Bushwacked by bogus enviro politics.

• Author: Dalby, Ron
• Position: Myths perpetrated by environmental groups about Alaskan oil exploration projects

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have misled the public for years, creating the image that environmental sacrifices in Alaska will atone for centuries of neglect in other states. Locking up Alaska does not solve problems in other states, it merely contributes to such things as increased oil imports, an unfavorable balance of trade, and a decrease of good jobs nationwide.

By North Slope standards, June 18, 1980 was a balmy summer day - temperature about 60 degrees, plenty of sunshine and a mild breeze. I was flying a helicopter for Era on contract to Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. for the annual pad survey from Pump Station # 1 to Valdez.

I met my passengers in the Deadhorse airport. I was to carry three Alyeska employees all the way to Valdez over a period of several days for the pad survey. Two others, engineers hired on contract by Alyeska to help with pipeline settling problems at Atigun Pass, would ride along for the first couple of days and would be dropped off at Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range.

One of the contract engineers approached me and inquired about our route of flight. Because of the mission, I told him we would be working low level over the pipeline the entire time. Disappointment was evident in his face. Then one of the Alyeska people chimed in and jovially pointed out that this engineer hailed from San Francisco and was a "serious Sierra Clubber." The engineer then commented that the Sierra Club had made it clear to him that there was no wildlife on the pipeline. I just shrugged and turned away so he couldn't see me smiling.

We loaded up and took off. The first caribou we saw were at the edge of the Deadhorse runway. We quickly flew over to Pump Station #1 and began working our way south along the pipeline, pausing here and there to do a ground inspection whenever the people from Alyeska saw anything suspicious on the pipeline pad. Everywhere we went along the pipeline there were caribou - thousands of them all told. Every animal we saw was standing either on the pipeline pad or at the edge of it.

This went on for two days, and I joined in teasing the engineer affiliated with the Sierra Club. Since he was getting off at Atigun Pass, we told him we were going to let him join a special mile-high club by throwing him out at 5,200 feet (approximately the elevation at the top of Atigun Pass). He was a good sport about it and gave as good as he got.

Late the second day, as we climbed toward the pass, our Sierra Club friend was sitting up front with me. Out the corner of my eye, I saw him throw something out the window. As helicopter pilots have a distinct aversion to anything that might go through the tail rotor, I spoke sternly to him and asked what it was.

"That was the pieces of my Sierra Club card," he said. "They lied to me. We've seen thousands of animals and every damned one of them was standing on the pipeline."

With that, we were nice enough to land gently at Atigun Pass instead of making good on the threats about throwing him out the door.

From many hundreds of hours of flying helicopters along the pipeline pad in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, I've observed that caribou are rarely, if at all, bothered by the pipeline. Neither are musk oxen, seen more and more frequently along the pipeline these days, or grizzly bears. I've seen grizzlies mating on the pipeline pad; I've seen caribou calves born on the pipeline pad and on the tundra next to drill rigs. Marmots dig burrows in the pad and falcons survey their domains while perched on supports for above-ground portions of the pipeline. And, since oil first started flowing through the pipeline in 1977, the caribou herd along the North Slope part of the route has increased in number from 6,000 animals to more than 22,000 animals in 1994, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

The argument that oil activity has seriously harmed the North Slope's herds of caribou is patently ridiculous. Those few people who have worked on the North Slope know it to be false. The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Greenpeace, Friends of the Animals and countless other groups pretending to have special knowledge prey on the fact that virtually no one in the country has ever seen the pipeline or the caribou and likely never will. As any political consultant can tell you, any falsehood, if repeated often enough, ultimately becomes believable by those who have no other knowledge of the subject.

Un-truth in Advertising

Again using the Sierra Club as an example, one lie is never enough. In late June 1988, when I was editor of Alaska Magazine, the phone rang in my Anchorage office. The woman on the line was from a public relations agency in Los Angeles, and she was positively gushing with joy because her company had gotten a Sierra Club contract to design and distribute a public service ad decrying attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. What she wanted from me was simple: pictures or the name of a photographer who would have pictures of the area that would be drilled if ANWR were open for exploration.

I asked her what she had in mind. "Like something out of the old West," she said. "Mountains, canyons - that sort of thing."

I laughed and said, "There are no mountains and canyons. The area where they're talking about drilling is a coastal plain."

"What's it look like?" she asked.

"From the air...