Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Public Lands Tag Sale

By Joan McCarter, 1-29-08

Last week, while everyone was distracted by a faltering worldwide economy and free-falling markets, the administration made Alaska the target of it’s renewed renovation. It snuck through something called the Chuckchi Sea Oil and Gas Lease Sale 193 and opened up 2.4 million acres of the state’s Tongass National Forest to logging and road building.

They must have something against bears.

As my friend Joel Connelly points out, the Chukchi Sea sale covers about half of the U.S. polar bear population’s essential habitat. Of course, the polar bear isn’t ye considered an endangered species because another arm of the Interior Department, Fish and Wildlife, have decided to delay making a decision on a polar bear listing. Anyone else smell something fishy?

Not at all, says the Bush administration. We had to delay making our decision because we got all this new information about just how dire the global situation for polar bears is. No, really, that’s their excuse.

The delay stems from a backlog of work, not scientific uncertainty or a pending lease sale for oil and gas development in polar bear habitat, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said during a telephone press briefing....

Evaluation of a suite of reports from the U.S. Geological Survey that concluded two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could go extinct by 2050 prompted the delay, the service said.

The reports from the USGS showing that the polar bears are likely to be gone in the next generation actually propel the Bush administration not to rush to protect the animals, but to rush to open up what’s left of their literally shrinking habitat to potentially devastating oil and gas development. There’s a surprise.

But that’s not all. Alaska’s brown bear population might have to start getting a little cozier with one another as their habitat gets sliced up by roads and clearcuts. In another assault on Alaska last week, the administration released a management plan for the Tongass National Forest that will open millions of acres of currently wild and roadless federal land to logging and road building.

At 17 million acres, roughly the size of West Virginia, the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska is the country’s largest national forest and the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rain forest. It contains grizzly and black bears, wolves, eagles and five species of wild Alaskan salmon.

Under the new plan, about 3.4 million acres of the forest would be open to logging and development. Of this acreage, about 2.4 million is in roadless areas, and about 663,000 acres is considered to have trees valuable for timber production.

There’s just over half a million acres that has valuable timber, and the whole 3.4 million acreage is being opened for road building. Well, that pretty much sums up the Bush administration’s ability to do math. Remember when the Iraq war was going to cost less than $50 billion?

Money has everything to do with. Our money. The new management plan for the Tongass will effectively raise no revenue for the U.S. government, as the U.S. taxpayers will have to pay to build the roads the timber companies need to access the forest. In Connelly’s words, “In 2002, the U.S. Forest Service spent $36 million on its Tongass timber sales program, and received back just $1.2 million from timber companies.”

That’s not much of a return on investment. But this crowd is happy to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury, as we’ve seen time and time again, as long as their buddies in the private sector get just a little bit richer.

Good news for a very wealthy few, and bad news for bears.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.

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