A Book's Proper Place

Abstract

the grim effects of the oil industry on wildlife in Alaska. The good news fit in this book; technical reports describing the bad news fill a library in Anchorage. The legacy of the oil industry in Alaska is written not only in the reports of financial success and “little change” on the North Slope, but on the backs of tens of thousands of oiled birds, in the death of a fishing industry and the decimation of the economy of a oncethriving fishing town, and in the loss of the subsistence way of life in a score of coastal villages. The accounted financial costs exceed $1 billion; the effects on wildlife, and the aesthetic and psychological effects on people, are unaccountable. These costs, of course, pertain mainly to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, at the other end of the pipeline that starts on the North Slope. When a new president, a narrowly elected ex-oilman, is pushing an industrial development agenda that most Americans consider radical and unacceptable, it is critical for our nation’s experts and for AIBS to be responsible about what we say on the subject of oil and industrial development. Alaskan wilderness is currently beset with plans for industrial development, including plans for an underwater natural gas pipeline, 688 leases for oil development in the Beaufort Sea, expansion in Cook Inlet, and drilling on the Copper River Delta. Environmentalists have always