Pretty good lead article in today's Anchorage Daily News about the fate of Alaska's nearly 4,000 polar bears over the next century, if present trends continue.
Excerpt:
"This is the first time that we've evaluated the plight of polar bears (with) respect to climate change, and we found that they were vulnerable to extinction," said the group's outgoing chairman, biologist Scott Schliebe, who oversees management of polar bears in Alaska for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Polar bears don't have a place to go if they lose the ice."
i'm still doing a slow burn over sensible shoes' recent diary my alaska, in which alaskans generally got trashed for selling out to big oil for a small annual stipend, and caring nothing for their surroundings or the preservation of wilderness lands.
i get the impression shoie visited bush alaska, or maybe lived in a village for awhile and decided to tell everyone here everything that was bad and nothing that was good about it. so we heard tales of crippling social problems, poverty, a lack of hygiene, animals butchered in bathtubs that are not used for bathing, and ten dollars for a pint of orange juice.
this is an argument for conducting surveys to try to find out as many details as possible about the democrats' opinions on a broad range of issues. not so much how to do it [basically, redirect some of the resources from polling during campaigns to polling now], but WHY.
on the dean blog in the primary, there was endless debate about the efficacy of various proposed strategies [should we try to appeal to the gun-racked, confederate flag-flying southern man?, move to the left or the right?, talk about your religious beliefs or not?, why is the DNC so out of touch with the base?, should we accept corporate money?, etc.] and there were many well-founded replies, but there also was often a lack of data.
[more below]
The native village of Shishmaref on the Bering Sea coast of Northwest Alaska is washing into the sea. This article in today's Anchorage Daily News talks about the costs, and other issues associated with moving the village to a new location. If this is what it takes to move a village of 600 people, I wonder how much it will be to relocate Miami when it becomes necessary?
Some excerpts from the article appear below.
a couple weeks ago i made a bunch of posts here about CBS and the texas guard memos. i had a crackpot theory that rove got someone to fake up the memos and release them, after making certain the originals would not be available -- and they deliberately made them look fake, but left the content reasonably close to the original, knowing that someone would discover the forgery, and knowing that CBS would end up looking bad no matter what. if CBS acknowledged the forgery, it would make it look like bush was being set up by someone [some group of crazy liberal commies]; or if it was revealed later, CBS would be suspected of having an agenda, or at least of being sloppy and reckless.
this letter to the editor in today's Anchorage Daily News well depicts the frustration of many with the Alaska congressional delegation's continuing ineffectiveness in addressing environmental concerns:
The Democrats should renounce corporate donations in the '06 and '08 campaigns. I got wrapped up in the Dean campaign a bit last summer. I contributed about $500 and was prepared to come up with $1,500 more, had he been the nominee. I don't really want to debate whether or not Dean was a strong candidate. Trippi in interviews is playing up their fundraising suceess as unprecedented and historic. He makes a good point but I'm not sure it has much to do with Dean per se. Kerry was just as successful in raising donations from ordinary people, once he became the candidate. The real story here is that people like me, previously interested but only tangentially could become strong donors and supporters. I'd given fifty bucks here and there, especially if someone I knew was running for city assembly or state house or something -- but the idea of giving $2k to a presidential candidate was incomprehensible. And it wouldn't have necessarily been easy to raise the money. On the other hand, it might have been the best damned investment i could make, had things worked out.
