Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Sep 24/01) - Lobbyists working to protect the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd have had to rejig their plans in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in the United States.

A six-person delegation from the Western Arctic was in Washington in the days leading up to Sept. 11 to talk to senators during Wilderness Week, an event organized by U.S. environmental groups. Mackenzie Delta MLA David Krutko and law student Ken Smith, of Inuvik, were the two delegates from the NWT, in Washington with four Yukon representatives.

Krutko had arrived on the weekend, and managed one uninterrupted day of meetings before the attacks. Reached in Calgary, where he was attending a oil and gas conference last week, he said the direct lobbying efforts will probably have to wait until a more suitable time.

"Monday we did lobby senators and we met with their advisors, so it wasn't all a loss," he said. "But we decided the next day to cut back on our lobbying efforts."

Krutko and the Yukon delegates were able to catch a lift on a charter bus to Ottawa Thursday night to catch flights out later that week.

Meanwhile, Smith decided to stay to continue his scheduled tour with environmentalist Lenny Kohm.

"I came all this way to talk to the American people, so even though this tragedy has occurred ... I never really thought of going home," Smith said, from his hotel room in Pittsburgh. On the day of the attacks, Smith had meetings lined up a senator and several aides, but the meetings were understandably cancelled.

On Thursday, Smith resumed his schedule of presentations to environmental and community groups, telling people about the way the Gwich'in live and the importance of the Porcupine Caribou herd to people's traditional way of life. Smith is one of several area Gwich'in who has toured the U.S. in the last several years with Kohm on a slide-show tour called the Last Great Wilderness Project.

"It was a weird feeling in a sense that the people's minds were elsewhere," Smith said. "At the same time, you didn't know whether it was respectful to the people who lost their lives."

Lobbying efforts had been intense leading up to this month because it was expected that the U.S. Congress would consider a bill to open the Alaskan calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou to oil drilling. The Republican-dominated House of Representatives has passed legislation to open the refuge, but the Democrat-dominated Senate has yet to approve it.

Called the "1002" lands, the area is adjacent to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeast corner of Alaska.

With the recent events in the U.S., it's not clear if the issue will be shelved until the emergency legislation is out of the way, or if it will be tacked on to contingency plans.

Smith says the events have changed the mood of the lobbying efforts and created more uncertainty. "With all the lobbying that we'd done, all bets were off, in the sense that people's priorities have changed. The whole issue regarding the refuge was the amount of jobs that would be created by opening it up and as of Tuesday, it's now a matter of national security.

"Our major fear is that with a lot of the emergency legislation that they're coming up with ... proponents of development may try to push a bill through Congress allowing for development in the refuge. We really don't want that to happen because it makes us look like the bad guys when we have to oppose it."

Smith is scheduled to come home Oct. 4 after his month-long tour.