GWICH'IN HYPOCRACY

GWICH'IN HYPOCRACY: Anybody who's following the ANWR debate closely should be interested in the news that the Gwich'in people have just joined an enterprise to drill for oil immediately east of a major migratory path for caribou. The Gwich'in have been used extensively in the anti-drilling propaganda war because of their opposition to oil exploration on the coastal plain of the refuge. They don't actually live there, but they have expressed concern that it might upset the caribou, which they consider sacred. Apparently they are not as worried about the effects of drilling on herds traveling near their own land.

Many of the hysterical appeals to stop drilling in ANWR have focused on the fact that the Gwich'in people consider the coastal plain to be too sacred to even visit. For example, the Alaskan Wilderness League declares on it's website:

The Gwich'in share the range of the Porcupine River caribou herd, except for the place the caribou go to bear their young each year: the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To the Gwich'in, the coastal plain is sacred. Even in years of famine, the people did not travel to the coastal plain, where hunting would have been easy during the post-calving gathering of the herd.

Unfortunately, the Gwich'in's desire to restrict access to their sacred coastal plain ignores the native people who actually live there. You'd run into problems, too, if you decided that your next-door neighbor's backyard was hallowed ground, not to be touched. The Inupiat Eskimos who live in ANWR are very much in favor of drilling, because it will provide them with money for development. They have also seen firsthand the environmental success of oil drilling at nearby Prudhoe Bay, where caribou herds have quadrupled since 1968.

This conflict between the Inupiats and the Gwich'in mirrors that between Alaskans, who overwhelmingly support drilling on the coastal plain, and the many environmentalist mainlanders who will never visit ANWR, but just like the idea of preserving some piece of remote wilderness somewhere. Of course, most of ANWR (particularly the beautiful mountainous parts seen in the DNC ads) is permanently off-limits to drilling. And the caribou seem to thrive despite oil drilling, which is probably why the Gwich'in don't seem to mind drilling on land they control.

Posted by shilohbucher at November 26, 2001 10:00 AM