ANWR plan stall

IQALUIT — A plan to allow oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife preserve seems to have derailed.

Despite support from both the Inuit of Alaska’s North Slope and from President George W. Bush, a proposal to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration appears to lack critical support in the U.S. Congress.

According to a recent report in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, who supports oil development, said Bush “doesn’t have the votes here, and neither do we right now.”

The drilling plan has been vehemently opposed by Southern environmentalists as well as by the Gwich’in Indians of Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The Gwich’in charge that drilling would disrupt the breeding of a major caribou herd which they depend on for subsistence hunting.

Inuit, on the other hand, point to similar oil projects elsewhere in the Alaskan Arctic that appear not to have harmed wildlife.

Inuit own much of the oil-rich land in ANWR, and stand to gain financially by selling drilling rights to oil companies.