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Call or Fax letters to our Congressional Delegation. Ask them to make sure all stakeholders in this controversy get an invitation to participate in the review -- not just federal subsistence and Interior Department representatives as appears to be the current plan.
Ask them today!
U.S. House of Representative member Morris Udall (D-Arizona) introduced legislation in 1978 to protect 140 million acres of Alaska in the form of Parks, Refuges, Wilderness Areas, and Wild & Scenic River corridors. His bill passed in the U.S. House. Alaska Senator Mike Gravel stopped its passage in the U.S. Senate. Because of the block on the Senate side President Jimmy Carter invoked the Antiquities Act, declaring 56 million acres of Alaska as National Monuments. President Carter’s withdrawals prompted renewed congressional action on an Alaska lands bill. Not long after that Alaska U.S. Senator Ted Stevens masterminded a change from Native priority to “rural” priority which gained his support for Senate Bill 9. Sen. Stevens then talked Alaska Senator Mike Gravel into ending his filibuster of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) which resulted in passages of ANILCA in 1980. That left all sides (native, non-native, rural and urban) in the debate feeling the compromised act was broken from the start.
--professing to be necessary for the sake of resource conservation--that says “come live on wildlife habitat and federal law will give you a priority to take all you can eat” couldn’t be anything other than broken. There is a clear reason why the North American Conservation model works. The model puts the resource first and then shares the harvest among all users. It promotes sustained yield and a fair harvest opportunity for all. This has been the basis of the successful model of North American wildlife management for over a century.
The implementation of ANILCA compromised the otherwise successful North American wildlife model, which was based on conservation and wildlife protection for all under the public trust doctrine.
Times of Shortage Myth (PDF)
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