ANCHORAGE -- January 26 -- The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) yesterday announced its final proposal to repeal the last remaining protections for critical wildlife habitat and hunting areas around Teshekpuk Lake Special Area in Northwestern Alaska. BLM’s draft plan, released in June 2004, elicited more than 220,000 comments from across the nation with the vast majority opposed to oil drilling in the area. Other federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also raised concerns. The final plan provides even less protection than what was proposed by the Bush Administration last summer.

The Teshekpuk Lake area is one of unparalled wildlife habitat. One in four of the world’s population of Pacific black brant utilize the area. Approximately 37,000 black brant, 30 percent of the entire population, utilized the Teshekpuk Lake area for molting in 2001. Other waterfowl that rely on the area include lesser snow geese, white-fronted geese and long-tailed duck that find critical nesting and molting habitat in the Lake’s environs. Spectacled and Steller’s eiders, both listed as “threatened species” under the federal Endangered Species Act, use the area for nesting. Big game species found in the area include the 45,000-member Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd that provides a subsistence hunting base for the remote communities of Nuiqsut, Barrow, Atqasuk and Wainwright as well as sport hunting opportunities.

"If initiatives like the North American Waterfowl Management Plan are going to succeed, public lands like those around Teshekpuk Lake need to be conserved as vigorously as partnerships are pursued private lands,” said Bart Semcer, the Sierra Club’s Fish and Wildlife Policy Specialist in Washington, DC. “This is a shortsighted decision that places efforts to conserve waterfowl for future generations at risk.”

”With this announcement, the Bush administration is making clear that satisfying the oil industry is more important to them than conserving waterfowl for future generations,” said Betsy Goll, Sierra Club’s Alaska Associate Representative. “We’re not saying there should be no drilling anywhere, but we’re not willing to hand over every single acre of critical big game and waterfowl habitat to the oil industry.”

Congress and three Secretaries of the Interior have recognized the ecological importance of the area around Teshekpuk Lake. Under the Reagan Administration, former Secretary of Interior James Watt closed an area of more than 200,000 acres north of Teshekpuk Lake to oil and gas leasing. In 1998, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt established an oil and gas leasing plan for the northeast Reserve, which protected much of the sensitive habitat around Teshekpuk Lake from leasing or oil and gas facilities.

In early 2004, the Bush administration announced its intent to alter the 1998 plan, and in June 2004 the BLM released a draft plan that proposed opening 96 percent of the entire Northeast Planning Area to oil leasing. In statements delivered to the Resource Development Council in Anchorage last week, BLM Alaska Director Henri Bisson acknowledged BLM’s plan to dismantle long-standing rules that had set core wildlife habitats in the area north of Teshekpuk Lake off limits to drilling since the Reagan administration.

“Under the new plan, 100 percent of the Teshekpuk Lake area will ultimately be open to oil leasing, not a single acre will be permanently dedicated to conservation and one of North America’s best remaining waterfowl habitats will be fragmented by roads, pipelines, air strips, gravel mines and industrial sprawl,” said Goll.

The Bush Administration’s plan does stipulate that certain leases will have “no surface occupancy”. Unfortunately, there has been too little follow through on such provisions in the past. For example, BLM issued exemptions last fall to both the “no surface occupancy” stipulations and the quarter-mile buffer at the first request of ConocoPhillips for its Alpine Satellite Development Plan.

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