Thanks to Trump, This Senator Finally Gets Her Chance to Decimate Alaskas Environmental Protections

[Hermit-The-Prog]

An industry-friendly White House helps Sen. Lisa Murkowski score long-sought gains.

Krista Langlois Mar. 11, 2018

This story was originally published by High Country News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski had been a member of the United States Senate for 15 years. She’d pulled off a historic write-in campaign, built a reputation as someone who thinks deeply about policy, and helped pass a sweeping bipartisan public-lands deal. But a year after gaining control over two of the Senate’s most influential energy and natural resource committees, Murkowski had made little headway in her plans to develop Alaska’s protected lands and waters.

Three changes in particular had eluded her. The federal “roadless rule” that spares old-growth forest in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest survived litigation, and Murkowski’s efforts to bypass it legislatively had fizzled. The Aleutian village of King Cove was still cut off from the rest of the world by the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. And one of President Obama’s executive orders kept the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge closed to drilling.

Murkowski, a lifelong Alaskan who believes that her constituents’ well-being is inextricable from access to the state’s natural resources, was furious. “There is no other way to describe it,” she said of the executive order, than “as a war. We are left with no choice but to hit back as hard as we can.”

Now, with help from an exceedingly development-friendly administration, Murkowski is successfully hitting back—and ushering in huge changes to some of America’s wildest landscapes. Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska regional director of The Wilderness Society, says she’s never seen “anything comparable to the full-on assault of Alaska’s land and waters that we’ve seen in the last year.

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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/03/thanks-to-trump-this-senator-finally-gets-her-chance-to-decimate-alaskas-environmental-protections/