Conscious Choice: Don’t Let Bush Take Your 5 Percent

March 2005 | Editor’s Note

Don’t Let Bush Take Your 5 Percent

A 95-to-5 split is a pretty good deal for the side that’s holding the 95 percent share. But apparently 95 percent is not enough for some people.

I’m talking about the centerpiece of perhaps the nation’s most contentious land use battle, Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which President George W. Bush wants to open up to his oil drilling buddies.

Now, before you put this down thinking this doesn’t have anything to do with anyone living this far south of the Arctic, let me explain to you the refuge is your 5 percent. It’s also the breeding grounds of some of our favorite birds, including some that travel from as far away as Hawaii and South America. And then let me describe what happened at the special preview of a Field Museum of Natural History exhibit: “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land” (photographs by Subhanker Banerjee, through May 8).

In the gallery Peter Solomon, a Gwich’in Athabascan Indian, points on a map to the small 20-mile swath of land on Alaska’s northern coast, called the North Slope. It’s the birthing grounds for caribou, which provide the major source of food for his village where the average income is only a couple of thousand dollars.

“They have 95 percent of the land to the west, but now they want this five percent,” he says. “Why?” he smiles at the apparent naiveté of the question. “Because they can.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Dick Durbin, who moments before had told the small museum crowd: “Remember, it’s your land,” is rushing to his next appearance through the back corridors of the museum. He explains that the fight has grown even more difficult as Bush is trying to attach the measure onto the federal budget proposal. That means, he says, it only needs a simple majority (51 votes) for passage, instead of the 60 votes it needed before to override the filibuster that he and his colleagues had put in place.

He offers up the papers in his hand when asked why a senator from the Midwest is fighting to save a refuge in a state so far away. (see Choice News).

The papers document Durbin’s trip to the Arctic. He points out the refuge was established in 1960 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who lead the Allies to victory in World War II. Perhaps because he saw so much death and destruction, Eisenhower understood the importance of protecting unspoiled natural lands for perpetuity. But instead of honoring this war hero’s legacy, Bush wants to destroy the refuge in the name of national defense. In another irony, it’s mainly Democrats that are at the forefront of the battle to save the land that a Republican president considered his legacy gift to the American people. Durbin says it’s a bad tradeoff in exchange for only “a six-month supply of our nation’s energy needs.” So if this isn’t about oil, what’s really going on?

Now, there’s a lot about this that I don’t know. But here’s what I do know about these kinds of situations. I learned it on a northern California mountain cliff. How and why I got there is another story, but sitting for days on the edge of a wilderness that was also under siege, taught me a few things. I learned that embracing natural pristine places on the outside is a very efficient way to access pristine places on the inside. And when we reach that pure place within, we change — for the better. We become less self-absorbed. We care less about getting ahead, and more about getting along. We start asking questions about what is right and good for all of creation.

This is threatening to people who don’t understand this bigger picture of the whole, and thus spend their time trying to control everyone else. They do this by wiping out the natural ways we provide for ourselves, and then convince us we need things we don’t really need, so that we get hooked into wanting more and more, while they dole out less and less, until eventually they own it all.

But I also know that just when it looked the most hopeless, and impossible, the impossible happened. Enough people who felt like me were able to save that small part of the planet. It took an act of Congress. We need to do it again, fast. For all our relations.

The measure is expected to come up for a vote in the Senate in mid-March, according to Kim Novick, Great Lakes organizer for the Alaska Coalition. To get involved: visit www.AlaskaCoalition.org or call 202-628-1843.

— Marla Donato

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