Huge Alaska Tract Up for Sale

Though it continues to lobby for a moratorium on offshore drilling, the Obama administration apparently has no qualms about pushing ahead in onshore drilling. On Friday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the impending sale of about 1.8 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope for oil and gas exploration, an area that's part of the state’s National Petroleum Reserve. The reserve covers 23 million acres on the North Slope in Alaska—an area about the size of Indiana—and 190 tracts will become available for drilling; bidding starts August 11 in Anchorage. The Bureau of Land Management did set aside the area around Teshekpuk Lake to protect migratory birds, but the fact remains that a chunk of Alaska is now open for drilling business, one of dozens of similar deals in Western states. To some, the environmental considerations are not enough. "They're not going to cut off its heart," Brendan Cumming of the Center for Biological Diversity said of the area, "but they're still cutting off an arm and a leg."