The senate has voted 51-49 to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling. It's not, however, a done deal:
Nevertheless, environmentalists have lost a superb opportunity to capitalize on what was, or is, inevitable: that drilling would take place in ANWR. Our preference would have been to leave ANWR alone, but given that the thirst for oil would not be quenched and no other practical solution to our energy problems is currently available or economically painless, environmentalists should have seen this coming.
What they should have done, instead of fighting extraction of ANWR's reserves with all their energies and resources, was cut a compromise years ago. They should have agreed to no longer stand in the way of drilling in ANWR if the Interior Department would guarantee that another (or several) large wildlife refuge would be created somewhere else in the United States and if guarantees could be put in place that the oil companies would leave ANWR as much like they found it as is technologically and economically feasible.
Because of the environmentalist's insistence on total victory on this issue those who care about conserving wild lands and natural beauty wind up with nothing when they might have preserved another new refuge from the depredations of developers. With foresight like this, it's no wonder the environmental movement is dying.
This isn't the only tactical mistake the environmentalists have made in this contest. For years they've fought oil drilling in ANWR, contending it would lead to "a spider web of drilling platforms, pipelines and roads that would adversely impact the calving grounds of caribou, polar bears and millions of migratory birds that use the refuge's coastal plain." No one knows if this is true, of course, but the experience we have in other places is that wildlife adjusts and in some ways even prospers. By staking their credibility on dubious arguments and indemonstrable assertions the environmentalists succeed merely in squandering their credibility.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. claimed that it is "foolish to say oil development and a wildlife refuge can coexist." But it is certainly as foolish to say that they can't. One of the jewels in the National Wildlife Refuge system is John Heinz refuge in Philadelphia which is bounded by Philadelphia International Airport, oil storage depots, a busy interstate highway and other scars upon the land. We ardently wish this weren't so, but as long as the refuge has been allowed to maintain something of a land buffer against encroachment the impact of these stressors seems to have been minimal.
Our dream is to see as much land as is possible permanently preserved from development, but sometimes one must take a step back in order to move forward. Yielding a relatively small tract of land in the midst of an inaccessible wilderness in order to acquire more critical habitat elsewhere would have been a fantastic trade-off, benefiting both wildlife and humans. Environmentalists had a chance to do this before the 2004 elections when the oil advocates were politically weaker, and they refused to do it. Now those who care about land preservation must take a step back at ANWR with no good prospect of any step forward anywhere else.
This was not the environmental movement's finest hour, but as Ted Stevens suggests above, perhaps they still have a chance to salvage a victory for preservation when lawmakers hammer out a final budget. Our suggestion is that the oil companies who will profit from ANWR oil be required to purchase and donate land in the lower 48 to the Department of the Interior for use as a refuge, or that their leasing fees be put to this purpose so that valuable wild lands can be incorporated into the National Wildlife Refuge system and preserved their for generations to come.