Mother Jones is reporting that a leaked memo written by FWS Alaska regional director Greg Siekaniec warned the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that going ahead with plans to seismically test for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would pose an unacceptable threat to its population of threatened polar bears, yet BLM ignored the warning:
In late July, the Bureau of Land Management announced that seismic surveys would likely have little or no impact on the region’s environment and sensitive species, including the Southern Beaufort Sea’s polar bear population, which has declined rapidly in recent years due largely to climate change. A BLM spokesperson told Alaska Public Media that because “there would be insignificant impact,” the Interior Department intended to forgo a time-consuming environmental impact statement and instead issue a less rigorous and much shorter analysis, known as an environmental assessment.
But then, the FWS—which, like the BLM, is part of the Interior Department—began sounding alarms. On September 6, Siekaniec sent his four-page memo stating that, according to the agency’s preliminary analysis, it would be virtually impossible to carry out the surveys without further jeopardizing the polar bear population.
The problem is that seismic testing can only be done when the ground is frozen and that is when polar bear moms den their cubs. The FWS memo pointed out that while even the loss of a single polar bear in this threatened population would probably be illegal, seismic testing would likely kill as many as 15 polar bears.
Of course after the memo was leaked the author backtracked and now claims that “changes” were made to the authorizing document to protect the bears but environmentalists are calling bullshit and are ready to sue to stop this latest Trump administration giveaway to the fossil fuel corporations.
This is only a cursory summary of the article so I recommend giving it a read to learn how the pieces all fit together, including, for example, how oversight had been taken away from FWS and given to BLM.