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.
