“[T]he world’s thirst for oil is outstripping the industry’s ability to produce it. That imbalance has driven up energy prices and can’t be fixed through conservation alone. Allowing ANWR drilling would show that the nation is finally getting serious about acting in its best interest by tapping a rich energy source and curbing its dependence on Middle Eastern dictatorships. Now that gasoline is again closer to $2 a gallon than $3, a sense of complacency is returning. That’s predictable but regrettable. Extracting more oil from Alaska in an environmentally sensitive fashion is important insurance against future energy shocks”. — – USA Today editorial
The devil is in the details of “environmentally sensitive.”
What exactly do people consider this phrase to mean?
The W-R in ANWR stand for Wildlife Refuge. Wildlife Refuge is what we call land we set aside to provide a safe place for the animals we share this earth with to find food, breed, and live out their lives. These activities are sometimes incompatible with industrial activities as I’m sure you can well imagine if you stop to think how you’d feel if a well or mine were perched in your backyard, your kitchen, your bedroom?
Those who advocate for drilling in this wildlife refuge claim that the activity will only disturb a fraction of the acreage, which is almost true. The actual footprint of the drill pads is small individually but will be connected by an invasive network of roads and pipelines, electric lines that would divide, cut up, fragment the land, much as how interstates and els sometime blight neighborhoods, Animals are sensitive to these interruptions in the texture of the land they are used to- but more sensitive is the land itself- the permafrost is a very slow growing environment- enzymatic activity is greatly reduced at these temperatures and hence recovery from any kind of assault on the land takes a very long time.
The kind of damage to the land there would be evident for centuries I am told. The disruption to the web of life there would be serious. After we’ve ruined that land for a 3 mos supply of oil, what new environment will we inflict our voracious apetite toward?
This is something that every group of people in this nation would be affected by for in diversity there is strength in nature as well as in societies. I hope that we can all come together and protect this planet for future generations of all of us whatever our ethnicities. Right now though, I am frustrated by what I have come to notice, thru researching on the web and experience, is a lack of involvement by peoples of diverse cultures (though I am not necessarily saying a lack of caring) in advocating for environmental protection. Thru the site I came here through, I am downright discouraged.
I know very few Hispanic persons who are involved in environmental advocacy and research, and they and have as few answers as I have as to why this is so. Why is this? For instance, if ~ 1% of visitors to our national parks are Hispanic, what kind of future do these lands face if they are not valued by what could come to be the majority population?