It’s an awe-inspiring landscape of soaring mountains and lake-filled plains that freeze in the Arctic’s dark winter and burst with color in the flowering summer light. ANWR is a homeland to wolves and whales, polar bears and caribou that migrate through well-worn trails and birth to the rhythm of circumpolar seasons.
And, above all, it is one of the few landscapes still protected and sustainably used by Traditional and Indigenous Knowledge experts of the Gwich’in people, a tribe in the northern part of Alaska and Canada that have relied on the porcupine caribou for thousands of years for food, cultural and spiritual well-being.
What ANWR is not is our country’s energy future.
This is a huge and dangerous mistake. No lease agreements should be made in weeks before Trump leave office, and come January 20 Joe Biden should refuse to issue any leases made in this period.
To drill for oil with little financial value at the expense of species, the food security of America’s northernmost citizens and a way of life is not only a direct assault on those who call the refuge home. It’s dangerous for the seven billion of us who call this planet home.
Any oil drilled from ANWR, and the use we have for it, is finite. By the end of my lifetime, its deep wells of black gold will likely have run dry. But the climate catastrophes that come from burning fossil fuels are infinite: Every barrel of oil we choose to extract from new fields like ANWR is another step toward a future defined by desolation.
If we continue our reliance on fossil fuels, then the fires and floods today are only the beginning.
This future, however, is not inevitable — what climate catastrophes we bear in the decades to come are a direct consequence of what we choose to do today. As the climate crisis has raged on across the country, we have been in dire need of a president to lead courageously and enact bold policies that put the safety and health of our communities first.
Unfortunately, Americans still have a little over 60 days to wait until such a leader takes office. And on November 3, 2020, the American public chose a presidential candidate who ran and won on the most ambitious climate platform in US history.
For the first time in four years, the United States will have leadership that puts the health of people and our shared planet before profits.
With a Biden administration, there is tangible hope that our world can still avert the worst possible future of an uninhabitable earth, including the exploitation of protected land for oil. But with this week’s ANWR decision, we’re left to wonder and worry over how much damage a lame duck Trump can do, putting profits over the well-being of people and planet, even as he heads out the door.
Source : CNN
