SOUND OF A TREE FALLING.(the serious environmental threat posed by the Bush administration)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 18-NOV-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, often described as the last truly unspoiled place in America, was created in its current form on December 2, 1980, in the closing days of the Carter Administration. At that time, part of the nineteen-million-acre refuge was designated wilderness, meaning that no oil drilling was allowed there; however, one and a half million acres along the Beaufort Sea were left in a vexed sort of limbo, neither accessible to the energy industry nor permanently off-limits. The battle over this strip of land, a spectacular coastal plain that is home to polar bears, musk oxen, caribou, grizzly bears, and some hundred and thirty-five species of birds, began almost immediately, and has been generating letter-writing campaigns and petition drives, not to mention huge lobbying fees, ever since. In the late nineteen-eighties,...

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