Tell the Bureau of Land Management No Seismic Testing in the Arctic Refuge

From PennEnvironment (http://www.pennenvironment.org):

Just outside the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Alaskan tundra is scarred.

Heavy vehicles involved in seismic testing for oil and gas have cut deep tracks into miles and miles of ground at Point Thomson, just west of ANWR. Some of the tracks have been there for decades, and they’ll remain for decades more.¹

Soon, those scars might cross over into the refuge itself. The Department of the Interior is charging ahead with a plan to lease out a big chunk of ANWR land for seismic exploration.²

Go to https://pennenvironment.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=28394 to tell the Bureau of Land Management: No seismic blasting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

A refuge like ANWR is supposed to serve as a safe home for wildlife. In the summer, it provides vital calving grounds for hundreds of thousands of caribou. In the winter, endangered polar bears make their dens there. Millions of migratory birds pass through it each year.³ Seismic testing will have the area crawling with vehicles, crisscrossed with airstrips, rocked with dynamite-like vibrations.⁴

And that’s just the testing. There’s only more destruction to come once companies pinpoint the location of oil and begin drilling for it.

What we destroy in the Arctic, we may not get back. That’s why the Bureau of Land Management needs to hear from us. When Congress authorized drilling in ANWR, they tasked the BLM with studying the environmental impacts and making recommendations. We need to tell them there’s no amount of oil or natural gas that would make destructive seismic exploration worth it.

Stand up against seismic blasting today.

There’s no reason to carve up and destroy land that has stood pristine for millions of years just to get a little more oil — especially with renewable energy and clean cars surging, and with the imperative that we must move away from oil anyway.

Will you stand up for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge today?

1. ---

   Henry Fountain, “See the Scars That Oil Exploration Cut Across Alaska’s Wilderness,” The New York Times, August 3, 2018.

2. Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson, “Drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to get fast review,” The Washington Post, July 19, 2018.
3. Joel K. Bourne Jr., “Arctic Refuge Has Lots of Wildlife – Oil, Maybe Not So Much,” National Geographic, December 19, 2017.
4. Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, “Companies take first steps to drill for oil in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” The Washington Post, June 1, 2018.