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 On
Sunday, February 18, 2001, Lenny Kohm presented "The Last Great
Wilderness," a multimedia slide show about
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), at the Community
Christian Church in Kansas City, Missouri. Mr. Kohm, who is a
freelance photographer, has spent several months of each of the last
13 years photodocumenting the Alaskan and
Canadian arctic’s stunning beauty. He has spent other parts of
each of these years practicing advocacy for preserving the integrity
of this unspoiled region, and his presentation was a part
of this advocacy. The new administration in Washington, D.C. intends
to open the ANWR to oil drilling, which will effectively bring to an
end the ability of this region to support some of its native
inhabitants from pursuing a traditional lifestyle. Mr. Kohm gave a
moving presentation that included a wealth of information about this
area, which represents the last stretch of undeveloped arctic
coastline in Alaska. Accompanying Mr. Kohm was Robin Netro, a young
man from Old Crow, a village of the Gwich’in Athabascan Indian
community of northeast Alaska and northwest Canada. Mr. Netro’s
dignified contribution to the proceedings came despite his visible
discomfort at speaking before a crowd of over 100 people. The
presentation was sponsored by Bridging the Gap, the Missouri Citizen
Education Fund, and Jackson County, Missouri. The event was free and
open to the public, and attendance was both large and enthusiastic.
Proponents of arctic oil drilling tell us that the operation can be
done in an environmentally sensitive manner. But in fact, if oil
development were to occur on the coastal plain of ANWR, a
conservative estimate of the necessary infrastructure required is
four airfields, two ports, two desalinization plants, seven large
production facilities, 60 to 100 drill pads (at several acres per
pad), six thousand workers, and about 300 miles of roads. In effect,
development would place a small industrial city right in the heart
of the refuge. Furthermore, hazardous drilling wastes would be
stored in open pits that can – and elsewhere do - leach out into
the fragile tundra. The permafrost there cannot absorb the leachate,
which spreads out over the surface in a wide radius, endangering
vegetation, birds, and other wildlife. Neighboring Prudhoe Bay
produces nitrogen oxides (a major component of acid rain) equivalent
to one third those of New York City. And there have been more than
17,000 oil spills on Alaska’s North Slope (the region occupied by
ANWR) since 1972, most at Prudhoe Bay. Advocates of oil exploration
and production in ANWR point out that only a small portion of ANWR
will be used. What they fail to mention is that this "small
portion" consists of the entire coastal plain. This is critical
calf-rearing habitat for the caribou.
And that’s if ANWR ever produces significant oil.
There is a very good chance, according to the U.S. Interior
Department, that little or no recoverable oil will be found in the
refuge whatsoever. Should recoverable oil be encountered, estimates
(even the very optimistic ones of the oil industry) indicate that
reserves would be equivalent to a 4- to 20-month supply of the
current amount consumed in this country. This is a fair amount of
oil, but chances of finding a field the size of Prudhoe Bay are only
1 in 100. Furthermore, consumption rates are not static. In an
expanding economy, without efforts aimed at conservation, resource
consumption increases at least proportionally to the rate of
expansion. In addition, the population and its attendant thirst for
petroleum are on the rise. These factors are evidence for an
estimated supply toward the lower end of the 4- to 20-month range.
We must examine the motivations that lead us to consider permanently
altering a pristine wilderness area in order to drill for oil. Even
if there is a 20-month supply, is producing it worth the level of
disruption that exploration and development will cause?
Oil drilling will seriously affect the numbers and
migration route of the Porcupine Caribou herd. This is the herd on
which the Gwich’in people rely for sustenance, and have for
thousands of years. Disruption of the Porcupine Caribou herd
potentially represents the willful cultural annihilation of the
Gwich’in people on behalf of you and me, the American consumer
(along with the executives and shareholders of the major oil
companies, who advocate this action so strongly).
It would be a mistake to destroy this area through
oil exploration and development when other oil-saving energy
strategies have not been pursued, (e.g., raising automobile and home
efficiency standards, developing alcohol fuels, building better mass
transit, encouraging alternative sources such as solar and wind
energy, etc.). Each of us surely remembers the lessons of our nation’s
westward expansion as this continent’s native people were pushed
aside and exterminated in order to make way for whatever land uses
those in power favored. History has not been kind to the
perpetrators of these actions when viewed in retrospect. It is
heartbreaking to realize that we could be moving toward a modern
version of this tragedy by wiping out the caribou herd that is
essential to the lives of the Gwich’in people, just as our
ancestors did to the bison upon which the Plains Indians depended.
Mr. Kohm suggested that members of the audience work
to influence congressional action to protect ANWR, and to support
projects which raise public awareness about ANWR. One way to do this
on the Web is to go to http://www.savearcticrefuge.org. Robin Netro
and Lenny Kohm are asking us to look within our hearts to evaluate
whether we, as a people who cherish at least the concept of doing
right, can permit this sort of atrocity to occur again, this time on
our watch.
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