(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Biden Administration Protects Millions of Acres of Arctic Alaska [1]
['Jenny Shalant']
Date: 2024-07
The Arctic under threat
Each spring, Indigenous villages at the outskirts of the NPR-A await sights of one of the Arctic’s heartiest creatures, the caribou. Right now, these shaggy, long-legged reindeer are making their way through the spongy soils of Alaska’s North Slope. It’s calving season, so many of the animals are heavy with pregnant bellies. Following routes ingrained in their collective memory, some of the herds have traveled as far as 400 miles from the southern side of the central Brooks Range, where the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sits. The caribou arrive on the rapidly flowering grounds of the NPR-A, ready to rear their young and fatten up on cotton grass and other tundra blooms.
In recent decades, the journey has grown increasingly treacherous. When President Biden approved the massive Willow oil drilling project in the NPR-A last year, the caribou—among myriad Arctic species—were already suffering in a region that’s warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. Climate effects have touched on everything from the stability of migration corridors as sea ice disappears to the ballooning populations of pesky mosquitoes, which can uproot caribou from their feeding grounds and cut them off from the nourishment they need to prepare for their next trip.
On this landscape, of course, they aren’t alone in facing climate-fueled food insecurity. The caribou are a sacred food to the region’s Indigenous communities, who are not only concerned about declining caribou populations but also about the very ability to preserve the meat from their hunts. The thawing of permafrost is causing the food that the Inupiat once could store year-round in underground ice cellars to rot.
“Will we get our foods in the places we need them to be in and in the times we need them?” Ahtuangaruak asks. “Will they be in the quantities we need and will they be healthy for our families’ needs?”
What is the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska?
In 1923, seeking an emergency oil supply for the U.S. Navy, President Warren G. Harding signed an executive order establishing the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4. (Harding’s was the same administration embroiled in the Teapot Dome scandal, which involved dubious oil company transactions on public lands elsewhere in the American West.) Despite the original intention, the reserve has remained largely undeveloped, and drilling there has been hotly contested for decades.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/biden-administration-protects-millions-acres-arctic-alaska
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
