Word: alaskas
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...REPRESENTATIVE DON YOUNG OF Alaska ever decides to raise some extra income, he can always lease out his Capitol Hill office as a wildlife museum. A former trapper and riverboat captain, he works surrounded by his trophies: the heads of a ram and a wild boar, mounted moose horns and the prime exhibit, a towering Kodiak bear that he bagged on a hunting trip back home. You could say he was a man with a hands-on appreciation of nature. Or you could say he's a guy who prefers his wildlife dead...
...Endangered Species Act is only part of it. The Wild Westerners have set their sights on the clean air and water laws, wetlands protection and the further acquisition of federal lands. They want to increase logging in parts of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the nation's largest temperate rain forest and home of grizzlies, eagles and 800-year-old Sitka spruce. The Republican lawmakers envision victory in a 15-year battle to open part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the 19-million-acre wilderness area that is a breeding ground for the porcupine caribou...
While Bill Clinton has threatened to veto some issues, last year's Republican sweep has put the Western lawmakers, many of whom are longtime members of Congress, into a position to make good on their agenda. In the Senate, for example, Alaska's Frank Murkowski heads the counterpart panel to Young's House committee on resources. Between them, the two ferociously prodevelopment Alaskans oversee most of the natural-resources legislation that comes before Congress. Alaska's other Republican Senator, Ted Stevens, runs the Governmental Affairs Committee. That gives him a line of fire on the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees...
...their top concerns, particularly if the damage doesn't occur in their own backyard. And the Westerners are framing their attack in the terms of the Republican agenda that voters went for last year: smaller government, regulatory reform, budget cutting and property rights. In resource-dependent economies like Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, they are also stressing job creation. "Eventually,'' says Young, "the working class, the poorer people, will realize that [the Endangered Species Act] is saving crickets over saving babies...
Rudenstine said that he met with several members of Congress, including Sen. James Jeffords (R-Vt.), Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), all of who are members of committees relating to academic funding...