LISTSERV - IOWA-TOPICS Archives - LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG

Subject: The least hospitable area left in America
To: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
        [log in to unmask]
Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]>
From: [log in to unmask]
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 18:04:54 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

EVER WONDER **WHY** WE NEED TO URGE OUR SENATORS TO OPPOSE THE
ADMINISTRATION'S PUSH TO OPEN THE ARCTIC COASTLA PLAIN TO OIL EXPLORATION??

--------- Begin forwarded message ----------
From: Julie Dudley <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: FW: Arctic Ignorance and Bliss
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 14:51:09 -0700

> Arctic Ignorance and Bliss

> by John Balzar
> August 3, 2001
>
> "How dare you stand up and talk about something when you've never been
> there. Shame on you."
> --Alaska Rep. Don Young, speaking on the floor of Congress Wednesday in
> favor of Arctic oil drilling.
>
> Well, I've been there. For two summers, short, soaring, bittersweet
> summers, I worked there. Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is
> about the size of Ireland. But it is entirely unlike Ireland or anywhere
> else. It is a charmed place, because we have been selfless enough to let
> it live. We deemed it important. One corner of our vast but crowded
> continent remains wild, no qualifiers.
>
> I was a boatman for Alaska wilderness guide Macgill Adams. We took
> tourists in groups of half a dozen or so down the rivers of this refuge,
> floating in rafts north out of the Brooks Range mountains into the epic
> flatness of the coastal plain and onward toward the Beaufort Sea.
>
> Cold Julys. Funnel clouds of mosquitoes. Two grizzly bears on a hilltop
> in the throes of ursine passion. A caribou calf on wobbly legs lacking
> the courage to cross a river and being left behind by the relentless
> migration. A forlorn musk ox prancing toward a mate to discover he had
> found only a tent.
>
> I remember the sound. The sound of a bush plane growling down a sandbar
> and vanishing over a ridgeline, the gasoline noise giving way to the
> tremble of wind on the eardrums in this land where there are no trees to
> rustle the breeze and no one to hear your cries for help. The sound of
wild.
>
> To enter this land is to intrude. It is as fragile as a snowflake.
> Prehistoric fire rings are so fresh you might be tempted to touch the
> tundra and feel for the fading heat of 1,000-year-old campfire.
>
> I felt the remorse of a trespasser, but I entered anyway. Maybe if I
> could help others experience it, they would add to the constituency to
> hang on to it. That's what I told myself.
>
> I remember the animals. A foggy day when I awoke and looked out the mesh
> of my tent into the eyes of a white wolf. Our gazes locked and the white
> vapors of our breaths touched. Then he bolted and tripped. I felt
> embarrassed for his momentary loss of pride. There will never be virtual
> reality to evoke the sensation of being surrounded by grizzlies: two in
> front, one to our left, one to our right, one behind us. What do we do
> when this happens? Shrink down into the mushy tundra and rejoice in our
> grand good fortune. But rejoice quietly, for the grizzlies are feeding.
>
> I remember the vista. From the 1,000-foot summit of the last foothill of
> this continent: a shocking landscape. Plains, uninterrupted from horizon
> to horizon. Hundreds of miles and 180 degrees of Nothing.
>
> There is nothing like Nothing when there is almost none of it left.
> There is nothing like Nothing for imagining everything. There is nothing
> so profoundly humbling as beholding the last of Nothing.
>
> Now the House of Representatives has voted to kill it. No, not the
> animals. The caribou will survive. The wolves and the grizzly bears will
> too for a while, although the industrialization will open the way for
> more hunters, more preemptive "predator control," a faster race to the
> end. But the first to die, what they will kill in a single summer, is
> the wild.
>
> The screech of machinery, the dust trails of trucks, the glint of
> midnight sun off acres of aluminum buildings, this will be our giant
> fire ring to signal the end.
>
> My friend who drives an SUV tells me she has her reasons and won't give
> it up. Her choice will bequeath her daughter, and mine, a diminished
future.
>
> Memories will replace reality, and memories are only chump change. At
> least I have a few pennies of it.
>
> If this administration gets its way in the Senate, my daughter will
> climb into my lap in a couple of years and ask me what is jingling in my
> pocket. I'll draw out the pennies. I will tell her about the home of the
> snarling wolverine and the den of the foxes and the pond nests of the
> loons and the sky dance of the jaegers and the flitting song of a rare
> bluethroat thrush. I will tell her that George Bush and Dick Cheney and
> Don Young took that from her for pennies of their own.
>
> "It is the least hospitable area left in America," explained Don Young
> recently. He was too stupid to understand what he said.


**Urge your Senators, **Urge your Senators,**Urge your Senators,**Urge your
Senators,
to oppose any Arctic drilling provisions when they vote on the
Administration's
Energy bill! To nix the whole bill if Arctic drilling's in it.  If you've
already
urged them -- please do it AGAIN. We must stop this in the Senate!!!!!!

THANK YOU for your help!
>>>>>>>>>>>

Vicky Hoover
Sierra Club Alaska Task Force
(415)977-5527
[log in to unmask]