What is Sarah Palin’s Record on the Environment and Endangered Species?
It’s hunting season again, and the guys are getting ready. All dressed up in rough boots, hats pulled down, and jeans hardy and tough, men will go out in the woods with their guns dragged from back seats of trucks and head out for sport. That sport is killing.
That’s what they do in a small town called Natchitoches where I live now and in La Grande, Oregon where I grew up. It’s celebrated annually, and people prepare months in advance. People have cabins in the woods, tents, trailers and all sorts of equipment for the sport of hunting. Grocery stores and little shops have large wooden racks that people can use to display the spoils of the hunt. Furthermore, the individual can even buy special cards and postcards that pictures can be added to so that the deer and the guy with the gun can be shown together. Only the guy is smiling.
I eat deer and value the hunter. I know that our culture came from men going out and hunting for food, and I value the men who do that. I was raised on deer meat, and I like it. It makes sense when you need to feed a family, as my folks did years ago when I was a child. But is a sport like football where we stand on the sidelines and cheer, especially when we aren’t killing for food?
Wolves aren’t sympathetic creatures. Who would worry about them. Sarah Palin advocates killing wolves in order to thin the population to allow native hunters an ample supply of moose and elk. However, shooting wolves from airplanes concern environmentalists because of the balance of nature issues and the form of killing that they continue to be unnecessary.
The creatures on Palin’s hit list are part of that balance of nature that scientists consider critical to stopping the deterioration of the environment that leads to global warming. Those creatures without protection keep us safe in many ways because of the interaction of animal life and nature. So their protections are important. So we have to consider what human behaviors might affect animal life that in turn affect changes to our environment in the long run.
Now let’s talk about those salmon, my favorite fish, because again as a native Oregonian I grew up with salmon steak and went out with friends and family to catch a few now and then. I know them well enough from being on a hook in front of me to all warm and wonderful in my tummy to want to make sure they get the right treatment. I want their waters to be clean enough to keep them healthy, and I want them to have the kind of environment to breed, make babies and keep lots of us fed.
It appears Sarah Palin may not have the same concerns about clean water that many environmentalists have or she doesn’t pay attention to safeguards on fish. Like me she likes to catch and eat fish but the Lake near her home isn’t safe. In fact Palin can look right out her own doorway and watch fish dying, even after the lake there is continually stocked. Wasilla now has polluted lakes such as Lake Lucille. This is an example of an environmental issue in need of attention that is right at Governor Palin’s doorstep. Lake Lucille was declared seriously impaired in 1994 and remains on the impaired list by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation according to Talbot, a researcher who has followed up on the program.
Palin spoke out against the Clean Water Act for whatever reason. Drilling and coal mining may have been one of them. Mineral mining pollutes waters. Now salmon have tapeworms. I wonder how many people who eat salmon grown in Alaska worry about how that affects them today.
Polar bears give the right impression to all of us, and right away we think about taking care of them. They have been on the endangered list. Sarah Palin wrote to Congress and asked that they be taken off that list. This was in opposition to 172 scientists, who had declared otherwise. Palin’s position was that environmentalists were trying to stop drilling by maintaining polar bears as an endangered species. Thus Palin filed suit against the Federal Government to keep the polar bears off the endangered list.
Most people don’t feel a sense of wonder and joy when they think about wolves. Actually most people get scared, but these days the wolves are. A bounty was put on the heads of wolves, to encourage average citizens to load up their guns and go kill them, from the air, from everywhere. That bounty was eventually stopped through legal action. Palin, however, disputed this and argued against the protestations of scientists who say that the populations of wolves do not need to be thinned in order to aid subsistence farmers who kill moose and elk for food, which wolves seek as well. Scientis are also concerned about the balance of nature related to global warming taking place in the wilds of Alaska.
Sarah Palin’s record on animal life and the environment raises serious questions that must be considered carefully when considering her for national office at a time when global warming concerns are critical.