Bush Moves on Alaska as Backs Are Turned
Whether it’s outsourcing a war in Iraq, or greasing the skids for industry buddies in Alaska, the Bush administration has made the backdoor fix its fundamental operating maxim.
The nation’s attention has lately been diverted to stocks’ roller-coaster ride, foreclosures and falling house prices, and self-destructive acts by 20-something showbiz folk.
What better time to sneak through something called the Chukchi Sea Oil and Gas Lease Sale 193, which happens to cover essential habitat for half the U.S. polar bear population?
What more opportune occasion to open 2.4 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and road building, on which Uncle Sam will be lucky to get back 5 cents on the dollar?
The Chukchi Sea lease is a particular example of how timing figures in a fix.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced a “delay” in its decision on listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.
In the meantime, the Minerals Management Service is getting set, on Feb. 6, to throw open 30 million acres of the bears’ habitat to oil and gas development.
With the skill of a World War II convoy escort, the administration has laid down a smoke screen around its actions.
“We wouldn’t be proceeding with this sale if we weren’t comfortable that we had enough knowledge, enough data to say that we can adequately see that the polar bear is protected: I’m confident we have done all we needed to do,” MMS boss Randall Luthi told a House subcommittee earlier this month.
Bull pucky!
In a 2007 memo, former MMS polar bear biologist James Wilder asked his bosses to hold off the lease until measures were taken to protect the bears.
“I do not see how the MMS can pass the ‘red face’ test … when polar bear issues which have been raised have been repeatedly and completely ignored by both Shell and MMS,” he wrote.
“Requests for critical information” on bear impacts were “repeatedly denied,” he wrote, and big polar bear populations “are likely to be greased if there is an oil spill,” Wilder added.
Wilder wrote that there was “extreme pressure” on scientists to speed up environmental reviews of plans to open the Bering, Beaufort and Chukchi seas to oil and gas development.
A bipartisan House group, including Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., is raising a cry in advance of February’s fix.
“We believe that any further commitments to fossil fuel development in polar bear habitat should be put on hold until the Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a final listing determination for the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act,” Inslee and Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., wrote in a recent letter to the service. Fifty-one House colleagues co-signed the letter.
Last week, many of the same lawmakers told Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne they are “deeply troubled” by delay in protecting the polar bear. They urged him to “immediately postpone” Lease Sale 193.
The Inslee-Shays letter made clear the bears’ peril.
Global warming is shrinking the Arctic icepack, the essential hunting terrain for polar bears.
“The U.S. Geological Survey has concluded that polar bears will almost certainly disappear from Alaska by the middle of this century, and that we will have lost fully two-thirds of the world’s polar bears by this time,” Inslee and Shays wrote.
The bears are likely to survive only on islands of Canada’s far north and in northwest Greenland.
As we struggle to limit global warming, why turn a huge chunk of polar bear habitat over to the fossil-fuel economy?
Given the bears’ “perilous status,” Inslee and Shays wrote, doesn’t it make sense to “maximize the protection” of the great animals’ remaining habitat?
Not to the administration.
The National Audubon Society is planning a federal court challenge to Lease Sale 193.
In turn, the state of Alaska opposes Endangered Species Act listing of polar bears. The state has a long history of picking petrodollars ahead of protecting its natural heritage.
A huge area of the Arctic — the National Petroleum Reserve, west of Prudhoe Bay — has already been thrown open to oil and gas leasing.
Can’t the Bushmen and oilmen ever get enough?
As if drilling the polar bear’s domain isn’t enough, the administration took out after Alaska’s brown bear habitat Friday.
It released a management plan for the Tongass National Forest that will open to logging and road building about 2.4 million acres of currently wild and roadless federal land.
OK, the 17-million-acre Tongass already has a lot of designated wilderness. One is pressed to think of a major icefield that does not enjoy the highest measure of federal protection.
The problem is, wild creatures live in low-elevation forests and valleys and wetlands. About 18 months ago, I watched brown bears feeding in an estuary off Upper Tenakee Inlet of Chichagof Island, an area slated to get new roads and be clear-cut.
Does this make sense? A total of 3,700 miles of roads now crisscross the Tongass and adjoining native lands.
And the U.S. Treasury? In 2002, the U.S. Forest Service spent $36 million on its Tongass timber sales program, and received back just $1.2 million from timber companies.
P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at joelconnelly@seattlepi.com. Follow his political blog at blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics.
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Gee, what a surprise. NOT!
These people? only know how to rape, kill, pilage, and plunder. They don’t give a rat’s behind about polar bears, forests, or anything/anyone else that’s in their way.
This callous environmental destruction is never mentioned during the so called “debates”. I have to conclude that the corporate media is fully behind every act of ecocide committed during the last 100 years. Just b/c Bush started the destruction, does it follow that the next Prez has to high five him and burn down another forest in his honor? I doubt any of the present candidates has ever spent one minute in full hiking gear.
Congress’ appeasement of the Bush Administration from 2001-2006 gave the Administration a license to steal, despoil and murder.
That license could have expired in 2006 when the Democrats took over Congress, however, Nancy Pelosi’s taking “impeachment off the table” in November 2006 extended the license indefinitely.
This has to do with HUGE profits for some corporations and not oil for the U.S. Ever since the 1995 Gingrich Congress, the oil companies have not been required to bring one drop of Alaskan oil to the U.S. We pay for the roads, pipelines, bays and everything else and they sell the oil to Asia for maximum profit.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (which I support):
http://www.nrdc.org/
has successfully fought this administration in the courts. Now, the administration is turning its back on decisions of the courts and on the laws of this country.
It’s not only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that are just “pieces of paper”. Bush has broken law after law. Why is impeachment off of the table? He is utterly evil.
I’ve worked with people like Bush. Smart asses that had a modicum of talent and or looks. They seemed to think they could do as they please. What a shame that a chump like Bush would come along at the same time our congress is filled with foolish sheep. Gutless and soulless is the leadership of this country. It used to be hard to sleep before the medication.
Looking forward to taking my grand daughter to see a tree in the tree museum, and to seeing old video of what the polar bears used to look like.
The bush legacy:
Death
Debt
Deceit
Amos, get off the medication. We need you.
and the cockroaches shall inherit the earth.
this is truly the end. homo sapiens is constitutionally unable to live in harmony with his environment. the fifth (or sixth, depending on how you count ‘em) mass extinction in the planet’s history is already well underway.
call me an optimist if you like, but i believe that within the next twenty to one-hundred years, earth’s ecosystems will essentially shut down, and have to start over from scratch. something on the order of 80% of species (and a higher percentage of actual organisms) will be wiped out, with two phyla–chordata (that includes us and polar bears) and mollusca–being especially hard-hit.
by the time so-called ‘intelligent’ life evolves again on earth, there won’t be any sign of a species having manipulated its environment to the point where it could destroy itself and everything else along with it.
What is Pelosi’s cut of the take?
Given the published fact of all the LIES this administration used to start a war of choice (the SUPREME crime as per the GENEVA CONVENTIONS), it would seem that ANY initiative set forth by Bush or his republican team of robber barons ought to be FROZEN. The entire legitimacy of any claim to high office has been so shit upon as to call for a FREEZE on any and all presidential choices. Add the lies to the countless signing statements and this unitary executive is so OBVIOUSLY out of control, amoral, drunk on power, laughing at the dead bodies of Iraqis as much as the vanishing polar bears. In the film (I can’t recall the name) where Tom Cruise is a hired killer and acts casual about the names/people he wants to eradicate, the taxi driver drawn into his mess says, “You’re missing some basic operating instructions” (that others have), boy is that Bush and his henchmen or what?
Amos, where ever did you find your sleep medication? I thought congress had cornered the market…
MIKEC
thankyou for mentioning the mass extinction. for anyone interested go to: www.massextinction.net to get information about this devastation. (you can also find a picture of KEM PATRICK - 4th one down - well, he says it’s him anyway.)
MikeC:
Only one rejoinder to your position statement: no species is designed to live in “harmony” with its environment. Change is the only constant, and all life struggles to meet that change. At the same time, the genetic and behavioural characteristics of all life must be geared towards “override” in order to meet the challenges of change. Homo sapiens is merely an example of runaway positive feedback. There’s nothing unique in that. We are not special, neither in terms of our destructive capacity nor our purported collective intellectual ability to avoid extinction. Cyanobacteria were extremely successful at wiping out most of the methanophyllic bacteria that had been around for a very long time: there’s no novelty in a species’ (like ours) ability to change the environment so drastically as to exclude or at least severely limit the viability of a large fraction of other species (or genera or even phyla) on this planet. It’s happened before.
Of course, the impending mass extinction will probably spare at least a few “higher” (I hate that term) species. I’m hoping that rodents, flies, and a few fish at least survive. That should be enough diversity to keep things going until we’re all eradicated.
why are you all so willing to concede? i’m right here in the belly of the beast, on the front lines of the fight for the tongass and i want you all to know that we are beating them back. same with the bridge and roadbuilding. i’ve been confronting these politicians for years and they get up in my face and tell me that such-and-such is going to happen and there is nothing i can do to stop it. but guess what, it is stopping. they are screaming to high heaven and denying that we are having any effect, but the fact of the matter is we are. don’t roll over, back down and concede the fight. that’s what they want you to do. don’t believe we’re losing, it isn’t true. keep fighting. tongassconservation.org
thewonderingyou–
if you happen to return to this post–
agree totally. that line was tailored more for impact than for accuracy.
it would be truer to have said that homo sapiens has more CONSISTENTLY modified and negatively impacted its environment than any species in the observable past, or something like that.
factor one, runaway population growth, happens often enough in nature, but the resulting destabilization to the ecology is typically local. ours is global.
factor two, the mayhem our big ol’ brains create (toxins, nuclear fission, mechanized plunder of our environment, etc.) that extends way beyond the simple displacing and devouring of competing organisms, is what’s new under the sun.
saying all that would have been a more suitable preface to the issue of mass extinction.
love biology, sometimes hate the awareness the study of it brings.
You can’t let this dumn nut alone for one minute without watching out for another wicked plot. This poor excuse for a human being will destroy every bit of America and other parts of the world as long as he is in office and damn that Pelosi and Congress for not impeaching him long ago. A bunch of cowards in Congress have let this slippery snake take it all.