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Alaska Wild Update #201 - Apr 28, 2003 QUOTE OF THE WEEK “[Bannerjee's] impassioned photographs of the landscape,
wildlife, and indigenous peoples, coupled with insightful essays, give
us strong testament why the Arctic Refuge should always remain off-limits
to industrialization". HEADLINES
NO MONEY IN THE ARCTIC REFUGE FOR FY04 BUDGET THE HOUSE OIL...ER...ENERGY BILL LEAVE NO TREE BEHIND: UPCOMING TIMBER SALES IN ALASKA
Excerpts from Fairbanks Daily News Miner 4-15-03 The U.S. Congress passed a final budget resolution before the Easter
recess with no language counting on oil leasing revenues from the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. The decision should considerably restrict, if
not eliminate completely, what drilling supporters had considered their
best hope in years for opening the Arctic Refuge's coastal plain for oil
drilling. "Two months ago, Republicans put us on notice that they
planned to jam a Last month, the House and Senate each passed differing versions of the annual budget resolution, a document that sets caps on spending and targets for tax income. The Senate voted 52-48 to remove a provision that counted on drilling revenues from the Arctic Refuge. The version the House passed made no mention of the Arctic Refuge, but it also didn’t explicitly prevent it the way the Senate did, leaving some apparent wiggle room in the conference committee. The question was whether a conference committee created to resolve the differences between the Senate and House versions would keep the House's language, or follow the Senate’s approach. In the end, the conference members rejected the idea late last week and sent the resolution to each house floor for final passage. The House approved the resolution 216-211 at 2:39 a.m. Friday. The Senate followed later that day at 5:15 p.m. with a 51-50 vote that required the tiebreaking help of Vice President Dick Cheney. The resolution, as currently worded, makes it more difficult to secure
drilling in the Arctic Refuge through the reconciliation bill later in
this congressional session. Reconciliation allows the laws to be changed
(or “reconciled”) in a way to help reach budgetary goals. In
this case, it would have allowed for the Alaska Lands Act, which currently
forbids Reconciliation bills are not subject to filibuster in the Senate. Drilling supporters pushed the back-door budget method because a budget needs only a simple majority to pass instead of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. Some drilling supporters say that this doesn’t close the door on drilling making it into some kind of reconciliation bill. Because the House and Senate couldn't agree on the size of the tax cut wanted by the White House, the reconciliation language in the budget resolution could be revisited by Congress. Congress expects to finish any work on a reconciliation bill by July.
Currently, there are no obvious means through which drilling supporters
could use reconciliation to push drilling in the Arctic Refuge, but they
have stated their intention to explore the possibility. Without any instructions
for reconciliation that would allow for changes in the Alaska Lands Act,
any attempt to do so would most likely be ruled out of order. THE HOUSE OIL...ER...ENERGY
BILL On Friday, April 11, the House of Representatives passed an energy bill by a vote of 247-to-175 and that includes a provision to allow drilling in the entire 1.5-million acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – an area even the Reagan Administration called “its biological heart” and “center of wildlife activity, ”instead of focusing on ways to stretch U.S. energy supplies by increasing vehicle mileage requirements. The bill is the first update for U.S. energy policy in a decade, although
to many, it was a step back to the past. The most controversial provision
in the legislation endorsed the Bush administration plan to open part
of the sprawling Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling in an
area that is the home for thousands of caribou, muskoxen, polar bears,
and millions of migratory birds. The bill also contains $18.7 billion
in tax incentives to Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) called the bill a "dream plan" for big oil companies, with less money for energy conservation and alternative fuels. "This is an oil company bill. It's oil, oil, oil - it has a greasy feeling to it," he said during debate on the measure. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products a day, with almost 60 percent of those supplies imported. Despite the fact that the United States has only an estimated 3% of the world’s supply of oil and uses around 25%, the Bush administration said that the potential crude oil from the Arctic Refuge is too important for U.S. energy security and the economy to remain in the ground. Government studies show that oil from the Arctic Refuge would reduce dependence on foreign oil by only 2% - from 62% to 60%. An amendment introduced by Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA) and Nancy Johnson (R-CT) to strip the language from the bill was only narrowly defeated by a vote of 197 to 228. Support for Arctic drilling has not wavered in the House since the last time they voted on this provision in 2001. “Not only has the House voted to spoil one of our nation’s truly special places, but they have done so against the will of the American people,” said Cindy Shogan, Executive Director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “The narrow margin of passage sends a strong signal to the Conference Committee that drilling in the Arctic is not part of a responsible energy policy.” The House also defeated an amendment to the bill that would have required the Transportation Department to come up with a way to reduce by 5 percent the amount of gasoline consumed by cars and sport utility vehicles by 2010. Separately, lawmakers voted down a proposal to establish federal emergency gasoline stockpiles in California, the Midwest and the Northeast. Republican Sherwood Boehlert (NY) was outspoken at the apparent double
standard of collegues support of drilling and opposition to tighter fuel
efficiency standards, asking ‘What right do we have as human beings
and what sense does it make as a nation to open a pristine area to drilling
when we are not willing to take basic steps toward conservation?’ “If supporters of this bill were interested in passing a comprehensive energy bill, they wouldn’t include drilling in the Arctic Refuge,” Shogan said. “It’s bad policy and bad politics.” As with the vote in the House of 2001, the House also passed a scam amendment to help some members claim they were in fact limiting the impact of drilling. The amendment, offered by Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM) purports to limit oil activities in the Arctic Refuge to 2,000 acres. This is demonstrably false. “This amendment limits total disturbance in the entire coastal plain of ANWR to just 2,000 acres, an area less than half the size of Dulles Airport,” claimed Wilson. Actually, HR 6 requires the entire Arctic Refuge coastal plain to be leased. The amendment does nothing to require that the 2,000 acres be contiguous, as Rep. Wilson herself admitted in the House Rules Committee meeting April 9. Oil facilities can be spread out across the entire Delaware-sized area – you could build 52 airport runways (14 times more than Dulles Airport) anywhere in the pristine area the Reagan Administration called “the biological heart” of the Arctic Refuge and stay within 2000 acres. With the House energy bill now finished, the focus shifts once again back to the Senate. The Senate is expected to begin debating their own energy bill sometime in early May and have indicated that they would like to have it finished by mid May. The energy bill is expected to be moving through the committee process starting the last week of April. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), the Chair of the Senate Energy Committee has repeatedly said that since the Senate has already voted on the issue of Arctic drilling, he didn’t want to vote on it again as part of his committee ’s bill. "I don't want to rehash that and spend a great deal of time in committee or on the floor on it," Domenici said of the Arctic, noting that the Senate already voted down an Arctic drilling measure once this year. "That is not to say [Arctic drilling] won't have another vote, but it won't happen in our bill."
All of the proposed logging projects would devastate these extraordinary
and pristine roadless areas by clearcutting large portions of old-growth
rainforest. Nearly all of the proposed logging is in violation of the
landmark Roadless Rule, a policy banning commercial logging and road building
in roadless areas nationwide. The Bush administration, however, has publicly
acknowledged its intent to revise the Roadless Rule and in doing so exempt
the Tongass National Forest from any protection. In the The four upcoming timber sales being pushed by the administration are the Cholmondeley Sound Timber Project, the Cholmondeley Sound Timber Project in the McKenzie Roadless Area, the Finger Mountain Timber Sale in the Chichagof Roadless Area, the Madan Timber Sale in the Madan Roadless Area, and the Emerald Bay Timber Sale in the Cleveland Roadless Area. The Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chom-lee”) project targets three areas—Sunny Cove, Saltery Cove, and Clover Bay—for logging within the McKenzie Roadless Area on Prince of Wales (POW) Island. The Cholmondeley project area is located on the east coast of the island and is bounded by saltwater on three sides. Status of sale: Final Environmental Impact Statement expected Spring 2003. The Finger Mountain timber sale would slice into the spectacular beauty
of the Chichagof Roadless Area, an area encompassing over 530,000 acres
of the central portion of Chichagof Island. Some of the highest densities
of grizzlies and Sitka black-tailed deer in the Tongass call the rich
ecosystem of the island home. The Finger Mountain project area lays just
across Tenakee Inlet from Tenakee Springs, a small town nestled in the
coastal The Madan Roadless Area is part of an impressive half million acre road-free expanse stretching over 350 miles from the Misty Fiords National Monument, the southeastern-most point of Alaska, north to the Skagway Juneau Icefield Roadless Area. Located on the mainland near the city of Wrangell, the Madan Roadless Area is dominated by rugged mountains linked by deep, broad valleys. The Madan Timber Sale proposes to clearcut forest just over the ridge from Virginia Lake, one of the 65 “important” watersheds in southeast Alaska according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Status of sale: Final Environmental Impact Statement expected Spring 2003. The Emerald Bay timber sale would serve as a gateway to future roadless
area timber sales on the previously unlogged Cleveland Peninsula. The
Cleveland Peninsula is a nearly 200,000-acre arm of land stretching off
the mainland north of the city of Ketchikan. Over the years, glaciers
have smoothed the topography and left a legacy of broad valleys, steep
slopes, alpine lakes, hanging valleys and coastal lowlands. According
to the U.S. Fish and Logging in these areas places many different species of wildlife at risk. Grizzly and black bears, wolves, Sitka black-tailed deer, moose, mountain goats river otter, marten, mink, seal, Stellar sea lion, humpback and Minke whales, 4 species of salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout, abundant bird and waterfowl (including loons and Trumpeter Swans), Peregrine falcons, and Queen Charlotte goshawks can all be found in the areas slated for the auction block. Decades worth of timber– over five billion board feet – is available to the timber industry in areas where roads have already been built. That’s enough trees to fill logging trucks stretched end-to-end from Washington DC to San Diego, CA - five times over! These areas do not require expensive new taxpayer-subsidized road-building. Yet the timber industry and its allies continue to push for more and the Bush administration continues to plan to log irreplaceable forests in roadless areas. As the Environmental Impact Statements are issued, there will be opportunities for the public to comment on the proposed sales. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton instructed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on April 11, 2003 to cease wilderness reviews in its resource management planning in Alaska and consider wilderness only where it is broadly supported by elected Alaska officials. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) authorizes the Secretary to consider and recommend wilderness on BLM lands in Alaska. While her action implies agreement with that authority, her decision amounts to a de facto “no more wilderness” policy. In 2001, Secretary Bruce Babbitt instructed BLM to conduct wilderness reviews under this authority but none were completed before Secretary Norton’s decision to rescind that order. During the Reagan-Bush Administrations, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service conducted wilderness reviews required under ANILCA on 13 national parks and 16 national wildlife refuges and published the results, but recommendations were never forwarded to Congress by the Interior Secretary and President as required. Recently, the Forest Service revised plans for both the Tongass and Chugach National Forests and addressed wilderness as required by ANILCA. In the Chugach, the Service reduced the size of a proposed wilderness area recommended during the Reagan Administration without making any new proposals or recommendations. After refusing to conduct the required wilderness review in the original Tongass plan, the Service completed a court-ordered evaluation of wilderness and recommended that none of the 9.7 million eligible acres should be designated wilderness. Agency officials entrusted with the implementation of ANILCA have either failed to complete the required reviews altogether or done so only grudgingly, after court orders and with minimal recognition of Alaska’s extraordinary wild places. Openly ignoring significant public support for wilderness, they have abandoned further wilderness designation on all public lands in Alaska. Still, wilderness reviews determined what those of us who have wandered
these magnificent Alaskan wildlands have known all along - most of it
qualifies as wilderness. Arctic photographer Subhankar Bannerjee has a new book, ‘Seasons of Life and Land’ that is hitting the bookshelves and is all about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Bannerjee spent two years documenting the life on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge and his pictures offer a beautiful testimony to the incredible life that is present all year long. You can read more about his book, or to order a copy. Bannerjee will be going on a tour to promote his book and may be coming to a town near you soon. You can see the full schedule of tour dates for Bannerjee’s tour. For those of you in the Washington DC metro area, on Friday (5/2) at noon Subhankar will give an illustrated lecture about his two-year photographic journey showing how global warming and pollution are affecting the landscape, animals, plants and people of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which native people call "The Sacred Place Where Life Begins." The talk will take place at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in the Baird Auditorium at noon. The Museum is located at 10th Street and Constitution Ave., NW; the Baird Auditorium is on the ground floor of the Museum. May 2 also marks the opening of Banerjee's "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land" exhibit. Photographs by Banerjee show the biodiversity and indigenous cultures of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The photos will be exhibited at the Smithsonian through Sept. 2. For more information, click here. |
