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PEER laments Alaska
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Posted by Staci Matlock on March 31, 2010 at 11:00am in Running wild View Discussions

The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility say if you thought Palin was bad, check out what her replacement is doing:

From the PEER director today - "If you thought Sarah Palin was bad, take a look at the guy she left in charge - Sean Parnell. He hasn't merely gone rogue, he is shooting for downright feral.

For example, Parnell's Board of Game has recently taken the following actions over the objections of the National Park Service (NPS):

Rescinded the 122-square mile no-trapping buffer (which had been in place since 1992) on the northeast boundary of Denali National Park. Indeed, the Park Service had urged that the buffer area be increased, citing a plunge in the Denali wolf population to its lowest level since 1987 due to trapping and hunting outside the park's borders. The Denali wolves are the first and longest-studied group of wild wolves in the world;

Renewed its controversial "aerial wolf control" program where state game agents shoot wolves to boost moose and caribou numbers. This month, state helicopter gunners killed the entire Weber Creek wolf pack from the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, including wolves with radio collars (which the agents admitted they saw) that were a part of a 16-year NPS scientific study;

Authorized use of flashlights in killing black bear sows and cubs in their dens before they emerge from hibernation. The Park Service immediately moved to block this practice inside park units that allow hunting, however.

These events signal a breakdown in the traditional comity between state and federal resource agencies. For nearly 30 years, the Alaska Board of Game has been party to a Memorandum of Understanding to recognize the management priorities of national park lands and cooperate in mutual interests. That MOU now appears to be a dead letter.

At the same time, the Park Service is mandated to manage wildlife in its Alaskan parks as "natural and healthy" populations but human activities outside park boundaries threaten to nullify that statutory goal. When asked whether NPS is developing a national response to these and other park buffer issues, Deputy Director Dan Wenk told PEER that his agency had no such plans and the matter would be handled locally, if at all.

This issue is not confined to Alaska, however, as PEER has seen in similar disputes from Arizona's Lake Mead to Wyoming's border with Yellowstone, as well as several national wildlife refuges. PEER will be urging formulation of a national park buffer policy and a reexamination of the sizeable federal financial contributions to rogue state wildlife management agencies.  Stay tuned. Sincerely,

P.S. A grim standoff over the fate of the ten surviving Virginia big-eared bats (out of an original 40) is playing out inside the federal bureaucracy in a review of a captive breeding project gone terribly wrong.. 

P.P.S. If states are the laboratories of our union, it is prudent to acknowledge that some state experiments turn out badly. Check out the Frankenstein stirring in New Jersey.

Tags: Alaska, Palin, wolves

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