Selling Alaska, our national heritage on the block

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If you don’t subscribe to National Geographic, go to the newsstand or the library and get the May edition. Turn directly to page 42, where the photo of a polar bear feeding on the remains of a bowhead whale begins the cover story, “Fall of the Wild.”

Written by Joel K. Bourne Jr., with a dozen full-page photos of Alaska’s North Slope by Joel Sartore, it makes the most compelling case yet against “The Selling of Alaska.”

Even as Congress battles over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, President Bush is quietly granting oil leases on 23 million acres just to the west known as the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska.

Though it hasn’t galvanized public opinion in the way that ANWR has, it’s the nation’s largest unprotected wilderness, home to huge herds of caribou, the grizzlies, wolves and raptors that live on them, and the summer nesting site of more waterfowl and shorebirds than biologists can count. It is an area more critical to wildlife than ANWR, some biologists say, but one believed to hide rich deposits of oil, natural gas and coal.

More than half belongs to the state of Alaska, which derives about 90 percent of its revenue from the oil. About 5,000 native Inupiat, living in scattered villages near their ancestral hunting and fishing grounds, own sizable parcels. The federal government, that is all of us taxpayers, owns the rest. But who would know it, the way it’s being handed over for private, that is, corporate, development?

What has happened to this country in the name of the economy? The value of corporate stock? The myth of energy independence? Once we believed the best way to preserve our national inheritance was to put our most special places in the hands of the government to preserve them from the wanton development of private interests. We saved them as national parks, national forests, wilderness preserves, wild and scenic rivers. Now they’re threatened more than ever by that very government’s mismanagement. National conservancies and land trusts are having to buy the land back to stop the exploitation.

At the same time he stresses our need for energy sources not to be dependent on unstable countries, Bush is pushing for public land sales in the West, tracts identified on computer models as isolated, even though many are surrounded by national forest lands and roadless wilderness. And for what? A one-time remedy to pay for operation of rural schools? Public education has always been a birthright in this country, willingly paid for in most states by taxes on property, sales and such. Most of us are unwilling to permanently lose pieces of our heritage for a temporary fix of a budget shortfall.

It’s bad enough that federal and state biologists have been muzzled on global warming, that scientific research on climate change, much of it paid for by our taxes, has been altered to dilute the facts. Government doesn’t want us to know that polar bears depend on summer sea ice to hunt, Arctic ice that’s melting much faster than our leaders are willing to acknowledge.

They’re telling us we need to wean ourselves off oil. Right! A token subsidy for hydrogen fuel cell development here, a rebate for purchasing a hybrid car there. The truth is the country and its leaders are obscenely dependent on oil and other nonrenewable fossil fuels. And that probably won’t change until the last drop of oil has been extracted from beneath our last wild places.

There are so many ways we could conserve the oil we’ve already developed, even before we get real about our personal methods of transportation. Globalization is taking more than American jobs. An inordinate amount of fuel is wasted shipping products from Asia, South America and Europe when their identical counterparts are already produced in this country. How many gallons of diesel fuel were used to haul $20 million worth of California-grown lettuce to Mexico in the same year an exactly equal amount of Mexican lettuce was hauled here? Why are we importing strawberries to California during the peak of production in Oxnard and Ventura fields? Do we need to sail cargo ships all the way from Chile so we can eat peaches and tomatoes in January?

Next, we could stop waging indefensible wars.

How many billions of barrels of refined oil propel Humvees over the deserts of Iraq? The tankers hauling gasoline from Kuwait? How many gallons of jet fuel does it take to deploy soldiers halfway across the world, to supply them, to carry their shattered bodies to hospitals in Germany and then back to Walter Reed, and sadly to return thousands of flag-draped coffins home?

How much fuel to ferry Congress members on fact-finding trips and Air Force One for presidential photo-ops to New Orleans, to the Arizona border with Mexico? And Rummy to Iraq to boost the morale of our troops? Good grief!

For all this nonsense we’re despoiling our last great places, polluting the habitat of our endangered wildlife, changing forever the landscape and lives of our native people.

As Bourne wrote in National Geographic, we face the ultimate choice of a nation: Whether to leave one corner of the wildest state the way it has been for millennia, or to leave no patch of tundra unturned to meet our insatiable desire for oil.