Alaska's Wildlife at Risk
Alaska's 22-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve provides important subsistence resources for Alaska Natives and vital habitat for caribou, migratory birds, grizzly and polar bears, walruses, seals and more. The future of the reserve is being decided now, and we need your help to ensure that this unique ecosystem is protected!
The Department of the Interior, which manages the reserve, wants to know your views on four management approaches. Alternative B stands apart as the best choice to effectively and reliably protect the exceptional wildlife habitat in the reserve because it withholds such areas from future oil leasing and shields them from any harm this could cause.
Please ask Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to protect key habitat in America's Arctic.
Dear Secretary Salazar,
As you consider the first comprehensive management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), I ask that you adopt Alternative B.
This is the only alternative in the draft plan that properly balances future oil and gas development with strong and reliably effective protections for the exceptional wildlife habitat and subsistence resources of the NPR-A.
The NPR-A features exceptional wilderness that is vital habitat for Arctic wildlife. Alternative B provides the best protections for these areas, specifically Teshekpuk Lake/Dease Inlet, Peard Bay and its surrounding wetlands, Utukok River Uplands/DeLong Mountains, the Colville River, and Kasegaluk Lagoon.
Withholding these critical habitat areas in the NPR-A from oil and gas leasing and establishing other protections set forth in Alternative B would ensure reliable protection of crucially important Arctic habitats of local, national, and global significance while also allowing for responsible oil and gas development in the future.
Thank you for consideration of these comments.
