes would fly over, a few boats might come for the afternoon. The documentary deals more with his personal side then it does his bear footage, but I can only imagine what kind of bear footage he managed to get.

    It’s really amazing. Awesome. Reckless, maybe stupid, the guy might just have been a total wacko. But the film got the best out of me, I’d feel like laughing and crying at the same time, there would just be that energy surging through my chest.

    I can’t say I feel bad for the guy, he was living among fucking grizzly bears. But what he managed to do, the film he took, the fact that this guy could walk up to and pet wild grizzly bears right on the nose. He knew them by name. That’s impressive.

  5. 09 November 2005

    1031 days ago

    Arctic Refuge Series

    Photoset of the soon to be desecrated ANWR. A great eulogy.

    This is the value of this piece of wilderness

    via Kjell Olsen1031 days ago

  6. 11 April 2005

    Ordinary Wolves

    Seth Kantner

    1243 days ago

    Absolutely stunning novel about a white boy raised as an eskimo: hunting, fishing, and living off the land and not much else. His struggles to fit in both in the Eskimo town a days sled from his home and later in ‘white’ alaskan cities show that the only place he really fits is out on the tundra – living by his own hands.

  7. Also somewhat recently

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