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“Under the calving grounds of the Western
[Alaska] Arctic Herd is one of the largest
low-sulfur coal deposits in the world. The
Teshekpuk Lake area of the National Petroleum
Reserve-Alaska, the calving grounds of the
Teshekpuk Herd, is facing proposed oil
development, and as you continue east across
North America from calving ground to calving
ground, you find activities or proposed
activities for development of uranium and diamond
mines, access roads, and other gas and oil
development.”
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University of Alaska at Fairbanks
http://www.uaf.edu/news/news/20080213123944.html
Submitted by Marie Gilbert
.
Seeking sustainability in a world of instability
New approaches to management of human-caribou systems
For most northern indigenous people, the roughly
3 million caribou in the world are their most
important terrestrial subsistence resource, and
while hunters and scientists alike have long
expressed concern about the on-going availability
of caribou, their perceptions of the causes of
change have differed.
“For years people have managed natural resources
based on their knowledge of how ecosystems have
functioned in the past, which assumes conditions
of equilibrium,” said Gary Kofinas, a resource
policy and management scientist and director of
the Resilience and Adaptation Program at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks.