Sarah Palin and Environment, Global Warming and Drilling in Protected Areas

It’s killing time; you know they’re going to leave us. It’s approaching the fall/winter season as I write this. The guys will go out in the woods with their guns dragged from back seats of trucks and head out for sport. That sport is killing.

That’s what they do in a small town called Natchitoches where I live now and in La Grande, Oregon where I grew up. It’s a celebrated annual event. The local grocery has big wooden racks to display the killed. You can even buy postcards to add your picture, with you and the dead deer beside. You don’t need den walls for display anymore, just props for the trucks on the road.

Now I was raised on deer meat, and I like it. It makes sense when you need to feed a family, as my folks did years ago. But sport? Like football for cheering?

Sarah Palin likes hunting wolves, which aren’t creatures we think of sympathetically. But in research on mass murder and war it has been found that people who enjoy killing animals don’t mind killing people some time. (True Crime) A smile from someone who talks about the sport of killing wolves (Detroit Free Press) that is then beamed on a political stage to celebrate the possible death of one’s son should make many of us worry. (KNVN 24) Because if someone likes killing animals from the air and finds that fun and smiles when a son goes to war, then will that same person protect or worry about our sons in a world where killing is a sport?

Certain types of creatures have been on the Palin hit list for some time. Still they have more in common than that; they help keep the rest of us safe. So we should probably think about protecting these characters, especially given all the other problems we have because they are directly involved in what’s going on. What happened to them might be the proverbial tip ofThe iceberg to what might happen to us.

Let’s talk about fish first. Let’s talk about salmon. I don’t know about you, but salmon is my favorite fish, anytime and any place. I was born and raised in Oregon, in salmon country. I grew up with salmon steak and went out with friends and family to catch a few now and then. So I love them and know them well enough to want to make sure they get the right treatment. By that I mean I want their waters to be clean enough to keep them healthy, and I want them to have an overall environment to breed, make babies and keep lots of us fed.

Sarah Palin doesn’t have the same opinions about salmon as I do. Oh, she likes to catch and eat them, that’s true. Protecting them is a whole other matter. Palin can look right out the door and see fish that are dying, even when the lake near her house is stocked as the fish continue to die. In order to get commercial interests into Wasilla Palin sacrificed the environment to do it. An example is right in her own backyard. Lake Lucille has been declared seriously impaired and really dead and has been since 1994 when Palin was Mayor of Wasilla. That was documented by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and remains like that today. (Talbot)

One Wasilla resident has said, as reported in Salon.com, "Sarah's legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth," said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher. Stoll, as reported, worked with Palin's parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, at the same school. She continued, "The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it's not a pleasant place to live. It's not thought out. And that's a shame.

"Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can't understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition."(Talbot)

But that’s not the only reason why salmon are grieving and leaving. If they want to die, they would likely want to do that proudly and not in polluted waters. One would think that watching a lake turn bad, and the fish flounder as a result, that some clean water regulation would be welcomed. However, Sarah Palin did the opposite: she spoke out against the Clean Water Act. Palin and her public want mineral mining more than food without tapeworms, which salmon from Alaska now have in abundance. (Summer Johnson) I wonder how many people who eat salmon grown in Alaska worry about how that affects them today. Palin, it appears, may not care.

If you thought it was only fish that should worry, you need to know about bears. Sarah Palin is against classifying polar bears as endangered species. Palin told the public that scientists had said that polar bears were not endangered at all. When questioned, secrecy measures immediately began, as anyone who asked for the emails from scientists were kept at bay with large sums of money asked for disclosing them. Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, was someone who had asked for them and was told that this request would be costly, as in $468,784. After going through federal records, Steiner found out that the scientists had indeed said that polar bears are an endangered species and worthy of protection. (Steiner)

Despite Steiner’s findings and the available knowledge about polar bears, Palin filed suit to keep the polar bears off the endangered list. Palin’s reason: she was worried that environmentalists are using the Endangered Species Act to block the extraction of oil and gas according to an interview she had earlier this year with Glenn Beck.

Palin also said that the population of polar bears is growing, but not according to the experts. One of them, Ian Stirling, who is a scientist who has studied polar bears for 37 years, says "Polar bear populations have not been increasing for the past 37 years, and that's a well-known fact," Stirling has studied polar bears more than anyone. So the issue is to lie, no matter the consequence to polar bears these days. That makes some people sad, just to think of how soft and cuddly they look, but who would feel sad for the wolves we’ll talk about next? (Stirland)

Most people don’t feel a sense of wonder and joy when they think about wolves. Actually most people get scared, but these days the wolves are. It’s one thing to keep wolves out of areas where people live and work, especially when they can eat not only livestock but people too if they are hungry enough. It’s another thing to make that a sport, just to kill for the fun of it. I’ve touched on that before, but it warrants inclusion with the fish and the bears.

Palin put a bounty on the heads of wolves, to encourage average citizens to load up their guns and go kill them, from the air, from everywhere. (Benjamin) That bounty was eventually stopped through legal action. Palin, however, wanted the practice to continue despite the ethical issues involved. All over the Internet there are pictures of Palin smiling over wolf carcasses as part of her campaign, so the practice continues certainly. Palin claims that humans killing wolves helps thin out the populations of predators that kill moose and elk which subsistence farmers in Alaska need to survive.

In defense of those wolves, not my friends surely, there’s not much scientific support for Palin’s position. In fact in 2007, 172 scientists wrote to Palin with their concerns about the lack of real science supporting killing the population of wolves. ( Benjamin) They are concerned about the balance of nature related to global warming taking place in the wilds of Alaska. (O’Brien) That didn’t influence Palin to change. The shooting continues and is applauded as well. In the wilderness of the gun, this is one more place people can practice sharp shooting. So what’s next for the propaganda machine that supports candidates like Palin who really don’t care about the effects of what they do on the rest of the world?

How someone thinks about life in any form, including protected animals, in relationship to the acquisition of material gain tells us something about how an individual might relate to victims of acts over which they have little control. Let’s learn about how Sarah Palin looks at certain social issues to try to figure out how she might respond to legislation surrounding such issues as domestic violence, sex abuse, and the rights of people with disabilities since these get to the core of her beliefs about life and how we should treat the least among us.