Sierra Club Statement on Interior's Sellout of Western Arctic

[douglas9]

WASHINGTON - This week, the Trump administration finalized a plan to open up millions of acres of fragile landscapes in the Western Arctic to oil and gas drilling.

The Department of the Interior published a proposed rule in the Federal Register revoking protections for much of the Western Arctic. The final rule will be published on November 17. Totaling more than 23 million acres in size, the Western Arctic is the largest contiguous area of national public lands in the United States.

The Department first announced its proposal to vastly increase oil and gas drilling in the Alaskan landscape in June, limiting public input to a 60-day comment period on the plan.

Since retaking the White House, Donald Trump has consistently acted to give away public lands to corporate polluters and oil and gas firms. Multiple Day One executive orders rolled back protections to make it easier for oil and gas companies to drill on public lands. Trump’s budget reconciliation law supercharged this pro-polluter giveaway, returning royalty rates oil and gas companies must pay for using public lands to levels originally set in the 1920s.

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/sierra-club-statement-on-interiors-sellout-of-western-arctic

[NNadir]

1. The Sierra Club was founded by John Muir to defend against the industrialization of important wildernesses.

Muir lost the battle accounting for the founding when the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite was converted into an early hydroelectricity plant, a role it still plays to this day. There is no one alive today who can understand how beautiful that valley was before it was inundated.

This said, the modern Sierra Club is hardly true to Muir's vision, and has very little ground to stand on in objecting to the industrialization of wilderness.

The modern Sierra Club never sees a wilderness that it believes should be rendered into an industrial park for wind and solar energy.

(A successor to Muir, David Brower, traded the Glen Canyon for the Grand Canyon, as if it was his right to trade important valleys for energy development.)

It seems to me that the successors to Muir are not true to his vision at all. I used to be a member of the Sierra Club, but am no longer.

I note that one of the early chairs of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, was a member of the Sierra Club, and saw nuclear energy has a way to protect wilderness from development. He made the point in his writings, the environmental importance of developing nuclear energy. His view was rejected by people who dubiously refer to themselves as "environmentalists."