Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Drilling would endanger wildlife

Every May, I spend four to five months in Alaska. I work as a naturalist and guide for an ecotourism company. Ecology, or how animals interact within the environment, is my passion.

One topic that often gets brought up is the the push to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. One conservation ecology principle that isn’t talked about enough is the need for continuous, unfractured habitat.

Big animals, especially top carnivores, need large and unadulterated expanses of wilderness to persist. For example, grizzly bears and wolves now exist mostly in islands of national parks like Grand Teton and Yellowstone. Outside of these protected areas, they run into major issues. Not even California, which has a grizzly on the state flag, has enough continuous wild space for this species anymore. Drilling in the refuge would bring networks of roads linking drilling activities that add more acute pressures and fragment habitat. We know now that no matter the size of the area, fragmented habitat doesn’t do these animals any good.