Pam Linn
While CNN broadcast pictures of Iraq clouded by dense black smears of burning oil last week, and prices at some Southern California gas pumps reached a whopping $2.30, we learned of another fierce struggle between oil extractors and environmentalists in the U.S. Senate.
Back on the agenda was the Bush administration’s plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration and drilling. Thought we’d been there and done that already? Well, yes, we did. But, unwilling to take no for an answer, they launched a stealth campaign, attaching the drilling plan to the federal budget bill, hoping to win on the old ploy of reducing our dependence on mid-east oil as we marched to war there.
This, of course, is a crock. And in an unusual display of bipartisan vision, senators voted 52 to 48 to reject the drive to despoil one of the nation’s few remaining pristine wilderness areas. Eight Republicans joined most Democrats in defense of Arctic wildlife. Bless them all.
I was alerted to this effort a few weeks ago in a letter from the Natural Resources Defense Council with a reminder to renew my membership and a plea from Robert Redford to help stop the sweeping assault on our environment. When Redford speaks, I listen. His loyalties are not paid for by lobbyists.
Last Thursday, I got an e-mail headed, “You helped save the Arctic Refuge.” NRDC President John Adams thanked me “for helping to make this inspirational victory possible.” At the same time he warned that the refuge has won a reprieve, not permanent protection.
It used to be that the way to preserve the nation’s natural wonders, places of significant beauty and serenity, was to get the federal government to buy them and set them aside for future generations, for the future of the planet. Previous presidents have designated many such places as National Monuments, hoping to add greater protections. Well, times have changed. It seems now that federal lands are subject to the vilest desecration, while state parkland (at least in California) may fare better.
L.A. Times columnist John Balzar wrote Sunday about his adventures during two short Arctic summers, working as a boatman for naturalist McGill Adams, whose tiny company, Wilderness Alaska, has guided trips into the Arctic for the last quarter century. Balzar tells of taking tourists “down the rivers of the Brooks Range Mountains, north through the foothills, and farther north still into this plain, their eyes big as saucers but still no match for the vastness of open space in which they found themselves.”
It’s hard to imagine the experience being the same with roads and trucks, drilling rigs and pipelines blighting the landscape.
Balzar cites Adams’ explanation of why the Arctic is so different from open space in the lower states. “Life on this planet is cyclic-inception, a spurt of growth, reproduction, bounty, retreat, rest and rebirth. Low-latitude landscapes plod through the cycle in measured moderation. The arctic, on the other hand, accomplishes the same cycle in a reckless, chaotic binge, an explosion, a celebration . . . magic.”
Wow! Where do I sign up?
I’ve been to Alaska in September, but only as far north as Skagway and Ketchikan. I walked through parts of the Tongass National Forest, which is also under attack from logging interests. The Haines Wilderness Area was truly spectacular, but even there are the remains of devastating pollution left by government sanctioned industry. Pleas to have the abandoned sites cleaned up haven’t even made a blip on the Interior Department’s radar screen.
I’ve been planning another trip to Haines, maybe to rent a small cabin, work on a book in the mornings, hike the forests or paddle on the lake in the afternoons. Now, I think I should include a tour of the Arctic Wilderness during the incredibly short summer. This summer for sure, because who knows what will happen to it if Bush’s war goes well and he sees that as a mandate for the rest of his agenda.
On the way home, I guess I better stop at all the threatened national parks in Montana, Wyoming and Utah.
Where did we go wrong? Teddy Roosevelt, and many presidents who followed, thought national parks and forests should be created to preserve nature, not to provide tax-subsidized commercial development of our natural resources.
Animals go extinct when their habitat is too degraded to support them. At what point will our habitat be spoiled to the point that it no longer sustains us? In body or spirit. Will we become the endangered species?
Heaven help us.