The Human Cost of Bush’s Arctic Policy

The Inupiat people lovingly refer to the ocean as “our garden.” But there are problems in the “garden” in the Beaufort Sea to the east.

Rosemary lives in Nuiqsut (“new-WICK-sit”), a village over 600 miles to the east of Wainwright and near Prudhoe Bay. The ever-expanding oilfields with their associated airplane and helicopter traffic, airports, roads, pipelines, gravel mines, noise, and flares have altered the landscape and the ways the animals use the land. Seismic tests push migratory caribou farther south, away from Nuiqsut, and migratory bowhead whales further north, out to sea. Causeways and gravel islands divert migratory fish away from the coast.

…Large-scale industrial development is simply not comlan left by the Bush administration will likely be scrapped. The plan opens the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts for drilling, Salazar observed.

…Exxon managed to recover only 3 to 11 percent of the 11 to 38 million gallons of oil that spilled in Prince William Sound. The Arctic Ocean is an even less forgiving environment with its four months of darkness, sea ice, bitter temperatures, and storms. There is no proven technology to clean up or recover spilled oil in broken ice. None. Dispersants don’t work in cold water with Prudhoe Bay crude.

Huffington Post