Alaska drilling: Much damage, little reward

In response to Dick Roggensack's June 4 letter, “Oil in Alaska shouldn't hurt our environment”:

Audubon's Doug Harr and I noted dozens of bird species whose nesting and eventual migrations would be threatened, not “several … upset” over oil drilling. We acknowledge there can be reasonable oil and gas exploration, but not near the critical Teshekpuk Lake region and several other regions in the 22 million acre preserve.

And far from “isolated rigs,” petroleum exploration brings with it roads, pipelines and support infrastructure, threatening to block migration routes for land species, as well as destroying vital wetland breeding areas for millions of birds. And the “additional oil … benefiting millions of Iowans” will be used up fast.

As stated in our guest column (“Preserving Alaska benefits Iowa,” May 24), modern-day exploration techniques show all this construction, destruction and production would be for a supply of a couple of weeks' worth of fuel, not the decades of oil guessed at in the 1920s.

Joe Wilkinson

Iowa Wildlife Federation

Solon