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Launching War On The Environment

According to ENN, the next battle over the ANWR is ramping up, and the prospects don't look good for the country:

Republican leaders indicated Tuesday that they plan to press the issue of drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as part of a so-called budget reconciliation process, which cannot be subject to a Democratic filibuster -- a tactic that has blocked the refuge's development in the past.

It's hard to explain why I personally feel so strongly about the ANWR. It is large (I've seen its size compared to South Carolina most frequently), but it's in a remote part of the country that I am unlikely to ever visit. What is most disturbing to me is not the destruction of important habitat or any other ecological concerns, but the motives for exploiting it.

The oil located underneath the ANWR is meaningless to our national energy economy; drilling there is equivalent to solving the world's food shortage by bulldozing the Louvre to plant a vegetable garden. Nevertheless, exploiting the oil reserves in the ANWR is being spun as necessary to U.S. energy independece and national security.

Drilling in ANWR is a test case. There are tangible consequences: the destruction of 19 million acres of habitat and an obscene increase in the wealth of a few oil company executives. But the corporate favor is only the icing on the cake. If they can ram this through, it will be an order of magnitude easier to perpetrate the next crime against nature and we are rapidly approaching a point at which there are no remaining defensible fallback positions.

My take

By Mikhail Capone (not verified) at March 3, 2005 - 7:22am |

"It's hard to explain why I personally feel so strongly about the ANWR. [...] remote part of the country that I am unlikely to ever visit."

Well, do you care about abused women? the working poor in cities other than yours? Asian and african AIDS victims? Iraqi civilians?

I mean, you don't have to have a direct connection to care about something.

The Artic Refuge seems like a beautiful place, and there's a lot of life out there that we haven't fucked up yet. We should be creating more places like that one, not destroying them. That's reasons enough for me.

And by the way, you might want to read this interview with Lakoff on "framing" and how words are important.

Calling it the "ANWR" makes it sound like some bureaucratic thing. Calling it the Wildlife Refuge is totally different, the same way that Lakoff explains that there's a very strong underlying message beneath the neocons' "tax reliefs" (as opposed to what they really are -- tax cuts for the rich).

re: My take

By pete at March 3, 2005 - 4:47pm |

The single most important theme I find in that interview with Lakoff is the following:

Lakoff: The image you get is of the environment as something separate from you. It sounds as if there were this helpless environment out there and you were the big protector. There�s no notion that we owe our very existence to the environment, and that we are threatening what gives us life. It assumes that there�s an external threat. It doesn�t say that the threat is us.

Environmentalists have adopted a set of frames that doesn�t reflect the vital importance of the environment to everything on Earth. The term "the environment" suggests that this is an area of life separate from other areas of life like the economy and jobs, or health, or foreign policy. By not linking it to everyday issues, it sounds like a separate category, and a luxury in difficult times. Wilderness: a place for those in Birkenstocks to go hiking.