Battle over calving ground heats up
Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Mar 12/01) - A drive to open up the Porcupine caribou herd's calving ground to oil and gas exploration is encountering stiff opposition from a legion of U.S. environmental groups.
But those groups are divided by their reasons for opposing development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and their means of opposing it.
Greenpeace is fighting any move to extract the up to 31.5 billion barrels of oil estimated to lie beneath the Alaskan coastal plain -- the part of the refuge the Porcupine give birth on each spring -- because it reasons the fuel will contribute to climate change and slow the move to renewable forms of energy.
Plain is critical
The Alaska chapter of the Sierra Club wants the plain left undisturbed because it believes it is critical to the ecological integrity of the 19 million acre refuge.
"We have a completely different perspective and approach," said Soren Wuerth of the Alaska Action Centre. "We're focusing on protecting the human rights of the Gwich'in people."
Wuerth said the board that runs the centre includes Gwich'in representatives intent on protecting the Porcupine herd, which Gwich'in of Alaska, Yukon and the NWT have relied on for centuries.
The battle over the coastal plain, also known as Area 1002, is largely being fought in Washington, with environmental groups and oil companies trying to garner the sympathy and votes of U.S. politicians.
Melanie Duchin of the U.S. Greenpeace climate campaign said she thinks that is where it will end.
"I think its going to be a tough fight, I think it's going to be a close fight, but I think they're going to lose," said Duchin.
Sierra Club spokesperson Sara Callaghan noted this is not the first time the sanctity of the refuge has been threatened. She said in 1989 then president George Bush led a political charge to open up the refuge. The move became politically untenable when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off the Alaskan coast and the American public was exposed to footage of sea birds smothered in oil and miles of tainted coastline.
All about oil
Like his father, current president George W. Bush hopes to open the coastal plain to development to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil.
Last week he introduced a budget package that forecast $1.2 billion in resource royalties from oil extraction in Area 1002. The budget for the 2001-02 financial year has yet to be approved.
"The Arctic Refuge is safe as long as American people are willing to stand up and be counted the way they have for decades," said Callaghan.
While the Sierra Club and Greenpeace lobby politicians and lead media and congress on tours of the plain, other groups plan more direct action.
The Alaska Action Centre, which employs non-violent direct protest techniques similar to those employed by the radical environmental organization Earth First!, is the most militant group involved in defending the plain.
"You can pretty much expect that if oil companies or congressional members make a move on the coastal plain we'll be there with front line activists taking direct action," Wuerth said. He hinted the group may be taking protest action in Washington, D.C. this summer.
"We want to draw attention to this. If the folks in Alaska don't know much about the Gwich'in people, what does that say about the rest of the country?"
