Posts tagged with INUPIAT

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Tremors of Anxiety Over Arctic Drilling

Green: Living




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A Voice From the Next Offshore Oil Frontier

ImageDamon Winter/The New York Times A bone from a bowhead whale skull rests on the Arctic shore near Barrow, whose Inupiat residents center their culture around whaling and their livelihoods, often, around the oil industry.
Green: Politics

On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had a meeting with the only people  outside the gulf region whose waters had been opened to offshore oil exploration. He was in Barrow, Alaska, the capital of the North Slope Borough, where people have the same conflicted feelings about the oil industry as residents of the gulf states do. The energy industry centered in Prudhoe Bay is the economic engine of the North Slope, helping preserve the Inupiat culture, but it also presents a potential threat to that culture. Mayor Edward Itta of the North Slope Borough e-mailed answers to our questions about these conflicts. (The transcript of the exchange has been edited and condensed.)


How did the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April and yesterday’s explosion on a different gulf offshore platform change your thinking about the merits of offshore oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea?


Those two explosions in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t change my mind about offshore oil exploration. They just made me more worried. I’ve never thought it was a good idea to drill for oil and gas in an ocean where we’ve been coexisting with migrating bowhead whales and other marine mammals for thousands of years. But when both Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington favor drilling off this coast, we’ve got to get realistic. To me, that means recognizing that it’s probably going to happen, and then demanding a regulatory framework that will truly protect these waters.

I’ve got a list of very reasonable requirements to minimize the risks — things like doing baseline science before the drilling begins, so we can measure any changes as development proceeds. If you don’t have a baseline, how will you know if the ocean is being stressed as time goes on? We also need a Coast Guard presence up here. This is the only ocean that has no one watching over the ship traffic. Those are just two of our concerns. You see, this ocean is still a frontier, and I want to make sure we have the right precautions in place at the front end.


Has the industry or the government demonstrated to your satisfaction that they would have adequate response Read more…