Help STOP the ARCTIC OCEAN MULTI-SALE DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT

DEADLINE: March 30, 2009

Alaska Native coastal communities need your support. Please submit a comment to the Minerals Management Service by the deadline of March 30, 2009 on the ARCTIC OCEAN MULTI-SALE DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT

Please take action to spur Obama’s officials to change course in Arctic Ocean away from massive Bush administration leasing and drilling plans.

The Interior Department proposes to offer 73 million acres off Alaska for oil and gas development that will endanger Native communities, harm wildlife, and add to global warming.

The Arctic Ocean Multi-sale draft EIS proposes to lease the entire 73 million acres, using one EIS for the next 4 lease sales starting in 2010.

Oil corporations already have millions of acres leased in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

These lease sales have the potential to seriously affect subsistence resources and Inupiat culture. You can join with others to help change this situation with the new Obama Administration.

Alaskan Indigenous Communities have witnessed offshore oil and gas development destroy communities, disrupt their traditional indigenous cultures, soil beaches, and kill countless numbers of birds, marine mammals, fish, and other wildlife. The Arctic is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of offshore drilling. With broken sea ice prevalent and waters that are treacherous for oil rigs, pipelines and tankers, the threat of oil spills—for which there is no technology available to clean up—is constant.

We have an opportunity to prevent these catastrophes in our Arctic seas.

Please urge Ken Salazar, the new Secretary of Interior, and the Minerals Management Service to stop Arctic oil and gas projects and keep the new Administration’s commitment to reversing climate change, protecting important ecological areas, and respecting the rights of indigenous cultures.

How to Submit Written Comments:
Send in comments by March 30, 2009.

Find a Sample Comment/Letter Below

Send comments to:
Regional Director, MMS Alaska OCS Region     
Email: akwebmaster@mms.gov

Department of the Interior
Public Comment Form Online:
Click here to quickly and easily submit your comment online at the DOI website. Use the comment/letter as a guide for your submission.

Hai’ Keegwaadhat Ooli’ (Thank You, May Creator Bless You)

Faith Gemmill, Executive Director
Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands

Comment Title: Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Sea Lease Sales 209, 212, 217, and 221 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS

Sample Comments/Letter:

I am writing to protest proposed plans for offshore oil and gas leasing and drilling in Alaska’s Arctic and Bristol Bay.  I urge Interior Secretary Salazar and the Minerals Management Service to take a time-out and immediately halt all activities related to these shortsighted and ill-advised plans. 

Before taking any action to open the Arctic to offshore oil and gas drilling there is an urgent need  to consider rejecting the leases of these areas based on a truthful and full scientific assessment of the ecological health of the Arctic ecosystem.

The traditional homelands of Alaska’s Native Peoples depend on this complex ecosystem, which is rapidly melting and changing do to global climate shifts. These conditions are causing grave consequences on the populations of bowhead whales, beluga whales, walrus, seals, sea birds, polar bears, and fish. To add the destructive process of oil exploration and drilling will further the extinction of and changing migrations furthering the disruption of the Indigenous Peoples of this area who have subsisted upon these living marine resources for millennia. .  It is socially and ecologically irresponsible to compound this stress to the Arctic.

Furthermore, to date there is no comprehensive management plan to protect the rapidly melting Arctic, no technology exists to clean up oil spills, there is no comprehensive energy plan for the nation, it accelerates global warming, and indigenous community concerns were severely marginalized during the development of the plans.  These plans are so unsound that Bush’s own Environmental Protection Agency and National Marine Fisheries Service both recommended that they not move forward.

Despite these objections, and over the voices of countless scientists and indigenous community leaders, the Minerals Management Service has leased almost 2.8 million additional acres in the previously undeveloped Chukchi Sea--the heart of polar bear habitat.  The Administration also attempted to move forward with drilling in the Beaufort Sea in an area critical to both endangered bowhead whales and the Inupiat communities that subsist upon them.

Instead of addressing these ill-advised actions that have not received proper environmental review and public process, the Minerals Management Service is attempting to immediately push forward four additional lease sales covering 72.5 million acres and a new Five-Year Program that would add two additional lease sales in the Arctic and would also sacrifice the Bering Sea’s Bristol Bay--the nation’s richest fishing grounds.

Now is the time for the new Administration to address climate change, a responsible energy policy, and protection of the ecologically and culturally rich Arctic environment.  Instead of rushing to drill this fragile and poorly-understood ecosystem, we must take a ‘time out’ to truly understand the consequences of our actions.

I urge Secretary Salazar and the Minerals Management Service to halt the Arctic Multi-Sale EIS process and undertake baseline scientific studies in the Arctic, engage in a respectful dialogue with the traditional indigenous communities of Alaska, commit to renewable energy initiatives, and protect sensitive ecological areas such as the Arctic Ocean and Bristol Bay. Furthermore the Five Year Program should reflect these priorities and recognize our need for a ‘time out’ on development in these areas.  It is time that the Department of Interior once again fulfills its role to be a responsible steward of our natural heritage.

Powershift and Wilderness Week- Washington DC Feb. 28-March 04

Faith Gemmill, REDOIL Executive Director
Marty Cobenias, IEN Administrator

We recently had the opportunity to attend Wilderness Week in Washington DC.  This year we (REDOIL) were able to attend with about 15 Alaska Natives from various regions of the State of Alaska.  Some were there in an official capacity representing their respective Tribes, some were there to represent their Native organizations and some were there to represent themselves as individuals joining the collective effort of 60 other activists from various other states in the US.  We went to Washington DC, the Nation’s capital with a specific purpose.  Our purpose was to meet with key congressional offices and leadership within the Obama Administration with a call for protection of places in America’s Arctic, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Alaska Outer Continental Shelf (Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, Bristol Bay and Cook Inlet) that are imperiled at this time.  The Alaska Native leadership that attended Wilderness Week were also joined by Canadian Gwich’in leaders.  Our delegation of Alaska Native leaders and Canadian First Nation leaders was very powerful and the work we did in DC was definitely remarkable and significant in that we represented the voices of our communities on these important issues.

The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, has been a political target and eyed by major oil companies such as BP, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil.  The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge represents the last 5% of Alaska’s coast that is still protected, 95% is already available for development.  Yet the companies, the State of Alaska and their high-powered lobbyists have worked to gain access to the Arctic Refuge.  We are defending this area, we are doing it as we have been instructed by our elders in 1988, when the political battle was thrown into the public arena.  We have moved forward with all the strength of our elders and in the spirit of our future generations…defending and holding the line. 

So, we all made the long journey to the Nation’s capital to speak for this area and to speak for the other areas in Alaska that are now imperiled.  The Bush legacy… The Federal Government plans to open 83 Million acres of vast areas of Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to oil and gas leasing. Lease areas proposed include two in the Beaufort Sea, three in the Chukchi, two in the North Aleutian Basin (Bristol Bay), and two in Cook Inlet.  Leases have been sold, and we are plaintiffs in legal cases calling for overturning the OCS five-year plan in Alaska. Since the Bush Administration promoted offshore development in Alaska and streamlined the plans hastily, without any thorough evaluation of the Arctic Ocean, lack of knowledge of the prime subsistence use areas within the OCS, and any concrete plan on how to clean up oil spilled in broken ice conditions, we were left with little option than the courts.  We now hope that the new Congress and Obama Administration realize that the OCS five-year plan is detrimental to the subsistence lifestyle of coastal communities and immediately suspend this plan.  The Tribes that will be impacted most have even passed resolutions calling for a moratorium on offshore development in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and Bristol Bay.

Alaska Native coastal communities have depended on marine subsistence resources since time immemorial.  The Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, North Aleutian Basin (Bristol Bay) and Cook Inlet among other offshore areas are critical to Alaska Natives subsistence.  REDOIL is deeply concerned with the risks posed to sensitive marine and coastal environments from oil and gas activities in the Alaskan OCS.  Vital subsistence resources that are intrinsic to the livelihood of coastal Alaska Native communities within the entire OCS area are at risk.  Due to the serious risk posed to these ecological areas and the communities that are within these areas or in close proximity who rely upon coastal resources, REDOIL strongly recommends the entire Alaska OCS be immediately suspended and excluded from the 2007-2012 leasing program. Federally recognized tribes, coastal communities and various conservation and Native organizations have consistently raised concern and objection to the Bush Administration’s Era of shortsighted and fast tracked OCS energy plans, these objections remain to be addressed. 

We also addressed the Yukon Flats Wildlife Refuge Land Trade issue.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Doyon Limited have proposed a land exchange that would grant Doyon Limited, full title to 110,000 acres of Refuge land, and subsurface title to another 97,000 acres of Refuge land.  In return, the Service would initially receive title to approximately 150,000 acres of Doyon lands.  Doyon, Limited has plans to explore and drill for oil and gas on the lands, and the Service has the potential to acquire additional lands if oil and gas development occurs.  The proposed Yukon Flats Land Exchange will facilitate oil and gas development on lands that are now an integral part of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge within the ancestral territories of the Gwich’in Nation.  Oil and gas development is not compatible with the purposes of the refuge or Gwich’in subsistence.  The exchange would give oil companies a foot in the door of the Yukon Flats, which would gradually transform this natural landscape into a sprawling industrial complex, with permanent damage to the land, culture, and human population.  The land exchange would set a dangerous precedent, allowing development on refuges and other conservation system units.  Also allowing the acquisition of Native Allotments within any wildlife refuge throughout the State of Alaska.  This is unacceptable, our homelands are there to provide for the needs of our future generations, and if we allow the lands to be bought, sold and traded, in essence we are denying our children their birthright.  This issue is in the EIS process.  We have had hearings in Gwich’in communities; it was very clear that 95% of the testimony in all the hearings were in adamant opposition.  My people believe the land will provide for us always, our subsistence way of life is so interconnected to our homelands, and we want to pass this way of life on to our children, how will we be able to do that if a massive industrial oil and gas complex is rooted in the midst of our villages and the veins of this field spread like tentacles throughout our territories? Leaders from the Yukon Flats attended the meetings in DC with us, and spoke on this important issue, raising awareness of this issue to the new members and governmental agencies.  We would hope this erroneous plan is rejected by the Obama Administration, Congress and the Fish and Wildlife Service now. 

Click here to read the full report.

Alaska Wilderness Week

February 28 to March 4, 2009
Washington D.C.

by Marty Cobenais

I was very fortunate to have been invited and accepted to attend the Alaska Wilderness Week, sponsored by the Alaska Wilderness League, Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, held in
Washington D.C. February 28 to March 4, 2009. The bill that we were there to ask Representatives and Senators to support and co-sponsor was H.R. 39.  There were 50 participants from 18 states and Canada.

In 1960, President Eisenhower began the bipartisan legacy of protecting this area for future generations.  At that time 8.9 million acres were set aside as the “Arctic National Wilderness Range”.  In 1980, President Carter, expanded this area to be designated as Wilderness, thus protecting it from oil development and other harmful activities and remained it the “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge”.   However, 1.5 million acres of the Refuge, the biologically rich coastal plain, was NOT protected as wilderness.  Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) has introduced H.R. 39, a bill “to preserve the Arctic coastal plain ….as wilderness in recognition of its extraordinary natural ecosystems and for the permanent good of present and future generations of Americans.”  Alaska Wilderness League

Prior to speaking with Representatives and Senators we obtained first hand education from 15 Alaskan and Canadian Natives about the Arctic Refuge on the North Slope of Alaska, and the threats that oil companies are making to destroy one of the world’s last pristine wilderness areas to expand oil exploration.  This oil exploration would affect the land and sea animals, plants and the environment but mostly it would affect the people in the areas that rely on the animals and plants to survive.  The people in the area who would be affected are members of the Gwich’in Nation, located in Northeastern Alaska and North West Canada.   Also affected would be the Inupiaq which are known for their traditional whaling culture.

Some of the animals that would be greatly affected by oil exploration and drilling would be the Porcupine Caribou Herd and the Bowhead Whale.  The caribou herd travels hundreds of miles to the coastal plain area to birth and nurse their young.  For the caribou, there is no alternative to this vital and sensitive habitat.  The herd’s migration and calving is a spectacle reminiscent to the Serengeti’s wildebeest and the buffalo herds that once thundered across the Great Plains.  The Gwich’in Nation, who call the coastal plain “Iizhik Gwatsan Gwandaii Goodlit” which translates out to The Sacred Place Where Life Begins, adamantly oppose drilling in the area and strongly support permanent protection.  The Gwich’in people believe that the oil drilling would make the caribou move their traditional calving grounds.  If the caribou moved their calving grounds, it would also move the annual migration route or it could even disrupt the whole circle of life and lead to the demise of the existence of the caribou herd itself.  The Gwich’in people have their villages located along the migration route as a main source of subsistence in their food supply.   If the caribou move their migration routes it would create a significant loss of subsistence in their food supplies and way of life.  So this suddenly becomes a human rights issue for these people.

Click here to read the full report.

20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie

Monday 23 March 2009
by: Greg Palast  |  Visit article original @ OpEdNews

Spilled oil remains.

"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"

The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.

"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT!"

She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.

It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?

So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.

The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke.

And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces- colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later, IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.

Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.

It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge - and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?

Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit. Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" - but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.

So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching.

Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"

Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.

So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" - was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.

And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid- Sound without the emergency set-up.

 Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.

Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.

Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."

Exxon promised - promised - to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non- Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.

On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.

The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.

Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."

Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.

Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.

They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award - but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.

Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill - and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.

Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.

After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.

Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess we're all some kind of Native now."

Image Credit: David Janka of the conservation group WWF with a hand stained by oil. (Photo: National Geographic)