Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Article Analysis

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Some individuals believe that using the wilderness for drilling of oil purposes will solve the US and its dependency on foreign oil. Through this article, Democratic congressman Edward J. Markey, alongside Representative Nancy Johnson, discuss the reasons for which they want to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or the ANWR, and other wilderness reserves from being developed on and industrialized. This wildlife reserve has been labeled as being one of the most magnificent reserves found in America. Unfortunately, people want to encroach on this territory and use it to increase the nation’s oil and gas development. This is not the first time that the reserve has been threatened but it is the most extreme. If this reserve were to be taken over by these industrialists, we would lose all form of wildlife available in this area including its endangered species.
The primary reasons that these two representatives want to protect the ANWR is because they want to keep the legacy of former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter alive. These presidents, in addition to several senators since their presidential terms, have worked hard …show more content…

However, the United States government is one of the few countries that actually has the money to continue importing oil from foreign nations. Why not continue to use it? Markey states that even if we were to use our own land for the drilling of oil, “it would only reduce our foreign oil dependence from 56 percent today to 50 percent 10 years from now” (Markey, 2001, para 18). In a nutshell, this is logically not a big enough percentage difference to make us even want to consider drilling on American soil with the immense possibility that this attack on the environment would kill and/or relocate hundreds of thousands of wildlife creatures and nature’s plant