To compare the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the back of the moon -as some pro-drilling Senators recently have -is like comparing death and life. The Arctic Refuge is one of the last places on Earth with all of its original inhabitants still intact. All the plants and animals that were there are still there, making it among the most important areas in the world to protect.
The Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge is the biological heart of the last intact Arctic ecosystem in the world, an intact ecosystem the size of California. Despite the lies that the budget bill will only affect 2,000 acres, the language in the bill would lease all one and a half million acres of the coastal plain to oil companies.
I have backpacked scores of miles through the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, where I saw first hand the industrialized horror that the oil industry brings.
There are gravel roads, gigantic pumping stations and a massive network of roads. Dredging for gravel is done in rivers and streams, which devastates their ecology. The so-called directional drilling improvements are far more propaganda than fact: they have only decreased the size of the drill pads by 10 percent over the past 30 years, and oil spills are increasing.
The development has sprawled to more than 1,000 square miles -with more than 400 oil spills a year -along with hundreds of unlined toxic waste pits that leach right into the wetland tundra. Oil companies already have 95 percent of the north slope of Alaska. We must leave this last five percent be.
Further, Seventeen Gwich'in villages depend upon the caribou that breed on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. These are among the last cultures left in the world that still live as they principally have -off the land and the caribou.
From backpacking hundreds of miles through the refuge and returning repeatedly to this most sacred area, I know from the deepest depths of my soul the imperative necessity to save the biological heart of this great ecosystem -the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is the densest denning ground of polar bears in the world and the breeding ground of 160 species of bird from six continents and all 50 states.
After destroying almost every native culture on earth and almost every wilderness area, cannot we just leave this one place -and this one culture -be?
-Chad Kister, an Athens resident, wrote Arctic Quest: Odyssey Through a Threatened Wilderness. Send him an e-mail at ckister@chadkister.com.
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Letter to the Editor
