Senator FOWLER. Mr. Chairman-Chairman Wirth I should saybefore I have to go to a budget matter, I want to just thank all the panel for being here, but especially my friend, Mr. Fisher, a former colleague on the Ways and Means Committee. I still miss the wakeups of the Chairman when we offered Fisher-Fowler amendments. And glad to see you again. Senator WIRTH [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Fowler. Mr. Freeman. STATEMENT OF DR. MILTON M.R. FREEMAN, HENRY MARSHALL TORY PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA, EDMONTON, AB Dr. FREEMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Milton Freeman. I am an ecologist and social scientist with 30 years' experience working on environment and development issues in the arctic regions. During this time I have served as an advisor to various native groups and to the territorial and federal governments having served in Ottawa as Senior Science Advisor to the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, which is the lead department in matters of environmental management in the Canadian north. Mr. Chairman, in my written brief I have addressed three particular situations that pertain to ANWR, the ANWR issue. And I will briefly go through these. First of all, the high cost of social breakdown and its relationship to subsistence activities on the north slope. I refer in my brief to the class of problems known as "no technical solution problems" where there is no particular quick fix once complex social systems break down. Second, I refer to the importance, when weighing the experts' advice, of according very great weight to the expertise of rural Alaskans and Yukoners whose testimony you will have received, and you may still be receiving, during these hearings. And parenthetically, Mr. Chairman, I would like to add that the opinions expressed from village representatives will not necessarily represent unanimous positions, and as Mr. Justice Thomas Berger has demonstrated, village hearings take a long time to effectively ascertain the true opinions held on problematic issues that can find family members on opposite sides of a controversy. And third, the nature of development as the term has come to be defined. I speak to this issue and the importance of non-material attributes in evaluating development. It is not only economic value that we need consider, but importantly development involves quality of life issues and considerations of equity and social justice. Now, however, what I want to do in a moment is to speak on one main issue in the time that I have before you. And it falls more to the issue of subsistence though touching on all of the points mentioned in my written testimony. Though we identify the issue of subsistence more especially with northern native societies in the context of these particular hearings, in fact, we ourselves are not totally divorced in our industrial civilization from the concerns, and more especially the implications, of subsistence. In our case, given our occupational and social specializations, we leave the business of food producing to others, to the farmers, the fishermen, scientists and businessmen who insure we continue to have food on the table, and to the government agencies and environmental groups whose interactions aim to insure that the global environment can still provide the resources we will always need to stay alive. In our case, however, our subsistence activities are highly attenuated, largely delegated to others. A native Alaskan and Yukon society remains the business of everyone, but we have this common bond, this shared dependency upon the environment to provide for our continued existence. And as most would agree, the environment needs all the help it can get to survive the onerous demands we so often recklessly impose upon it. Our environmental problems mainly stem from an attitude problem, an indifference to the long-term effects of what we do. If we are to correct or offset this cultural shortcoming, we need to look with humility upon the subsistence behavior of others, those still possessing a profound ecological awareness of the fundamental relationships, biological, psychological and spiritual with which we are inextricably bound to living nature. My brief speaks to the importance, which I cannot overly stress, that members of this committee listen and learn from the testimony which comes from the Alaskan and Canadian native users of the living resources of the north slope region. These are representatives of long-term civilizations that have an intimate and enduring dependency upon the true wealth of the tundra and the tiger, the renewable resources which have sustained their societies and cultures for centuries if not millennia. And unless our future recklessness interferes, these dependencies could continue to sustain the indigenous ways of knowing and doing that I submit to you are of essential importance to our own future well-being. I come back again to my observation, Mr. Chairman, that our 20th Century industrial civilization has an attitude problem that is of such proportions that we must all be concerned about the world we will leave to our grandchildren. Two weeks ago at the Alaska Science Conference in Anchorage, two full days were given over to discuss long-term research in federally reserved lands in northwest Alaska. An overriding and recurring theme voiced by scientists and resource managers at this conference was how can we truly involve the native residents in our research. How can we tap their environmental knowledge and wisdom? How can we be assured their expertise will be joined in setting the research agendas now and in the future? This is, indeed, a welcome realization now ever so widespread. Just last month in a speech to the Canadian House of Commons, the member of Parliament for the Yukon referred to a Canadian scientist who could name and classify 200 northern bird species. This scientist can neither read, write nor speak English, but rather works in the Looshoo Indian language and lives in Old Crow. One of the hats I wear is as a member of the Commission of Ecology of IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Natural Resources. That commission made up of scientists from about 30 countries has as one of its main tasks the recording of environmental knowledge from the hundreds of traditional hunting, gathering, farming, fishing and pastoral societies around the world whose insights and accumulated wisdom for all our sakes must not be lost. I will not labor the point further but merely observe that over the past five years there have been numerous international science conferences sponsored by such groups-and I will mention just a few for the record-as the Marine Sciences Division and the Ecological Sciences Division of UNESCO, the International Association of Biological Oceanographers, the International Union of Biological Sciences, the International Ecological Association, and here in Washington, the National Research Council. All these groups are concerned to insure indigenous knowledge systems be used in solving various environmental and scientific problems. In short, Mr. Chairman, the realization exists widely and sincerely that subsistence users, having a special relationship with their environment, have important lessons we need to learn, to learn quickly and to learn well. It is for this reason among others that I am profoundly disturbed when threats to subsistence use are promoted ostensibly for the national good. We must insure our priorities are in order when we speak of the national interest. We must weigh very carefully the potential benefits and the potential losses, and we must use an appropriate calculus when making these particular judgments. What price a few hundred thousand and or a few million barrels of oil? What price a human life, a way of life, and ultimately our way of life? The issues at stake, Mr. Chairman, override those of economics but not of morality and are not those of expediency but of sustainability. Thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Dr. Freeman follows:] STATEMENT OF DR. MILTON M.R. FREEMAN, HENRY MARSHALL TORY PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA, BEFORE THE SENATE ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, 15 OCTOBER 1987 Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, I am Milton Freeman. In this testimony before you, I have chosen to be brief rather than discursive as the issues I choose to address are straightforward, and much of what I could report, second-hand as it were, will be heard by you first hand during the subsequent public testimony phase of these hearings. Over the past fifteen years there have been many social impact assessments made in both the U.S. and Canada that bear on these present hearings, for the Northern regions of our continent have felt the quickened pact of industrial development, whether in the form of massive hydro-electric developments or proposals for mining, hydrocarbon or transportation developments. In nearly every case a coalition of groups, representing native residents of the region, environmentalists, church groups, academics and assorted other public interest bodies have counselled extreme caution, if not implacable opposition, to the proposed developments. Why should this be so and why does this continue to be so? Surely after so many earlier attempts to push the industrial frontier north, we must have learned something of how to do it right? The reason petitioners continue to urge caution is not because we have learned nothing, for certainly we have, but rather that the stakes are so high should the predicted negative impacts come to pass. You may ask, why if we have learned from our past experiences - 2 why are mistakes still made? The answer is simple: there are classes of problems in this world which have no technical solution. This is not to say there are no remedies to such problems but merely that there is no quick fix, no easily advanced or surefire solution. We can think of many such no-technical solution problems closer to home: unwanted pregnancy, urban violence, chronic youth employment, sexual and physical abuse of children the list goes on and on. There may be solutions, but they seem a long time in coming, and according to many official reports, despite our seemingly best attempts to resolve the problems they do not appear to become less common with each passing year. - - The fact is that societies are not machines, in the sense that one can diagnose the cause of the problem, take remedial action and presto all works like clockwork once again. Human societies -- even those appearing most simple -- are the most complex, variable, and unpredictable of all ecological systems, and despite their inherent powers of overcoming internally and externally posed perturbations within a certain range, there are finite limits of stress whose thresholds can be exceeded often without too much advance warning. It is for this particular reason, namely the high cost incurred in societal breakdown, the extreme difficulty of effecting social reconstruction following such breakdown, and the ensuing human casualties and losses whose presences and absences respectively persist long after the event, it is for |