Throwing Away Our Resources

This summer, I was dismayed to learn that the Bush administration proposed leasing the rights over some nine million acres of land in the Western Arctic Reserve of Alaska—an area 23.5 million acres large located in the northwest corner of Alaska—for oil development. At the start, I could not see how the government could justify developing one of the few unspoiled ecosystems left on the planet. I thought at the time that the Western Arctic Reserve (not the same as the better known Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—ANWR) would be worth more as an ecological entity than for the oil beneath its soil.

Later, I found out that the Bush administration wanted to pave forest roads through the Northern and Central Rockies that until this point have been lined with trees and untrammeled by the world. This includes areas that former president Bill Clinton banned from development. The forest that would be damaged includes 100,000 acres of the scenic Wyoming Range in Greater Yellowstone.

Then I learned about the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Here, Bush has planned to turn a pristine area into a base for military and industry. Again, he has overturned and continues to undermine many of Clinton’s solid policies with respect to our national resources.

In 2000, Bush paid lip service to environmental policy—since former vice president Al Gore ’69 wanted to be the environmental president. In the past three years, he has sped resource development on public land across the country. He backed off his 2000 campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and he abandoned the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that had been so important to Gore. In the year 2000 alone, the number of general drilling permits doled out by the government increased to 5,222. That’s 50 percent higher than the average of the three years before, according to the New York Times. Bush has made his position clear as a veritable terrorist to the natural world.

More than any other example of Bush’s environmental destruction, the plight of the Western Arctic Reserve captured my sympathy. This preserve is the habitat of thousands of species, many rare or endangered. The center of this administration’s proposed oil drilling site, Lake Teshekpuk, is the summer home of millions of migratory birds, as well as caribou, wolves, foxes and polar bears. People live there too. The Inupiat Eskimos have lived in the region for 8,000 years. But despite their long claim to the region, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to care.

Remarkably, the Senate and House of Representatives never turned the Western Arctic Reserve—an area the size of South Dakota—into a federally protected wilderness. Instead, it was set aside by Congress as a petroleum reserve, with the stipulation that drilling could occur only in times of dire national crisis. Fair enough, but our country has borne energy hardships for 80 years without harvesting the oil from this beautiful preserve. We survived the oil embargo of the 1970s without extracting oil from the Western Arctic Reserve. The fact that oil prices have risen in the last few years does not justify destroying such a sizable ecosystem.

Past presidents have chosen to leave these lands largely untouched, whereas Bush appears to think that now the time is right. Recently, Michael A. Leavitt, an executive with the Environmental Protection Agency, summed up Bush’s attitude: “There is no environmental progress without economic prosperity. There is nothing that promises pollution like poverty.” That’s circular logic at its worst. This country should be committed to protecting the environment whether the economy is good or bad. If we’re willing to compromise our commitment over ephemeral spikes in oil prices, then our so-called commitment is no commitment at all. Ransacking a national reserve without convincing evidence of a need to do so is one more example of the Bush administration’s loose dedication to the environment.

Moreover, as has been thoroughly documented by the Bush administration’s own economists, tapping Alaskan oil reserves wouldn’t result in a decrease in oil prices for nearly 10 years. If Bush truly believes that America’s economy is under dire threat from high oil prices, then he should take more immediate steps first, before drilling in Alaska.

A bad economy and hundreds of billions of dollars of debt are not good reasons to begin plundering the resources in our own backyard, especially when plundering them won’t even fix the problem. Is our need for oil really so great that we should despoil one of our nation’s natural treasures? No, not when we could be more actively pursuing alternative fuels and practicing conservation. There are as many better options that don’t include drilling to solving the current oil crisis as there are migratory birds roosting in the Western Arctic Reserve. It’s time for Bush, or Sen. John Kerry, to start making sensible choices.

Elena P. Sorokin ’06, a Crimson news editor, is a history concentrator in Adams House.