 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
 |
||||||||||
How to Help Save the Arctic Refuge and Promote Climate Change Legislation
Write a brief or long letter, email, or postcard encouraging your lawmaker to support the proposed wilderness bills for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—HR 39 in the House, and its companion bill in the Senate—with your thoughts on the issue.
Use your own ideas, individual letters really count, but here are some talking points:
- The majority of Alaska’s North Slope is available for oil leasing, so we need to protect the last vestige of wilderness: the 1.5 million acres of the Refuge coastal plain. See map below
- Hundreds of thousands of nesting birds, the porcupine caribou herd, muskoxen and other animals will lose vital habitat if the coastal plain is made into an oil field.
- A soon to be released, three-year study conducted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the oil companies and the Wildlife Conservation Society with a half dozen plots inside Prudhoe Bay and in pristine areas of the North Slope have shown that the oil fields have increased foxes, glaucous gulls, ravens, and jaegers—that are preying heavily upon nesting birds.
- The Arctic is warming much faster than any region of the lower 48. Although the jury is still out on how northern wildlife will adapt, it’s clear that their Arctic habitat is rapidly changing. Amid this dissonance, if an oil field is erected in the Refuge, further difficulties will be introduced to the many wild animals that depend upon the sanctity of the coastal plain.
- The amount of oil beneath the coastal plain will not wean this country from foreign oil, and it will take nearly a half century to extract little more than a year’s supply for America! See graph below
- If Congress were to pass higher fuel (CAFE) standards for our automobiles, or if everyone inflated their tires to the proper pressure, we would save more fuel than found in the Refuge. See graph below
- Please support the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act (S. 309) and the Safe Climate Act, because both establish the necessary 80% reduction in global warming pollution below 1990 levels.
- Tell your Congressman that you look forward to hearing their thoughts on the matter; if you want to know their position on this and other issues before writing the letter, google their name and look up their voting record, or go to CongressReportCard.org.
If you want more info on contacting your representatives in Congress about the Arctic Nat’l Wildlife Refuge, visit the Alaska Wilderness League for easy email instructions.
See the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Murie Timeline.
