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TechnoratiThe Human Cost of Bush's Arctic Policy
Wainwright, Alaska - "We'll have to give you an Eskimo name if you like our food!" Kenneth "Kenny" Tagarook teased as he sliced another piece of frozen raw caribou meat for me with his ulu - a hand-sized, flat piece of metal with a small handle opposite the sharp, curved edge.
Kenny and his wife Ann are Inupiat ("In-OU-pe-at" or "Eskimo"). They are hosting me and Kenny's cousin Rosemary Ahtuangaruak during our visit in Wainwright. The village of 520 mostly Inupiat people lies along Alaska's North Slope over 200 miles above the Arctic Circle.
The site was settled by Kenny's ancestors over 100 years ago as Olgoonik, an Inupiaq name for "where the land slopes to the sea." The landmark bluff overlooking the Chukchi Sea is nearly indistinguishable now as the sea ice is packed in successive ridges that press firmly against the shore. Earlier, the biting cold (-39 with wind chill) had shortened our walk along the bluff.
"Did you try the bearded seal?" Rosemary asked. I picked up a marble-sized bit of dark brown meat, dried and frozen. Rich opaque oil coated my fingers. The seal meat was dense and delicious. "I love our food," said Rosemary, her black eyes sparkling and her mouth full.
The food is part of the culture and the culture is why Rosemary and I are visiting Wainwright and other Inupiat villages along the Arctic Ocean. Wainwright has been spared the oil and gas development - and cultural impacts - of villages to the east near Prudhoe Bay.
But that may soon change. Forty million acres of the Chukchi Sea may soon be leased to oil and gas development along with another 33 million acres of the neighboring Beaufort Sea. Together, these lease sales open the entire Arctic Ocean to oil and gas development.
The Chukchi Sea teems with sea life. In spring and fall, bowhead and beluga whales migrate along the coast. The vast ocean is a rich feeding area for gray, humpback, and fin whales, walrus and ringed, bearded, and spotted seals. Millions of migratory birds from across the U.S., central and South America, and even Antarctica rear their young in the brief Arctic summer. The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas support 20 percent of the world's polar bears.
The Inupiat people lovingly refer to the ocean as "our garden." But there are problems in the "garden" in the Beaufort Sea to the east.
Rosemary lives in Nuiqsut ("new-WICK-sit"), a village over 600 miles to the east of Wainwright and near Prudhoe Bay. The ever-expanding oilfields with their associated airplane and helicopter traffic, airports, roads, pipelines, gravel mines, noise, and flares have altered the landscape and the ways the animals use the land. Seismic tests push migratory caribou farther south, away from Nuiqsut, and migratory bowhead whales further north, out to sea. Causeways and gravel islands divert migratory fish away from the coast. Loss of traditional foods means loss of a way of life - and loss of a human right to protect a culture.
Kenny and Ann worry about what is happening in Nuiqsut at the northern end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline - and what happened in Prince William Sound at the southern end of the pipeline. Oil from the Exxon Valdez is still buried on the beaches of the Sound and most of the wildlife injured by the spill 20 years ago still has not fully recovered.
Twenty years without traditional foods is unthinkable to Inupiat people like Kenny and Ann, yet Wainwright is slated to become the next Nuiqsut - an industrial complex - and oil spills come oil development.
Large-scale industrial development is simply not compatible with large-scale wilderness and the Inupiat culture. We can have one or the other, but not both in the same place. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently indicated that the offshore oil-drilling plan left by the Bush administration will likely be scrapped. The plan opens the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts for drilling, Salazar observed.
Let us not forget that it also opens the entire Arctic coast to drilling.
Salazar said, "There are places that are appropriate for exploration and development and there are place that are not."
Surely the Arctic Ocean is a place where oil and gas development are not appropriate. Exxon managed to recover only 3 to 11 percent of the 11 to 38 million gallons of oil that spilled in Prince William Sound. The Arctic Ocean is an even less forgiving environment with its four months of darkness, sea ice, bitter temperatures, and storms. There is no proven technology to clean up or recover spilled oil in broken ice. None. Dispersants don't work in cold water with Prudhoe Bay crude.
What is at stake is a culture that has survived for over ten thousand years in one of the harshest environments on the planet. The culture has survived because the people could live off the land and sea. Take away the food and the people will vanish from the land.
Why should the Inupiat way of life be sacrificed for our oil dependency? The Arctic should be off limits to oil and gas development.
13 Comments so far
Show AllWith works to prevent damages to our communities and our environment, I take the recent news of a spill requiring request for oil spill boom from the coast guard with tears and a heavy heart. The stark beauty of the area, intertwined with the known dependance of renewal of food stores has always been the heart of the season now blackened with reports of a spill creating a sheen jeopardizing the foods of our ancestral ways. With out the resources in place efforts are beginning and hunters have waited through the hours of time for the start of response as past stories are echoed. Wanting more news, I dread the response but pray they are able to find and contain the continued spread toward Barrow with known failures to drills in broken ice conditions and wind changes to challenge any efforts to place boom.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3123242.cms
The latest evidence is the wolly mammoth went extinct due to climate change and disease. They had very little in the way of genetic diversity.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080611161038.htm
WEBBER NEITHER THE POLAR BEAR CUB NOR THE HUMAN WOULD SURVIVE VERY LONG WITHOUT ITS PARENT .THAT ARGUMENT SEEMS RATHER FOOLISH. IT ALWAYS SHOCKS ME WHEN SOME FROM THE CURRENT EURO MIND SET IS CRITICAL ABOUT THE WAY OF LIFE OF NATIVE SOCIETIES.YOU DIMISS IT AS ROMANTICISM .FIRST OF ALL NATURE WHEN PEOPLE ARE LIVEING IN A MORE EARTH CENTERED EXISTANCE KEEPS ITS OWN BALANCESO THE POPULATION OF HUMANS NEVER EXCEEDS THE CAPACITY OF THE LAND NOT TO AN EXTENT TO WIPE OUT OR DO PERMANANT DAMAGE TO ONE SPECIES OR THE OTHER .THAT BEING SAID NATIVE WAYS OF LIFE IS TO SEEK A BALANCE WITH LAND AND LIFE AND AN UDERSTANDING THAT WE ARE SPIRITUAL BEINGS IN A MATERIAL REALITY SOMETHING THAT EUROPEANS UNDERSTOOD ALSO WHEN THEY WERE A TRIBAL PEOPLE BUT HAVE LONG FORGOTTEN BEFORE THE BIBLE AND BEFORE KINGDOMS AND IDEAS TO PUT THERE BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHAINS FOR PROFIT .SO WHEN YOU ARE A NATIVE AND YOU HEAR ARGUMENTS FROM THE SIERRA CLUB RUSH LIMBAUGH AND YOU. THAT NATIVE PEOPLE CAUSED THE EXTINCTION OF THE MASTADON AND THE WOOLY MAMMOTH AS IF THAT MAKES US AS GUILTY AS EUROPEON COLONIALISM AND THE DESTRUCTION THAT IT AND CAUSED AND CAUSES IS JUST RIDICULOUS.KEEP ROLLING YOUR EYES.
Thanks for your post, i rolled my eyes when i read Webber's post, i should have replied.
We need a whole new system starting from scratch. This one is obsolete and the sooner people start admitting that its only working for the privelaged few (set up that way on purpose) at the top and that the rest of us are paying the price in everything from illnesses caused by the toxins and pollutions in the air caused by our greed and consumption to fill the hole in our souls where we used to be connected to one another and the earth -- to unaffordable band-aids for everything that ails us out of reach -- we will move forward to true joy of living.
Its very simple: A home (the smaller the footprint and simpler the better), food, heat and the right to pursue what makes us truly happy (not the easy fix at the mall). This is surprisingly simple to achieve. But the big corps don't want us to know this. They want us to believe we can't do without TV, cars and mortgages... yurts, teepees, hogans, tents, barabaras are all very comfortable ways to live. And that outhouse is a wonderful way to stay connected...
Everything becomes richer living simply.
STOP CONSUMING.
No coal! No oil! No nuclear! No electricity! No automobiles! No machines period!
Observe and Simplify~the Name of the Game...is living with Nature and Loving the same...the first rule of course, is incredibly plain, If NoOne Profits, Everyone Gains...
I roll my eyes whenever I see articles like this.
I mourn for the true natives of the North-the nonhumans there.
I cant really feel the same for the way of life of the human residents because biologically speaking they are not natives of the North like a polar bear or caribou.
This is easy to prove.
Take a naked new born polar bear cub and a naked newborn human, place then side to side on the ice. Whoever perishes first is the alien.
Humans are not Natives of the Arctic-and if they are, they are ill equipped to survive there.
Articles like this attempt to get the reader to sympathize with a hunting culture as if it represents the good ol days. Not sure the wooly mammoth would agree.
The Inuit have been known to sell their hunting licenses to big game hunters. They also have exploited non human species for the fur industry, and travel by plane to whaling conferences.
As Stephen Best points out in his articles on the fur industry and the Inuit, traditional hunting cultures are very selective in what traditions and what technologies they keep. They want to keep hunting, but they also want to sell the hides to westerners. And use western technology(tvs, guns etc).
There is a tribe in Manitoba that captures beluga whales for aquariums and when asked about the morality of it, one of the hunters said their god gave them the right to slaughter beluga whales if they want to. The Makah tribe of Washington state is similar(they also kept human slaves but dont seem as eager to resume that tradition).
Worshiping less technological societies may satisfy some sort of romantic notion of what it was like to live in the pre Industrial age, but its not really appropriate for the 21st century or trying to lvie in harmony with Nature.
Saying we should stop oil and gas drilling so a few humans can keep on slaughtering native species according to their selective traditions isnt really as strong morally as saying we shouldnt have gas and oil drilling because it harms the native species there.
"To be humane is to be cruel, vicious and unrestrained, like humans.
To be inhumane is to be compassionate, restrained, moderate, like non humans."
Bush is becoming history, but meatheads like Sarah Palin will be leading the "Drill Baby Drill" chorus until Wasilla sinks into the muck.
Any money for leveling Alaskan home foundations in the stimulus plan?
The Human Cost of Bush's Arctic Policy: Bush's "Arctic Policy" applies to all walks of life. George Wanker Bush was the coldest, most rotten person ever to be president. If you weren't one of his kind (and thank God you aren't), then tough darts! He is The Big MoFo, Dead Man Walking - the embodiment of the absolute worst in human beings. He wins, hands down, in all categories, including the Robert Mugabe Award and The Stalin Prize for Cynicism. There is nothing good to be said of him, not even that he likes dogs because no one really knows what he did to poor Barney, the scotty, behind the scenes. And as kivals said yesterday, George Wanker Bush is still very much with us. He remains the very symbol of our political degeneracy and national decline.
This article, alarming as it is, still only talks about the present situation. What should be even more worrying is that companies (and governments) are drooling over the prospects of ever more drilling and more shipping when the Arctic Ocean and the 'North West Passage' become open for navigation due to the melting of ice. Already ships are able to move more freely than in the past due to less ice in the summer.
Also, watch out for disputes among countries such as the USA, Canada, Russia, Denmark, etc. (viewed from the top of the globe, these are actually not so far off from each other) over their maritime boundaries - essentially where each one can drill, based on where their 'land' ends. So there is intense efforts on getting the maps right. Russia has already planted its flag on the ocean floor - clearly staking a claim. Canada, which generally likes to appear as holier than the USA when it comes to the environment, is also busy in asserting its Arctic sovereignty. All of this for what? Because the Americans have made it clear that they plan to expand drilling and other mining in the Arctic, and so have the Russians.
But all these greedy a**h*les are playing with fire. There are repeated warnings about how fast climate change is happening - scientists are revising their timeframe. As Arctic ice and Greenland ice melts, global warming is bound to accelerate, because, as the ice melts, there is a reduction in the heat-reflecting white surface and an increase in the heat-absorbing ocean surface. Most worrying is the potential release of all the methane that's trapped under the 'permafrost' - that is when things can become really unpredictable. (Climate change deniers, please don't even bother to reply to my comment - I'm just going to ignore you if you do :).
Just as there is an Antarctic Treaty that largely prohibits any mineral exploration, I think the Arctic region should be off-limits - not just for American companies, but anyone - I think it would be the height of irresponsibility, arrogance and greed to even make plans for drilling and 'exploration' in the Arctic region. Go chasing your profits elsewhere. It's not just about the Eskimos, the caribou and the seals - it's about something that can affect all of us, and those who will be affected first, and the most - the poorer countries - are those that are least responsible for climate change.
Highintel: Can we do better?
"The culture has survived because the people could live off the land and sea. Take away the food and the people will vanish from the land."
What's true of the Eskimo is also true of the Australian and the Californian, and a few billion other people.
The desecration of the Arctic is a foreboding reminder of an economic system that places profit over protection of our planet. Where does our current leaders' moral compass indicate? Is the Obama Administration motivated to forge a new relationship with nature?