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MARTIN
SHEEN SPEAKS OUT Actor Martin Sheen, who plays U.S. President Josiah Bartlet on the Emmy-award winning show West Wing, is calling on the U.S. Congress to protect Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a movie trailer that is currently appearing in theaters across the country. You can download and watch this trailer on your computer. Select from the list below depending on what software you have and how you connect to the Internet:
If your computer is configured to automatically show videos, then the video will start when the download is completed. If you would rather save the file for later viewing, then use the right mouse button to click on the link. Then select either "save target as" or "save link as" (depending on your browser), using the menu. The trailer, which will appear through October in more than a dozen theaters, is running as the Senate prepares to take up provisions to drill in the Arctic Refuge. The Arctic trailer will appear in theaters in Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, New Mexico, New York and Oregon. The trailer displays footage of the majestic wilderness of the Arctic Refuge, and includes images of polar bears, eagles, and caribou migrating to their calving grounds on the Refuge's fragile coastal plain.
The movie trailer was produced by filmmaker Benjamin Arseguel, whose San Francisco company, PublicServiceMedia.org, works on various social and environmental projects, as well as documentaries and fiction films. In addition to Martin Sheen, Arseguel used Bruce Reitherman’s Emmy-nominated footage and a score by Jean-Philippe Rykiel. Sheen is the most recent celebrity to call on Congress to protect the national treasure from oil development. Actors Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and musicians such as Alanis Morisette, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Moby, the Beastie Boys, Matchbox 20, the Dave Matthews Band and the Barenaked Ladies, have all come out against the energy plan and its provision to develop the last 5 percent of Alaska’s Arctic coastal lands that remain off-limits to oil exploration. The Arctic Refuge protects some of America’s most spectacular wilderness and wildlife, including polar bears, caribou, grizzlies, musk oxen and millions of migratory birds. Each summer, the Porcupine caribou herd -- currently estimated at 129,000 strong -- migrates hundreds of miles to the 1.5-million acre coastal plain. The calving grounds on the coastal plain are considered sacred by the Gwich’in people, a subsistence culture that relies on the Porcupine caribou to maintain its very existence.
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"The
Arctic Refuge" intones Sheen, shown at left in a publicity still
from West Wing. "Is it worth destroying forever, for six months
of oil? Please act now."