The Bush administration’s Bureau of Land Management is pushing to open 400,000 acres of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s arctic to oil drilling even though the area was put off-limits to extractive industries six years ago to protect area wildlife. The Clinton administration brokered a deal in 1998 to block oil leasing in the environmentally sensitive Teshekpuk Lake region of the National Petroleum Reserve, which is home to caribou, grizzly bears, wolves, migratory birds and many other charismatic wildlife species.
"We believe very strongly that we can appropriately explore and develop the area and protect the resource values in the new area that would be made available," says Henri Bisson, the Bureau of Land Management's state director in Anchorage.
Bisson claims new drilling technologies would minimize the impact on area wildlife, and might attract additional wildlife. He also says expanded drilling in the disputed area could more than double production of Alaskan crude.
Environmentalists such as Eleanor Huffines of the Wilderness Society do not believe that the oil industry could develop the area without disturbing local wildlife populations. “Studies have shown that calving caribou are significantly disturbed by oil and gas development,” Huffines says, adding that the Wilderness Society does not oppose any drilling in the area outright, but that the plan proposed by BLM lacks balance.
Source: http://www.news-miner.com/Stories/0,1413,113~7244~2204316,00.html
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