Well, here I go. I hate to jump into this discussion because it gets to be such an us or them thing. If you're on the side of exploration and production you are per se a rapist, destroyer of all that is beautiful in nature, and if you're an environmentalist, you are an air headed tree hugger. Surely, there must be a white male republican somewhere in the world who can recite Joyce Kilmer's lovely poem with soul; or a young lady of the Green persuasion who realizes the enjoyment of eating an occasional bit of red meat.

I lived in Alaska for a good long spell; long enough to get an engineering degree from the University of Alaska (Fairbanks)and to raise two daughters and a son and see them through school and out into the world. I went to Alaska because I loved the outdoors, I loved to fish and hunt. After college i eventually becamd the CEO of the largest Alaskan owned construction company, which incidentally built 80% of the infrastructure in support off the exploration and initial production on the North Slope. I took a leave from that firm to become the Commissioner of Alaska's Department of Public Works.

The real prize in the oil development world so far as Alaska is concerned has always been the geologic structures that lie within the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. All the time that work was centered on the Prudhoe Bay field the eyes of the oil company executives were on ANWR. They dared not stub their toe environmentally or goodbye future development. It was the environmentalists who kept the oil companies and construction firms honest, and it will be the environmentalists who will again keep them honest in ANWR. Because oil recovery WILL take place in ANWR. The country will not support such a radical change in national economics as to deny it. As a country we have prospered exactly because of a policy of unlimited harvest, sale and consumption of natural resources. The will of the people is not so aroused as to allow them to reject that policy, and YOU, the people, are not prepared to survive the depression that would inevitably ensue, were a move in that direction to become an actuality.

On this subject, from where the sun now stands, I will speak no more forever.

Spud