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 ood,
honest, fullthroated indignation is nice to come on every now and
then, and here is a sample. The provocation was by President Jimmy
Carter, writing in the New York Times. He was pleading against
any oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR).
What he said was, "The simple fact is, drilling is inherently
incompatible with wilderness. The roar alone — of road building,
trucks, drilling, and generators — would pollute the wild music
of the Arctic, and be as out of place there as it would be in the
heart of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon."
That really did it for Jonah Goldberg, who had recently returned
from the area in Alaska about which Mr. Carter was being poetic.
"This sort of distortion," he writes in the current issue
of National Review (and references in the Goldberg
File), "is rampant . . . Never mind that all of that harmless
noise pollution would occur in pitch darkness, drowned out by a
120-degree-below-zero wind chill. Even Jimmy Carter should know
that music is like trees falling in the forest: It's only music
if there's somebody there to hear it."
It is a devastating picture that Mr. Goldberg brings back from his
trip. The sum of his case is that prospective oil drilling in Alaska
could be done without any damage to live sensibilities. What are
the reasons for the offensive against it? Let him tell it: "There's
a simple explanation and a complicated one. The simple one is that
it could be bad for the Porcupine River caribou herd . . . The more
complicated explanation is that this is all a convenient and bogus
cover for the simple fact that Americans generally — and environmentalists
like [Ted] Turner specifically — are more than a little daft when
it comes to ANWR."
Goldberg begins his informative dispatch with some graphic figures.
The oil development on the North Slope dots a huge area, roughly
the size of Minnesota. But the work is done on a comparatively tiny
archipelago of "parking-lot-sized islands of human activity
in a boundless ocean of tundra."
To get a perspective: Alaska has a population about the size of
the nation's capital. But you could squeeze California into Alaska
almost four times. Those who fear that Alaska is neglected in the
matter of federal wildlife preservation are reminded that 60 percent
of the official wilderness areas of the United States are in Alaska.
ANWR is way over on the northeastern side of the state, about the
size of South Carolina. What the oil industry is asking for is access
to 2,000 acres, an area no bigger than Dulles Airport. "This
footprint would be 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned
by Ted Turner, who helps bankroll efforts to keep ANWR off-limits."
Goldberg makes a shrewd point when he reminds us that life can be
hypothetically grand, but in order to make the sentient appreciation
of it real, you need to experience the beauty. I can speak of having
experienced the beauty of the South Pole, but it helped, when I
did that, that it was midsummer, that a large warm igloo waited
for us with food and wine, and that the naval airplane that brought
us there kept its engines running, lest they freeze shut while we
lunched.
What you have in the ANWAR part of the world is not just beautiful
mountains, but five-months' blackness in winter, and five months'
perpetual sunshine in summer, when the melted ice has produced puddles
in which the enemy breeds. "The water in an old tire can breed
thousands of mosquitoes; a puddle in a junkyard, millions. ANWR
is the Great Kingdom of the Mosquitoes." We are not talking
about mosquitoes as mere nuisances. "On a bad day, according
to the villagers in nearby Nuisquit, you can't open your mouth for
fear of inhaling the mosquitoes."
Yes, there certainly is wildlife, though not even wolf packs can
co-exist for very long with the mosquitoes. "Grizzly bears,
like caribou, aren't frightened by oil exploration. They consider
Deadhorse the Paris or New York of the North Slope; they come in
to see the sights, perhaps grab a little dinner, even to catch a
show. Everyone has a bear story; the owner of an air-charter service
recounts to me how she came out of her office one day to find three
bears sitting, expectantly, atop her car, as if she were late for
the car pool."
Ah, the ideologization of nature. The Prudhoe Bay drilling has been
done with the most fastidious attention to derivative effects. There
is no hunting, not even fishing, tolerated. "I knew a guy who
got fired for throwing a rock at a fox," one exasperated former
ranger is quoted as saying. Speaking of Arctic foxes, most of them
are rabid. The satisfaction taken by those who swear by the blessed
virginity of ANWR is felt mostly by Americans who have not been
deflowered by life there.
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