Senate hearing July 28 on bill (S.1063) attacking Glacier Bay National Park—Your support for the park needed now.

Along with the National Park Service (NPS) in Alaska, Alaska’s Senators Lisa Murkowski (R) and Sen. Mark Begich (D) want to let members of the Huna Tlingit tribe of SE Alaska collect glaucous-winged gull eggs in Glacier Bay National Park.  Their bill, S. 1063, would authorize this subsistence practice in a park long closed to the extraction of wildlife, including subsistence hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering by Alaska Natives.

Glacier Bay is one of the nation’s finest wilderness national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.  It is a World Heritage Site, a major component of an International Biosphere Reserve, and a critically important summer feeding ground for endangered humpback whales.  It provides essential security for Steller sea lions.  It fulfills Congress’s mandate to be one of the national parks in Alaska that “…are intended to be large sanctuaries where fish and wildlife may roam freely…without the changes that extensive human activity would cause.”  

The Sierra Club strongly opposes S. 1063.  Opening this park would inflict harm on the gulls—by reducing the number of fledglings in the park by 22%, according to the National Park Service (NPS)—and it would likely result in  proposals for additional subsistence practices in the park.  The tribe is on public record as wanting the park opened to subsistence hunting for mountain goats and seals.  

If Congress were to approve S. 1063, other federally recognized tribes in Alaska could ask for the same privilege and other perhaps other subsistence practices in Alaska’s other three sanctuary parks, Katmai National Park, the old Mt. McKinley part of Denali National Park, and Kenai Fjords National Park.  

And the potential unraveling of the park sanctuary standard might not stop in our 49^th state.  If enacted, S. 1063 could trigger similar Native American demands for subsistence access to national parks in other states.  As Glacier Bay goes, so goes Rocky Mountain, Yosemite, Yellowstone, North Cascades, and other premier national park sanctuaries?

Opening Glacier Bay to egg gathering is also completely unnecessary.  Just outside the park boundaries and within Huna Tlingit traditional territory are a half-dozen traditional gull egg collection sites of the tribe.  In a demonstration project in 2001 and 2002 the National Park Service assisted tribal members to successfully collect gull eggs on one of these non-park sites.  This proved that NPS facilitation of such non-park collection trips is a “reasonable and feasible” alternative to opening the park.

Please act to defend the park – one phone call

Members of the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks and the full Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee need to hear from Sierra Club members from throughout the nation:

If your senator is listed below, please call his/her office before July 28 and urge opposition to S. 1063: explain you oppose this Glacier Bay National Park gull-egg collecting bill because:
(pick one or two)
 **You care about continuing the proud tradition of Glacier Bay National Park as a wildlife sanctuary and one of our national treasures, a world-renowned park which John Muir explored in the late 19^th century and which is a park dear to the heart of Sierra Club members.  
  ** You support Native subsistence in Alaska but not in this national park long closed to wildlife extraction, especially as there are alternative proven egg-collecting sites outside the park.
** You fear the precedent would lead to similar extractive uses in other Alaska national park sanctuaries and maybe in famed national parks in other states.
** If you have visited Glacier Bay National Park – let them know.

If you do not have your Senator’s direct office number, call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Senator.