| Sunday, June 18, 2006 |
00:29 - A life in pictures
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So here's the cover story of the May issue of National Geographic:
It's about oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope. Oh, it's apolitical and all. Thoroughly balanced. Just the facts, ma'am. Lots of thoughtful text and maps and stuff.
But that leadoff picture sure does pack a few thousand words, huh?
Here's another thousand, on the next two-page spread:
Oil! Humans! Apocalypse!
How about a thousand more?
Aww. Look at that. All those caribou. That beautiful green verdant tundra valley. Those gorgeous mountains flecked with summertime snow. And some bonus words to boot:
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Caribou from the Porcupine herd dot the uplands of ANWR, which three times last year barely escaped congressional approval to drill within its borders. A critical meat source for bears, wolves, and local natives, this 123,000-member herd (down almost a third since 1989) calves on the refuge's coastal plain.
So what's the impression you're left with after this sequence of pictures?
If you're like the various friends to whom I made the mistake of mentioning my Alaska trip last year, it's something like: "If we don't Do Something Soon™, Picture #3 will look like Picture #2." Oil processing facilities and pipelines filling that gorgeous mountain valley. Caribou replaced with those oil-derrick things that look like drinking birds. Green and blue replaced with brown and gunmetal gray.
These are the images that people have in mind as they head to the Prius dealership. As though that would make the slightest difference in a world where a single container ship sidling into port puts out as much exhaust as 350,000 cars, or where people in China have to wear face masks to keep from choking on the air.
Well, here's what the pictures don't quite properly convey:
Note well the relative locations of the prior two pictures:
Not only that, but: flat ugly muddy coastal lagoons are here, and beautiful mountainous grassy valleys are here. Yet to flip through the photos, you'd never guess that the two regions were separated by hundreds of miles of oil-less tundra. The text blurs the line between the widely separated "uplands" and "coastal plain", making it seem like "within its borders" means "within the landscape you see in this picture". You also wouldn't cotton to the fact that Prudhoe Bay is already extensively developed for oil, using almost exactly the same kind of land that the proposed oil development plan uses, and there's been that whole pipeline thing coming down from it through the same picturesque valleys of the Brooks Range that the photos make out to be unspoiled wilderness, since the mid-1970s. Or that the proposed development is designed using methods that would make it essentially non-interferential to the caribou's breeding habits, or that the fact that the caribou herds have decreased since 1986 has nothing to do with the Prudhoe Bay development (oil production from there has been steadily decreasing since about that time too, and meanwhile the wolf and bear population throughout Alaska has been exploding like never before, because the state's predator-control trapping and hunting was stopped in the 1990s).
One thing I found out while riding the ferries through the Inside Passage with native Alaskans last summer was that such people are completely disgusted with nationwide coverage of this issue, which to them is about akin to Californians balking at further developing the Kern County oil fields because Yosemite is pretty.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not immune to a heartsick feeling at despoiling these major areas of distant wild land that have not yet felt human hands. But it's just as maddening, to me, to see people internalizing such a warped idea of what "drilling in ANWR" really means, directed by heart-punching photos in well-meaning magazines, and standing in the way of something that could help stabilize our economy and international oil dependence while we develop new sources of energy just because they don't realize that all it's talking about is "more of the same thing we've been doing for the past 30 years".
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Brian Tiemann
