Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Alaska's effort to peel off some ANWR land under review at Interior Department
The state's current dispute over the boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a place believed to have huge oil deposits, is partly based on a pilot for a defunct airline who came to believe long ago the U.S. government was enforcing an incorrect border.
Andy Bachner, a Fairbanks investor in oil and gas leases, said his flights across Alaska's North Slope as a Wien Air Alaska pilot started during the early days of the oil rush in the 1960s. That brought him into contact with petroleum geologists who took particular interest in that area of the Slope, which later became the 19-million-acre national wildlife refuge.
On his flights — sometimes at altitudes so low he could spot polar bears and whales — Bachner said he realized ANWR's northwest boundary, as enforced by federal officials, overshot the Canning River, the western boundary in the refuge's legal description, by far.
The federal government says the boundary extends to the Staines River, which it describes as a channel of the Canning. The state, and Bachner, say the Staines, farther to the west, is a river in its own right and therefore outside the refuge...more
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