Board of Game nominee quits

ADN:

“A growing dispute between Native leaders and Gov. Sarah Palin may have been defused late Wednesday when Teresa Sager-Albaugh, a former Alaska Outdoor Council president, turned down her new appointment to the state Board of Game. Sager-Albaugh said she was withdrawing her name so that the growing controversy did not get in the way of the Game Board’s important work. Native leaders began protesting last week after Palin filled three vacancies on the Game Board, leaving no Native or off-road rural resident as members for the first time ever. The board sets policies for wildlife, hunting and subsistence on state and private lands in Alaska.”

Read the full story here: ADN

 

Trade groups join PR tug of war

Homer Tribune:

 

As if things weren’t confusing enough with the powerful mining companies interested in staking their claim in Pebble land and special interest groups that are dead-set against them, now there’s an “anti-anti mining” group that seeks to drill the momentum right out of those mining opponents. Clear as molybdenum? Introducing: Alaskans Against the Mining Shutdown.

It’s no surprise that at the core of this effort to stall mining efforts are mining companies, mining trade groups, mine owners and Native Corporations that formed to protect those incredible mining potentials.Other founding members of the campaign committee include Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor John Williams, Kenai’s Bob Favretto, and a host of some 250 others determined to make mining work.

Read the rest of the story here: Homer Tribune

Palin reverses Murkowski move

Gov. Sarah Palin said Tuesday she will move the state Division of Habitat back into the Department of Fish and Game.The move would reverse the controversial change made by former governor Frank Murkowski.

Murkowski then claimed the move was made in order to “streamline” the permitting process and promote development.

Critics of the Murkowski move pointed out that the environment would be better protected with Habitat under Fish & Game. Palin’s executive order will take place in January 2009.

Alaska disputes polar bears need special protection

Ken Taylor has had easier jobs than this one. It’s not like the good old days chasing rhinos, climbing into bear dens and wrestling beluga whales in shallow water.

These days, sitting at a desk as deputy commissioner of fish and game, the veteran wildlife biologist has to muster the best science he can find to argue that Alaska’s polar bears are in good shape and need no special protection from hypothetical doomsday scenarios.

This requires Taylor to stand up to the prevailing wisdom about global warming in most of the world’s scientific community and the public — not to mention some pretty strong opinions in his own department.

But Taylor, point man on polar bears in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s administration, argues that the scientific justification simply isn’t there — at least not yet — to declare the polar bear “threatened” and touch off a cascade of effects under the Endangered Species Act. A decision on the bears is expected from the U.S. Department of the Interior in the next few weeks.

45-year projection a stretch

“From my perspective, it’s very difficult to put a population on the list that’s healthy, based on a projection 45 years into the future,” Taylor says. “That’s really stretching scientific credibility.”

The state’s own scientific credibility hasn’t been helped by the fact that the Fish and Game Department no longer has any polar bear experts of its own. Nor did it help that, when state officials found a scientific study reinforcing their polar bear stance, a congressional committee called a hearing to decry “phony science” and Exxon Mobil-funded “climate deniers.”

Still, Taylor has helped produce two reports in the past year arguing against an endangered-species listing.

The state argues that there’s too much uncertainty about the future of the Arctic ice sheet on which the polar bears depend. Explanations for global warming other than greenhouse-gas emissions, such as sunspots and variations in the Earth’s orbit, need to be considered, the state says.

And despite experts who call the idea “fanciful,” the state argues that polar bears forced onto land might be able to adapt quickly by eating birds, caribou and other terrestrial species.

“The country is being hit with sky-is-falling-type articles,” said Taylor. “Very little attention is being given to those who say it’s overblown.”

Palin is leading the state’s fight. In an op-ed column in The New York Times earlier this month, she said there is “insufficient evidence” to justify such a listing — an opinion she said was based on “a comprehensive review” of the science by state wildlife officials.

With limited peer-reviewed science available that concludes the bears are doing fine, however, the state devotes most of its space to challenging everyone else’s work.

That pits Taylor and his staff — and several national consultants from the warming-is-overblown camp — against polar bear biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and leading international authorities in the World Conservation Union’s Polar Bear Specialist Group, not to mention the climatologists of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Studies by those scientists contend that Alaska’s polar bear populations are already showing signs of stress and decline linked to summer melting of their ice habitat.

Ice shrinkage models suggest that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be gone by the year 2050. Scientists now say the Arctic ice may be melting even faster than that.

The Palin administration’s effort to block action by raising uncertainty has moved the state to the dubious margins of scientific credibility, according to environmentalists.

“They’re not presenting a fair picture of the science,” said Deborah Williams, a former Interior Department official who now heads the climate nonprofit Alaska Conservation Solutions. “It’s a terrible disservice, to release something so irresponsibly biased.”

National environmental groups sued to prompt the federal endangered-species review. They say the state is giving credibility to industry-funded dissenters whose studies are designed to confuse the public and the press.

“The deniers somehow manage to get a very small number of such papers published, and then those who oppose greenhouse gas regulation or protection of the polar bear seize upon them and promote them and ignore the fact that virtually the entire scientific community disagrees with them,” said Kassie Siegel, the climate program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

State’s credibility at stake

At stake is the state’s credibility in other areas where a balanced view of science is important, such as predator control and oil-spill cleanups, said Rick Steiner, a professor with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program. A federal listing of the polar bear as threatened could have far-reaching consequences, depending on the management plan drawn up to protect the bears.

State officials have expressed concern about effects a threatened-species listing could have on international hunting agreements and future oil and gas development in the Arctic.

Sen. Ted Stevens echoed those concerns this month, saying bear protections could interfere with construction of a gas pipeline from the North Slope.

Rep. Don Young and Sen. Lisa Murkowski have also spoken against the listing, which has been cited by opponents of a pending federal oil lease sale in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea.

Past oil drilling on northern lands has not hurt the polar bears, according to federal studies. Environmentalists counter that current interest in offshore Arctic drilling presents new risks, including oil spills into water.

An even bigger question, spreading far beyond Alaska, is: How will a management plan protect the bears from anticipated habitat loss? Will it focus on new protections for the last few bears on land? Or will it provide new leverage over federal permits for projects in the Lower 48, raising challenges on everything from new freeways to coal-fired power plants — all in an effort to curb greenhouse gases?

“When I voted for the creation of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, I never envisioned that gas and coal plants in the deserts of Arizona could be adversely affected by the listing of polar bears in the Alaskan Arctic,” Young said this month.

The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups say this is just the result they hope for: using the polar bear to address global climate issues. Anything less and the bears are doomed, they say.

Federal officials say there is nothing in the law to preclude listing species threatened by climate change. They say this is the first time such a listing might be made.

Both sides in the debate agree that polar bear population data are scarce.

Follow news about the environment and wildlife at azstarnet.com/environment

Source: Arizona Daily Star

Critics take aim at predator control

Critics take aim at predator control

Hearings on Gov. Sarah Palin’s proposal to streamline the state’s predator control laws opened Wednesday with a barrage of opposition.The bill had its first hearing in the House Resources Committee.

Officials with the state Department of Fish and Game called the bill a housekeeping measure that would mesh and simplify two confusing, often conflicting, laws aimed at boosting moose and caribou populations.

Kevin Saxby, an assistant attorney general working with the Alaska Board of Game, said the bill would allow the board to respond quickly to declines in prey populations while continuing to base its decisions on the department’s research and advice.

“The procedure is subject to almost constant challenge because it is such a complex law that there is a great deal of confusion with the public and special interest groups over what the Legislature intended. So we are proposing to reduce it to its bare essentials,” Saxby said.

Defenders of Wildlife, which is suing the state over its aerial wolf shooting program, said the bill would strip the program of scientific standards and limit public participation, leaving predator control decisions in the hands of an ideologically driven game board.

“This legislation positions the Board of Game to accelerate a program for political reasons but without attention to whether such a program is fiscally prudent or biologically sound,” said Tom Banks, the group’s Alaska representative.

Some hunting groups also had reservations over the bill.

Mark Richards, co-chairman of the Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, said his group supports the administration’s attempts to make predator management decisions legally defensible. But he said the changes would have the opposite effect by giving the Board of Game sole authority on future predator management decisions.

“We need to stop frivolous lawsuits that cost the state so much time and money, but this bill introduces too many potential downsides with its solution,” Richards said in written testimony.

Still others said the Legislature should wait until voters can weigh in this fall on a ballot initiative that would limit the state’s aerial wolf kill program to hunts done by state biologists in emergency situations.

The state currently allows private pilots to do the hunting if they are part of a state-sponsored program.

Alaskans have twice passed similar initiatives in recent years, which were later overturned by the Legislature.

The state’s program, which has been the target of lawsuits since it began in 2003, is intended to boost moose and caribou numbers where residents have complained that predators are killing too many, leaving them too few to hunt for food.

Banks said rural subsistence-dependent people are often portrayed as the chief beneficiaries of the predator control programs. However, statistics show two-thirds to three-quarters of moose and caribou hunted in Alaska are harvested by urban and out-of-state hunters, he said.

Under the program, now in its fifth year, 700 wolves have been killed. The goal is to reduce wolf populations in each of the specified areas by as much as 80 percent annually.

The committee will continue to take public testimony on the governor’s bill at its meeting next Monday.

The measure is House Bill 256.

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