Earlier this year, while writing a documentary on Kivalina, one of several Alaskan barrier-reef islands slipping into the sea, and among the world’s worst ecological disasters, I stumbled on the state’s 44-year-old governor Sarah Palin. Even then, as she posed in the snow-covered wilderness beside her seaplane and fresh animal kills, rumors swirled that she might be a vice-presidential contender. In an extraordinary twist of fate, this sharp-shooter and former small-town beauty queen, who until two years ago was mayor of her tiny hometown, Wasilla, Alaska, has become the American right’s golden girl.
Ever since the Palin family soap drama hit prime time, the mainstream media has focused on digging up the dirt, but there have been few mentions about her environmental history. Palin is governor of a state that has seen the most dramatic effects of a warming world, yet until last week she remained unconvinced that climate change is in any way man-made.
“The jury’s still out on that one,” she said, just days after the recent hurricanes and tropical storms were making their way across the Atlantic, offering a glimpse of the climate chaos that may be left for future generations.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Palin, in a recent interview with Newsmax.com, accepted that warming would affect Alaska “more than any other state, because of our location.”
But she added: “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being manmade.”
Such a position would put her to the right even of US President George W. Bush and some of the oil companies — and it is now scaring the international community.
Last Friday, she finally conceded that the problem might be man-made.
In an interview with ABC television, she said: “I’m attributing some of man’s activities to potentially causing some of the changes in the climate right now.”
Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, says: “The irony of a climate change denier being based in Alaska is breathtaking. The state is warming faster than practically anywhere else, with winter temperatures up by 6ºF [3.3ºC] since 1950. Visitors to Alaska can see the evidence all around, from drunken forests of semi-fallen trees and sunken roads, all unseated by the melting of the permafrost, to unprecedented forest fires.”
For conservation and animal protection groups, Palin has long been considered an enemy.
Greenpeace says: “Palin has the most anti-environment record of any governor in the US. She has supported oil drilling in some of the most ecologically sensitive areas in Alaska, even when it meant sacrificing polar bears and beluga whales.”
Only this month, Palin told the Republican party convention: “We Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas. And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska, we’ve got lots of both.”
Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth US, says: “Sarah Palin’s record is not extensive — just two years ago she was the mayor of a city of fewer than 10,000 people — but what it indicates is troubling. She has been a friend of Big Oil, opposing a windfall profits tax on the oil industry that could fund affordable clean energy for more Americans. Oh, and Palin’s husband works for BP.”
CONSISTENT
Palin is, if nothing else, consistent. She tried to sue the US government to derail the listing of polar bears as a threatened species, fearing that it would get in the way of oil and gas development — this as the ice melts under their paws and they are literally drowning.
She then wrote a piece for the New York Times, saying that these “magnificent cuddly white bears are doing just fine and don’t need our protection. If the ice melts, they’ll adapt to living on land.”
That is a contention most scientists found reckless, given that polar bears have shown little ability to feed on land.
Palin also questioned the scientific consensus that global warming is melting the Arctic sea ice, and failed to mention oil drilling or the routine oil spills that, over the years, have destroyed the ecology of nearly 7,300 hectares of wildlife and marine habitat.
“We need to drill, drill, drill,” she told the Wall Street Journal recently, and she is in the forefront of moves to exploit the long-protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). “If Alaskans can’t do that on our own land, then the nation is going to be in a world of hurt, depending on dangerous foreign powers.”
She argues that “ANWR is only the size of the Los Angeles airport, and drilling there isn’t environmentally destructive.”
In oil-rich Alaska, that goes down well. Many residents support drilling in the 7.7 million hectare refuge on the north coast, an area considered by conservationists as a treasured wild place.
“If you’re not for opening ANWR, in the state of Alaska, you couldn’t get elected dog-catcher,” says former Alaska state representative Ray Metcalfe, a Republican-turned-Democrat who supports Barack Obama.
Alaska is wildly beautiful and sparsely populated, with abundant natural resources that more recently have started to become scarce. In her two years as governor, Palin has got her own pleasure out of its wildlife. There are photos of her posing with the bloodied carcasses of moose, caribou, elk and grizzly bear.
This summer, she reached new lows in the eyes of conservationists by approving the killing of black bear sows with cubs. The year before, she put a US$150 bounty on wolf paws to entice hunters to kill more of these elusive wild dogs. She also spent US$400,000 of public money to defeat an initiative that would have banned aerial hunting of wolves for sport.
“Palin is an environmental horror story,” claims conservationist Dave Chandler. “Alaska’s out-of-control wolf slaughter is pretty brutal. When she approved the killing of all wolves in the Cold Bay area, state officials illegally killed 14 wolf pups — after killing their mothers — by dragging them out of their dens and shooting them.”
When environmentalists or concerned citizens from the other 48 states (where wolves are protected) dared to object to the idea of a hunting free-for-all, Palin protested that they didn’t “understand rural Alaska.”
The state that Palin governs consists of 660,000 people, with a minority that loves the wilderness and its animals, and a majority — mostly Republican — that appears to want to squeeze all the cash it can out of the state before the oil dries up, the fish die and the wildlife disappears.
Alaskans, who annually receive oil-royalty dividends — US$1,654 each last year — think of themselves as fiercely independent, but in fact are completely dependent on oil. As in many resource-rich economies, this has tended to encourage corruption and bad governance, and a culture of impunity among lawmakers. After a four-year FBI investigation, several Alaskan businessmen and politicians — including the state’s US senator, Ted Stevens — have been convicted of making and taking bribes to keep a tax on oil profits at an artificially low 20 percent. Palin herself is facing one abuse-of-power investigation for allegedly using her position to settle family scores by exacting retribution against her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, and firing officials who would not toe the line.
SELLING OUT
Palin claims to be embarrassed by Alaska’s national reputation as a corrupt backwater. Yet critics say she is in the pocket of Big Oil and is maintaining the state’s tradition of selling out its natural resources. She swept into the governor’s office as a self-styled renegade, promising to shake up the status quo, but has fallen in line with the Republican political establishment who have traditionally served the interests of multinationals and their hunting, fishing, mining and oil-drilling buddies at the expense of the environment.
Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain’s choice may reassure hardline Republicans, but for many Americans she is a frightening prospect: an anti-environmentalist who puts special interests above science and whose policies make the Bush administration look progressive; a pro-life hunter who opposes abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest, yet kills other living creatures for entertainment and a Christian fundamentalist who thinks that the Iraq War is “God’s task for America.”
She certainly stirs strong emotions.
As former New York mayor Ed Koch said: “She scares the hell out of me.”
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