Protecting belugas ‘right’ and reasonable

By Bob Shavelson

Maybe George Bush wasn’t our most eloquent president. But he did use the 1906 Antiquities Act to designate national monument status for roughly 200,000 square miles of marine waters — the largest such designation by any president in history. That’s because, from Teddy Roosevelt to Barry Goldwater, and from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, conservation has been a long-standing staple of American conservative thought and politics. And rightly so. As preeminent conservative Russell Kirk aptly put it, “Nothing is more conservative than conservation.”
So why, then, do we hear such angry “sky-is-falling, hair-on-fire” rhetoric from our corporate captains and politicians when it comes to protecting the Cook Inlet beluga whale? If you believe everything you hear lately, protecting the beluga whale will completely shut down all economic activity in Cook Inlet, and will leave us all in the dark burning sticks in cold caves.
Of course, that’s just plain wrong. And there are thousands of examples in Alaska and across the nation to prove that protecting our natural heritage and supporting a sound economy are not mutually exclusive.
The real question is: why have such extreme positions taken the place of common sense conservation? It’s not as if we couldn’t see this issue coming a mile away. For the past decade, Mark Begich, Lisa Murkowski, Don Young — and our state and local politicians and agencies — have sat on their hands, refusing to act in the face of a slow-motion train wreck. Now, as the National Marine Fisheries Service takes steps to protect the whale — steps it should have taken years ago — the finger-pointing, name-calling and factual distortions have hit a feverish pitch.
The Endangered Species Act is, like every law, imperfect. But lesser protections have failed to provide the safeguards needed for the whale’s population to rebound. While critics of enhanced protections decry the heavy hand of the federal government, they’re the first ones with their snouts in the federal trough when the money spigot opens. Doesn’t it make more sense to work within the law to find ways to protect the beluga whale and enhance economic development at the same time? When Senator Ted Stevens faced a similar issue with the Stellar Sea Lion, he acted boldly and brought tens of millions of research dollars into the Alaska economy to find answers. We can and should do the same thing here.
The NMFS Conservation Plan for the Cook Inlet Beluga whale includes a laundry list of research projects that will help us provide better management solutions. Instead of arm-waving and foot-stomping, our politicians at the local, state and federal levels should look to research and science for some answers. They need to work to find out why the beluga remains troubled.
Instead, Governor Parnell has “declared war” on the federal government, and we’re about to watch lawyers and slick public relations firms from Outside chew up millions in Alaska tax dollars to fight additional whale protections. While this grandstanding may make good politics in the lead up to elections, it doesn’t address the root of the matter: the Cook Inlet beluga whale is in trouble.
All sides to this debate seem to agree on one thing: the beluga whale is a vital strand in the ecological fabric of Cook Inlet, and we need to protect it for generations to come.
It’s not only the reasonable thing to do, it’s the right and conservative thing to do. Ronald Reagan, a darling of the American right, clearly understood these most basic ideals when he noted:
“What is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live … And we want to protect and conserve the land on which we live — our countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows and forests. This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.”

Bob Shavelson is executive director of Cook Inletkeeper, a member-supported nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the Cook Inlet watershed and the life it sustains. For more information, visit www.inletkeeper.org

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