Who Lives in the Arctic National Wildife Area?

Did Smithsonian hide Arctic wildlife exhibit?

Tuesday, May 6, 2003




If you want to see the Smithsonian Institution's stunning new exhibition of photographs of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, you'll have to look around.

The photo exhibit has been relegated to the lower level of the National Museum of Natural History, in a hallway tucked behind an escalator. It's apparently no accident that it is so hard to find.

The photos are the work of Subhankar Banerjee, who spent 14 months living in the Alaskan wilderness and traveling 4,000 miles to capture rare scenes of life in the refuge in all four seasons. His book, "Seasons of Life and Land," is an introduction to "a land of pristine wilderness, pulsing with life even in the depths of white subzero winter."

And this is where the controversy begins. In its determination to drill for oil and gas on portions of the refuge, the Bush administration has tried to paint the land as barren and desolate, a "flat white nothingness." But on the Senate floor in March, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, displayed one of Mr. Banerjee's photos of a polar bear and encouraged her colleagues to see the photos before voting for drilling, which opponents contend would destroy the refuge's ecosystem. The Senate subsequently voted against drilling, 52-48.

Soon after, Mr. Banerjee learned that his exhibit, which had been scheduled for a prime spot near the museum's main hall and rotunda, would be moved to a lower level.

Captions for the photos, which had described the land's beauty and the fragility of the wildlife in great detail, were shortened, some to a few meaningless words, such as "rock lichens." And an early draft of the introduction to the exhibit, which had included a quote from former President Jimmy Carter supporting preservation of the refuge, was changed and the quote omitted.

Smithsonian officials have denied that they were pressured to censor the exhibit, but they have said that they think it was politicized by Ms. Boxer's actions and that museum exhibits cannot be seen as advocating a position on pending legislation. The Smithsonian's budget will also be the subject of congressional hearings this week, and the head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee is none other than Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who has said the Senate vote against drilling in the refuge was a vote against him personally.

The Banerjee exhibit opened last week. Let's hope all the publicity over the museum's action will backfire and actually spur people to seek out the photos.

Those who manage to find it will see breathtaking images of polar bear, musk ox, the bones of dead whales, birds (who migrate to the refuge from six continents and all 50 states), icebergs, the Northern Lights, and a sweeping land that is known to its native people as "the sacred place where life begins."

It's not likely that many of those viewers will come away convinced that drilling in the refuge is worth losing one of the last places on earth that is still a true -and sacred - wilderness.


From an editorial in the Bergen Record (NJ), 6 May 2003



Manipulation is an art form.