"When the Tide is out, the table is set" or, why OFFSHORE DRILLING IS A BAD IDEA

Bidarki: Where Science and Spirit Meet from Kevin Co on Vimeo.

Here is a video of a project I am so proud and honored I was a part of. I worked with Anne the western scientist here, and the traditional local scientists of the villages on this amazing project about an important Suq'piaq Allutiq food source found in the intertidal here, the (i'm spelling this phonetically here, my allutiq is awful, i'm so sorry) Aahoy-duq, otherwise called the Bidarki, or the Black Leather Chiton, or Katherina tunicata. (by the way, that's me driving that good looking aluminum anchor point skiff, the Lady Bidarka, into those knarly prop biters. and, by the way, my props had a high rate of non-biteness)

And what does this have to do with oil? Well, most people still don't go picking (harvesting) anywhere near where they saw oil spilled from the exxon valdez. some still don't eat many because of it. But even more are horrified and feel excluded from decision making because in our own Cook Inlet, our waters are not allowed to be included in the Clean Water Act. Not only is there very little oversight to our offshore drilling sites in Cook Inlet, but Oil companies are legally allowed to dump everything that is a by product in oil extraction into our waters. Without processing at all. Cyanide, cadmium and more shooting out the out pipe into where our dinner swim through.

Heard about the Cook Inlet Beluga whale? No one knows how many are left, but sightings are getting extremely rare, and their prey are very susceptible to the chemical pollution dumped from Cook Inlet's oil drilling operations, so it is no wonder that our belugas are most likely soon to be extinct. 

Know anyone involved in an Upper Cook Inlet fishery? The past few years haven't brought much salmon to the table, let alone the money these fishing families need to survive, and this year the closures in our upper cook inlet watersheds are frightening. 

I could go on and on, but I think you understand. This is important to everyone, everywhere. Bristol Bay, the most successful wild salmon fishery in the world has already been put under the trigger by the Bush administration selling Offshore Drilling leases there, the last thing we need is the administrations' buddy McFrightening to come along and dot our coastlines with pollution machines so we can continue this unhealthy lust for oil. 

To me, it is really not surprising that McCain wants to do this. If the man cannot respect his own wife enough to cheat behind her newly disabled back as he did to his first wife, how can we trust him to respect where we get our food and livelihoods from? That's right. We cannot trust McCain. 

I need a man who respects me, the land I live off of and the people I am a part of. For the presidency, Obama is this man.