From Erv's soapbox

It just gets better and better...
A short while ago we flew to a very remote area of Katmai National Park and, with only 2 others and a very environmentally minded guide (meaning no firearms), we experienced the world as it may have been if man had not been part of it. Of course thanks to technology we were able to reach back in time by arriving in an hour on a small plane and I was able to record it with the latest in digital cameras and I am able to send it out to the world through the internet, but other than THAT, we were in Brown Bear Jurrasic Park. Surrounded by active, steaming volcanoes, ancient glaciers miles thick and creatures that struck fear and respect in our ancestors as they told stories around their fires in the distant past, you couldn’t help but feel small and insignificant but part of something bigger. I could write for days about the wonderful time we had, but something more important is gnawing at me since that day.
This wonderful, remote world of Alaska is so accessible today it makes it even more important to save areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from man’s imprint.
Protecting it from the proposed drilling and limiting it to scientific study to learn how nature or God if you want, intended the earth to evolve without us. This is one of the last places on earth that we haven’t scarred or altered significantly. Can’t we just keep this for the plants and animals that live there and see what there is to learn from it? Sure, Senator Stevens would have you believe it’s a “barren wasteland” with his blank white poster board displays and photos of snow covered tundra, but under the white blanket is a tremendous variety of life forces waiting to explode in the short seasons given them. And there’s a vast number of birds and animals that call it home as it is. My friend Alan Bartels reminded me, only man can make a barren wasteland. We are learning (or should) every day, all of life is woven together. You can’t tug on one string without another reacting to it.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, as the oil industry would like you to call it to depersonalize it, has maybe 200 days worth of oil. It would take at least 5 years to even tap that. It would not be “American” oil. Oil companies are international. The product would not be exclusively for our SUV’s.
Alaska is known by its license plates as the “last frontier”. As I look around, more and more I see it treated the same as all of America’s frontiers of the past.
This is the last chance we have to have a last frontier. We must try something different. Soon Sandra and I will be leaving to work for the Visitor Center that serves Gates of the Arctic National Park, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Kanuti NWR above the Arctic Circle. I’m sure it will be the experience of a lifetime for us. We will be in a log cabin with no indoor plumbing, running water or electricity leaving lots of time to blog and photograph and explore the “wasteland”. Keep you posted!