FWS + ANWR = Beware

by

Dave Harbour

(See the testimony I wrote for the hearing tonight.)

(More ANWR Testimony and Photos Here.)

While our thousands of Canadian and Lower 48 readers cannot participate in TODAY’S Anchorage meeting, they may find this ANWR evaluation process reflective of the Obama Administration’s continuing environmental initiatives

 
Today, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service will hold a public meeting in Anchorage regarding its intent to revise the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Comprehensive Conservation Plan.   The meeting will be held in the Service’s Alaska regional office, at 1011 East Tudor Road.  Public comments will be taken in the Gordon Watson Conference Room from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and again from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. On May 13th, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service will hold a similar public meeting in Fairbanks in the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center. (See the Federal Register Link.)
 
Please attend one of these meetings and make a brief comment as a citizen, member of an organization or representing a business or local government agency.  (See Today’s Anchorage Daily News Editorial and review this great resource: CONSUMER ENERGY ALLIANCE-ANWR ISSUE)
 
Here’s why we citizens should participate:
 
·         Section 304(g)(1) of ANILCA, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act orders the Interior Secretary to “…prepare, and from time to time, revise, a comprehensive conservation plan for each refuge.” The CCP can completely change the way a refuge is managed, affecting every sort of public use and access within a refuge. 
·         The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service webpage confirms a certain bias infecting management of the Service’s 8,000 employees, stating that, “Worldwide scientific consensus tells us that human activity is changing the climate system itself. As climate changes, the abundance and distribution of wildlife and fish will also change. Some species will adapt successfully to an abruptly warming world; many will struggle; and others will disappear.”
·         It bases its philosophy on authority of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) whose policy makers were caught perpetrating a global warming fraud.
·         The webpage goes on to verify that, “As the nation’s principle federal conservation agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is dedicated to helping reduce the impacts of climate change on fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats.”
·         What we are therefore facing in Anchorage today and in Fairbanks on Thursday is the nation’s principal conservation agency, basing a revision of the ANWR CCP on a “concensus” supporting climate change that may require agency action to reduce climate change impacts.
 
This is a dangerous direction for an agency to take because:
 
·         Citizens can no longer trust the FWS to make science based decisions, but, rather, decisions based on ‘worldwide scientific concensus’, a political but not a scientific term, promoted by the fraud-consumed IPCC.
·         If FWS  seeks to change ANWR’s status, reducing public access and activity, it can use climate change ‘concensus’ as a basis for a whole range of changes to river access and travel, rights-of-way, hunting, fishing, natural resource extraction, and commercial uses or economic activities including tourism concessions, wildlife viewing.
·         Though FWS says only Congress can decide whether or not to develop oil and gas resources within ANWR’s Coastal Plain (1002 area), it could recommend that Congress apply a wilderness designation to any area within the Refuge.
·         The Alaska Statehood Act (text) and the citizens compact (SJR 31, 11-5-96 adopted) upon which it is based assumes that the State will participate in a sharing of natural resource revenue derived from federal lands in Alaska. If the federal government withdraws those lands from use and/or access, the citizens of the state are affected.

It would, therefore, be important for Alaskans at public hearings to provide testimony into the record that diminishes any rationalization the FWS may have for further restricting access and use of an area the size of the state of South Carolina.