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Luke Mogelson | In the Streets With Antifa
Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "Trump is vowing to designate the movement as a terrorist organization. But its supporters believe that they are protecting their communities-and that confronting fascists with violence can be justified."
READ MORE
How Police, National Guard and the Military Are Preparing for Election Day Tensions
Tom Bowman and Martin Kaste, NPR
Excerpt: "November 3 promises to be an Election Day unlike any other, and public safety entities say they're preparing for tensions and the possibility of violence."
READ MORE
"They Wanted to Take My Womb Out": Survivor of Medical Abuse in ICE Jail Deported After Speaking Out
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Jaromy Floriano Navarro is a survivor of medical abuse and neglect at Irwin. She was the original source of the information about a medical abuse by Dr. Mahendra Amin that was eventually included in the whistleblower report."
READ MORE
Judge Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Samuel Corum/NYT)
Nina Totenberg on Amy Coney Barrett, Anita Hill And Saying Goodbye to RBG
Terry Gross, NPR
Excerpt: "NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg has spent decades covering major shifts in the Supreme Court and breaking major stories about the court."
Watching Judge Amy Coney Barrett's Senate confirmation hearings, Totenberg was struck by the nominee's reticence.
"There was almost nothing she was willing to say about anything," Totenberg says. "Amy Coney Barrett takes the crown for unresponsiveness."
Now, as the Senate prepares to vote on Barrett's confirmation next week, Totenberg anticipates a fundamental shift in the Supreme Court's outlook.
"With the ascension of what is likely to be Justice Barrett, I think we're likely to see a court that is more conservative than any court since the 1930s. And it could lead to very profound consequences," she says.
Totenberg says that if Joe Biden is elected president, any progressive legislation that passes is likely to be challenged "over and over again — the way the [Affordable Care Act] has been challenged."
"I don't think [Biden is] a fan of court packing or adding justices, but [Franklin] Roosevelt wasn't a particular fan of it to begin with," Totenberg says. "It took three years of the Supreme Court striking down essential New Deal legislation at the height of the Depression for him to make his proposal to add justices to the court."
Interview Highlights
On her friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Initially, it was just a professional friendship. And then when she moved to Washington, we became really close friends. She was a very interesting person, in a way difficult to peg, in the sense that a lot of people took her for being a bit austere because, in fact, she was very shy and very quiet. So when you would have her over to dinner, you sometimes really had to strain to hear her voice. And what could you discuss with her, after all, you can't discuss the court? ...
But in fact, we had just many wonderful times together, especially in the last year of her life. During lockdown she came to our house for dinner every Saturday night, almost until the time she died.
On saying goodbye to Ginsburg
She was really not feeling well. And we brought dinner to her. And that was the last time I saw her; [it] was probably about 10 days before she died. But I did talk to her and I said goodbye to her on the phone. ... At that point it was just a couple of days before she died, and she couldn't talk anymore, but [Ginsburg's] daughter said she raised her hand to wave when I [said goodbye].
On if she thinks Ginsburg regretted not retiring during the Obama administration
Ruth didn't do regrets, and she didn't do defeat. She just soldiered on. I think that she regretted that Trump was president; I think that's patently obvious from some of the impolitic things that she said and shouldn't have said, on one occasion, anyway, but that's just not the way she operated. She operated to live and to get her work done, and she did that almost until the day she died. Not quite, but I'd say, within weeks. I don't think she even acknowledged the possibility of really dying before a new president — whether it would be Trump or Biden — was sworn in. I don't think she really acknowledged that genuine possibility that she was going to die before then until maybe a couple of weeks before she died.
On covering Justice Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991 and breaking the story that Anita Hill had submitted an affidavit about sexual harassment that the Senate Judiciary Committee had ignored
It's true that it was ignored, but it's also true that she really didn't want her name to be public. When I talked to her at first, she didn't want her name to be public still. And I said I was trying to get her to do an interview with me. And she said that if I could get the affidavit, that she would agree to an interview. And I think ... that she didn't really think I could get the affidavit and that therefore she would not have to come forward.
But I did get the affidavit, and she lived up to what she said. She did do an interview with me. Almost everything that she said in the hearing she said in that interview. When I broke that story, I thought that there was a 50-50 chance it would just die, because if she left her house and was unreachable and didn't talk to anybody else in the news media, it would have died, without a human face. And she didn't do that. She was very young at the time. ... What she did was very brave.
On getting her start as a journalist
Often, in the beginning, I was the only woman in the newsroom, or one of two women in the newsroom, and that's the way it was for a very long time. If you were a woman, you understood that you had to be twice as good and that that wasn't fair. My mother certainly was a fiery dame, but she never thought I would succeed as a journalist. ... She had been somebody's administrative assistant and sort of ran his office and that's what she figured was the best that would happen to me, and I just wasn't prepared to accept that ever.And I have to give some credit to my dad, who was a famous virtuoso violinist, and as a result, I did see women in music, not so many in the orchestra, but very talented musicians who were like him, performers. And he always treated them absolutely equally. And I think that that example got it in my feeble brain that I could do this job, I could do it well if I wanted to.
On how NPR had women reporters when other news outlets didn't
In the beginning, NPR was a tiny little place. There were 16 reporters in the newsroom, period. And now there are probably over 100. ... We had one overseas reporter, that was Robert Siegel in the U.K. ... We had, at some point, a totally hopeless management. ... They didn't like us because we were women. We were cheap! That's the only reason they hired us! We were cheap. You couldn't get a man to work for what we worked for in the early days. ... The salaries were really unforgivably low, and that's why we were mainly women in the newsroom.
You couldn't get a job doing what I did at a comparable news organization in those days, making the money that people in those other news organizations were making. There were very few of those people. That's the reason all of us of a certain age know each other. Lesley Stahl and I used to sit at the table in the Senate Dining Room, the press table in the Senate Dining Room all the time and talk because there were a handful of us.
A Bosnian couple read the newspaper in their bombed-out apartment along Marshal Tito Avenue in Sarajevo in 1992. (photo: David Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images)
I Watched War Erupt in the Balkans. Here's What I See in America Today.
Elizabeth Rubin, The Intercept
Rubin writes: "I can't sleep anymore. I wake up in the middle of the night from hallucinatory dreams and don't fall back asleep."
I’m obviously not alone with this condition. Sleeplessness and a kind of narcoleptic fatigue that I have all afternoon are gripping the country, actually the globe. Last night, I was locked inside a church and pulling the rotten, moldy, wood slats covering the windows to escape. I kept falling back onto the church floor and seeing bodies against the back wall.
Earlier this summer, as I walked past the hum of the morgue trucks parked outside our neighborhood hospital, I remembered my frequent pilgrimages to the morgue in Sarajevo as people searched for missing family during the war more than a quarter century ago. I can’t believe it’s that long ago. Watching what’s happening around the country, images from the Bosnian war and from years of my past living amid other people’s civil wars have crept into my daily and sleepless life. What were the precipitating incidents, what were the signs, when did rage and fear turn to violence, how did the fear defeat hope, was there some measure that could be codified? I don’t think we’re there yet. In fact, I can’t believe we’ll ever be there. But neither did they.
George Floyd’s death, the video of his slow suffocation, his pleas for breath, his call for his mama as he lay dying under the knee of police Officer Derek Chauvin ignited a rising-up against an entrenched and far better organized movement of white power, one that stretches back and back through our history. During one of the first Black Lives Matter protests in Brooklyn, I stood in a crowd wearing a mask and listened to a Black Episcopalian preacher give a sermon about peaceful anger. The next day, I was outside Barclays Center just before dusk with a crowd of protesters when another crowd arrived, having marched for miles from Bay Ridge. They stopped and one woman said they were going to pray, the evening Islamic prayer, and anyone could join or listen. They formed rows. A young man sang the call to prayer. The rest of the crowd — Black, white, brown — got down on a knee facing them. You could feel the surprise among the original crowd who had not expected the Bay Ridge Islamic Center’s arrival. How to react? Time passed and the anxiety dissipated as the kneelers watched and listened and some raised a fist. Bay Ridge’s Muslims were saying, Yes we know well how the system wields power, sweeps through neighborhoods, crushes minorities. And we’ve joined forces before.
That night, the protesters stayed out after curfew; the police chased them, many were beaten, locked up. Groups formed to get people out of prison. You know the rest: Allies handing out water bottles, curfews, the chanting of names of Black men and women killed by police, police violence, clashes. And then, on the tails of demands for justice, the extremists flew in. In the streets of Portland, Oregon, the gun-chested, beefy, white power anti-maskers and the Homeland Security dudes in riot gear ratcheted up the crisis, with unmarked vans whisking protesters away, with the Boogaloo Bois, the Boojahadeen, the Proud Boys, and antifa. In early June, helicopters were constantly buzzing overhead in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and then at night the fireworks began. All over the city. At first, it was exciting, celebratory. I noticed Max, our 6-year-old mutt, who could never get enough of the outdoors night or day, around dusk, his tail would drop, he’d lope to the dining table and duck under. If I tried to take him out after sundown, his feet cemented in place. Max wasn’t alone. There was an epidemic of traumatized dogs. Canines sense an earthquake coming — why not war?
Max’s fear started with the fireworks. And the fireworks set off more fears, conspiracy theories about government plots to drive people mad with sleeplessness, to stir anxiety in Black and brown communities, to send police fireworks squads into neighborhoods searching for “troublemakers” — code for protesters. You could find any and every theory, even that the fireworks were the prelude to war. Isolation, despair, insomnia, job losses, illness, curfews, police violence, looting — they breed conspiracy theories. It’s the traction of those conspiracy theories that needs to be measured.
I lived in Sarajevo during the war above the Catholic church in the old town called Bascarsija — “grand bazaar” in Turkish — with Vera, her husband Drago, and their traumatized dog, Blacky. Every time the phone rang, which wasn’t often since the phones were often down during the war, Blacky flipped out. If you dared to venture forth and pick up the receiver, he’d grip your ankle with his teeth and yank. Everyday around dusk, an archipelago of shell-shocked dogs barked their agony across the city.
Vera, a poet and newspaper editor in her 50s, was convinced that war would never come to Bosnia. Even in 1991, the year before the war began, with the Yugoslav army shelling towns on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, with the Yugoslav army besieging the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, Sarajevans did not believe that war would come to their beautiful city nestled in the mountains. War in Bosnia? No way, said Vera. It was too mixed up: Muslims, Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, all living together and intermarried. Vera was Croat. Vera’s former husband was half Croat and half Jewish. Drago, a retired economist and bank director, was Serb. Upstairs in Vera’s apartment building lived a Jewish-Croatian Bosnian and his Muslim Bosnian wife and their mixed son. The whole building was like that.
Drago told Vera that she was naive. “The war in Bosnia,” he said, “will be longer and bloodier than anywhere else.” The two rarely agreed on anything.
Vera had been a baby in a bomb shelter in World War II. Drago had joined the partisans to fight the Nazis and their Croatian allies. He ended up in a concentration camp in Austria and nearly died of starvation. His sister happened to see his body thrown on a pile of corpses and saved him.
Drago always expected the worst. And so in early 1992, with war raging just across the border from Bosnia, Drago drove up north to his family farm where he’d once been mayor. Already, the Bosnian Serbs had declared autonomous zones and were preparing for an independent state. Drago heard that Ratko Mladic — the charismatic Bosnian Serb military commander who would become notorious for leading the massacre of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica — was recruiting men for his separatist army. Drago urged the reservists he knew to resist Mladic and stay home, until a friend warned him to be quiet and leave lest he get thrown in prison or killed. On his way home, he saw irregular soldiers with beards and long hair wearing patches with crossed swords, a skull, an eagle. The Chetniks were back, reincarnations of the old nationalist guerrillas who’d formed an alliance with the Nazis in World War II to advance their dream of a Greater Serbia. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, was a great admirer of the Chetniks. In their honor, he vowed that the Muslims of Bosnia would burn in hell if Bosnia declared independence.
Lately, I’ve drifted into Drago’s camp. The images of bulging, bearded men with their ammunition bibs, wielding automatic rifles and a medley of white power symbols — swastikas, Confederate flags, nooses, patches of an arrow through a skull and the words “death” and “victory” — just like a cabal of Chetniks. They mobilize like the wind thanks to their chat-frats. They message, “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city?”— Kenosha, Minnesota. They threaten to lynch and behead the governor of Michigan. Drago recently died, but I can hear him telling me, “Don’t be a donkey.” That’s what he called me. A lot. Usually for missing signs of trouble, for not being vigilant.
In Sarajevo, whispers swept through schools, the hospital, newsrooms, offices. Serb friends and colleagues were suddenly off to Belgrade to visit family, or going to the countryside, or getting medical treatment, or just disappearing. Still few believed that war would come to Sarajevo. Between February 29 and March 1, 1992, Bosnia held a referendum on independence from Yugoslavia. A nearly unanimous “yes” prevailed. Except that the Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia boycotted the vote. In fact, they’d already declared a separate constitution.
On March 1, a Serb wedding party was heading toward the old Orthodox church in Bascarsija. Gunfire scattered the celebrants. The bridegroom’s father was shot and killed. The Orthodox priest was shot. Sarajevans were disgusted but not surprised when the killer was rumored to be a local thug, nicknamed Celo, or “baldy.”
Immediately Bosnian Serb leaders declared, You see? We were right. Independent Bosnia means death to Serbs.
Up went the barricades manned by Serb paramilitaries. Students removing the barricades were killed. And up went the barricades manned by Celo and other criminals. Fairly quickly, the Bosnian government formed its own underdog army.
In April, Sarajevans still believed peace was possible. Because they wanted peace. Because they felt peace. They couldn’t conceive that anyone would want war. Hundreds began marching in Dobrinja, the suburb created for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Hundreds turned to thousands and tens of thousands shouting, We can live together. They brandished photographs of the late Josip Broz Tito, nostalgic for his autocratic rule when everyone was a Yugoslav. They waved signs for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This was Sarajevo. Fun town. Comedians. Musicians. Cafe hipsters. War was for those rural hillbillies. The protests carried on into the next day. Some 100,000 Sarajevans calling for peace. Then the shots rang out again. Bullets hit dozens of protesters. Fourteen were killed. The police figured out that Serb snipers were firing on the protesters from the Holiday Inn, the same hotel that would end up housing the international media for three and a half years of siege.
That day, April 6, Bosnia won international recognition of its independence. And the siege began.
The siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern Europe’s history, was brutal and twisted and yet so intimate. It’s very intimacy made it so unthinkable that friends and neighbors could turn on each other. How could they? How could we? One Bosnian Croat writer and boxer I knew who stayed to defend the city told me that his best friend was on the other side with the Bosnian Serb army. During the day, they shot at each other. At night, they talked on the phone and wept. Ismet Ceric, the head of psychiatry at Sarajevo’s main hospital, was Karadzic’s boss for 20 years. He told me that the very day Karadzic ordered the shelling of Sarajevo from the mountains, he called Ceric’s mother in Sarajevo. “He called to wish her a happy Bajram,” Ceric told me, referring to the Muslim festival following Ramadan. Ceric then asked me, Can you believe that? Yes, sadly I could. Karadzic was so obsessed with Ceric that he followed his old boss around the city for the next three years with mortars and grenades. It was hard to say whether Karadzic wanted to kill him, taunt him, or whether Ceric thought there must be a Karadzic behind every near-miss.
When Karadzic told Serbs to evacuate the city, many refused, because they had nowhere to go, some because they refused to be refugees, and some because they believed in defending the old pre-war Sarajevo even as the Bosnian army turned more and more Muslim. As hard as you tried to hold on to your identity as a mother, a doctor, an actor, a journalist, a policeman, that’s not how others identified you. With a flip of a linguistic switch, you were reduced to Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jew.
What flips civil strife into civil war? A well-planned agenda, charismatic leaders, and fear. And perhaps one last ingredient that pulls together all three: the whittling down of history and all its complexities into a narrative of collective destiny — ours against theirs, us against them.
This summer some New Yorkers fled the city for the suburbs, the countryside, New England, California. The New York Post egged on the dystopian fears with headlines like “New York City Crime Wave Reaches New Heights.” People have lost their homes, more are living on the streets. Storefronts and restaurants are empty. Overturned chairs and tables fossilized in the windows. My dentist in Manhattan told me that her colleagues want to buy guns. What did you tell them, I asked her. That they should get them, she said. Her husband survived the war in Kosovo, he says they would be foolish not to have guns. A war photographer and friend told me that I should have an escape-survival bag always at the ready. He thinks we city people are idiots not to have guns.
An author and friend in Charlottesville, Virginia, tells me the feeling in low-income communities is that the mob is coming, and no one will protect them but their own guns. She says summer of 2017 in Charlottesville was our Fort Sumpter, the first generation of a virus that’s morphing. When a group of Ku Klux Klan showed up to demonstrate, the police had their backs to them. Who were they facing down? The citizens who’d come to protest these avatars of violent white power. They chanted: The cops and Klan go hand in hand. And when the KKK left, the cops tear-gassed the anti-KKK demonstrators as if to say, Yeah, we do. That was two years before George Floyd’s death set off demands to defund the police. After all, who are they defending? The KKK? The Proud Boys? The demonstrators? Onlookers? Their power?
FBI documents released recently give proof to the fact that right-wing extremists are infiltrating and recruiting the police. Daryl Johnson, an agent tasked with investigating domestic terrorism at DHS eleven years ago, was pushed out for his inconvenient findings that right-wing extremist terrorism is far more dangerous to the homeland than Islamic terrorists. Recent history in Las Vegas, El Paso, Gilroy, and Charleston just proves his point, a point he now makes in books, articles, interviews, to anyone who will listen. Hundreds of thousands of well-armed white power extremists are now fully out in the open. Their violent acts are enshrined in social media and heralded by the president. They have new charismatic leaders. They have a clear agenda. They have a narrative of historic grievances and a shared destiny: white power. They have their white supremacists’ bibles. Their conspiracy theories are sticking with acronyms like TEOTWAKI: The End of the World As We Know It. They could all be called the children of the Turner Diaries.
Residents in Erie and Union City, Pennsylvania tell a New York Times reporter that people on both “sides” are ready for violence should the other candidate win. Biden and Trump supporters live side by side. Some in the same family. They all know each other. And they’re all saying, Forget the courts. Trouble is coming to the streets. Because everyone’s armed. Trump supporters say a Biden win would be a Marxist socialist coup — extreme-right rhetoric is now mainstream. Female Biden supporters like Mary Jo Campbell say they’re scared to death. After Trump was elected, she and her friends started a club they called “The Drinking Girls” to meet, drink, plot, talk. During the pandemic, my women friends, and I’m pretty sure thousands of others, took to Zoom-drink sessions for similar reasons.
I keep looking at the portraits of Campbell and the other people of Erie captured by photographer Libby March. The faces — weary, drawn with anxiety, tough. They remind me of the men and women in central Bosnia, where the war hit first, where everyone kept an AK-47 or hunting rifle by the door. It’s impossible to imagine neighbors and friends turning on each other. Until it’s not.
I’m trying not to be a donkey, but being a Cassandra is extremely unrewarding. And annoying. A friend of mine who fled Iran when she was 9 years old balked at my comparisons to Sarajevo. “The minute anyone compares completely different countries that share no history, I switch off. That is never going to happen here.” I agree, in part. The U.S. doesn’t share a political context or history with Bosnia. But then there’s human nature, how we wield denial to survive, and tribalism when under threat, and how hard it is to turn off the worst of ourselves.
The two sides have come to stand for so much more than they can possibly hold and now face each other down like the forces of light and dark over Gondor. Only each side thinks the other is the dark. People who should be united by economic class are divided by skin color. The idea that one side is elitist and the other working class is a fallacy. Look no further than the elitism of the sitting president. Or the myriad working classes who comprise the so-called elitist Democratic Party. Still, when we meet strangers, we know almost instinctively who is a Trump supporter and who is a Biden supporter. Who is other. Who is hateable, deplorable, dispensable. The language of othering slips so easily off the tongue in this fraught moment. We are in the throes of an inexorable rearrangement. History moves not like an arrow but a boomerang, Ralph Ellison wrote. And no one knows which way it will go. What is known is that none of us can escape from history.
I could leave off here. Except I prefer the endings of comedy, not tragedy.
My neighborhood park in Brooklyn has come alive as never before: It’s an outdoor gym, an outdoor dance floor, people bring their exercise mats and a phone for their online high-intensity training or yoga class. People are kickboxing, jump-roping, sweating under the British prison ship martyrs’ monument. I watch one-woman camera crews filming their friends for a TikTok video. Nightlife has also moved to the park: Picnics, small parties, a couple wrapped in a blanket because there’s nowhere else to go. Every shape and color and size mingles in the park. I recently noticed that the hum and menace of a police generator and a police pole with stadium lights are gone. While ostensibly there to offer safety, the hum and glare stalked you, creating the menacing atmosphere of a dystopian film about surveillance, anomie, and the end of the world. Their absence has brought calm, respite, and festivity. And been replaced by nightly drumming sessions.
I loved Jerry Seinfeld for his real-New Yorkers-stick-it-out column, rebutting and lampooning a fellow New Yorker and comedy club owner whining on LinkedIn that the city is dead, his friends have fled, and he’s moving to Miami. Imagine being in a real war with this guy, Seinfeld wrote.
The day after I read it, I was speaking to a friend who wrote one of the definitive books on the wars in Yugoslavia.
“We have to stay,” I said.
“Of course we’re staying,” she said. “Where else are we going to go?”
Then she said, “We’ll be like the Sarajevans.”
Even if Joe Biden wins, the divides ripping apart this country will not go away. But that doesn’t mean we will go the way of the Balkans, find ourselves in Sarajevo’s siege. That’s the nightmare scenario. There are millions of people, most in fact, who want to find a way to bridge the divides and face the seismic shift that history is demanding.
In a recent dream, I walk into a party in Sarajevo. I plan to surprise Vera. We haven’t seen each other in two decades. She’s on the couch. She seems angry. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, or is this just a coincidence because you wanted to go to a party? No, no, no, I say, stunned by her anger. I don’t even know these people, I tell her. She hugs me so tight. We’re both crying, in front of a roaring fire. The room turns to stone. The ceiling recedes, cathedral high. It’s so dark. I take my daughter by the hand to show her the room where I slept without windows, but she is pulling me away, she wants to go talk to the kids outside. She says something about a new friend, Methody. Outside Vera’s building I see a bent-over old man with long gray hair and a cane. It’s Mr. Methody, the philosopher-father of the crowd. Everyone looks to him, but he keeps manifesting in different places. He whispers to me, The structure of things is difficult. These are not normal times. The atoms and structures. It’s not a time of normal cause and effect. Then he vanishes.
Voters in Santiago, Chile, cast ballots in a constitutional referendum on Sunday. (photo: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images)
'An End to the Chapter of Dictatorship': Chileans Vote to Draft a New Constitution
Pascale Bonnefoy, The New York Times
Bonnefoy writes: "The protests started over a small hike in metro fares, then exploded into a broad reckoning over inequality that shook Chile for weeks. The movement soon seized on a vehicle for their demands: Chile's Constitution."
Voters overwhelmingly approved a bid to scrap the charter inherited from Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, a move that could set a new course for the country.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets, calling for sweeping change in their society, with higher wages and pensions, better health care and education.
The existing charter, drafted without popular input during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and approved in a fraudulent plebiscite in 1980, was widely blamed for blocking change — and seen as a lingering link to a grim chapter in Chile’s history.
A caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (photo: Danielle Brigida/EcoWatch)
Trump Admin Plans Seismic Testing for Oil in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge This Winter
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
A caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (photo: Danielle Brigida/EcoWatch)
he Trump administration released on Friday its plan to start oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) this winter, as The Hill reported.
The plan was put forth by the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation and released by the Bureau of Land Management. The plan calls for the start of seismic testing on millions of acres, spanning an 847.8 square mile area, on the east side of the refuge in an area where polar bears and other wildlife reside. The seismic testing will allow the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation to detect the presence of oil in the area.
Seismic testing works in a way that is similar to ultrasound technology. It generates acoustic waves deep underground that produce a picture that can pinpoint oil deposits, according to The Hill.
The Bureau of Land Management said it would allow for 14 days of public comment before deciding if it should issue a permit, according to The New York Times.
Environmental activists have argued that the short timeframe means it is impossible to conduct an adequate environmental review of the proposal. The plan involves using heavy trucks fanned out across the area to create a grid pattern. It also requires a crew of 180 workers who would need ample supplies and mobile living quarters, according to The New York Times.
The National Wildlife Federation argues that the rushed comment period in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic ensures that public opposition will not be heard adequately.
"This is a desperate attempt to jam through a plan that could kill denning polar bears, imperil other wildlife, threaten the Gwich'in people, and cause long-lasting damage to the Arctic," said Tracy Stone-Manning, associate vice president for public lands at the National Wildlife Federation, in a statement. "By rushing this plan through while ordinary Americans are focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and their own health and safety, it's clear this administration wants to cut the public out of public lands in order to advance its dangerously myopic and misguided energy agenda."
The company intending to conduct the seismic test said it will exercise caution should it encounter any wildlife during its exploration. Environmentalists countered that it's not the interactions that worry them as much as the permanent alterations to the Arctic tundra that could upset the delicate balance of the ecosystem that polar bears and other animals depend on.
"Allowing huge thumper trucks and camps onto sacred lands where they leave deep and lasting wounds is a threat to my people, the animals, our food, and our way of life," said Bernadette Demientieff, the executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, in a statement, as The Hill reported. "We have raised concerns repeatedly about this administration rushing the process and shortcutting our review."
The Wilderness Society also sees the plan as a politically motivated move that will silence the public.
"The submission of this application and BLM's choice to act on it so close to the election shows how desperate the administration is to turn over one of the nation's most sensitive landscapes to the oil industry," said Lois Epstein, director of the Arctic program for the Wilderness Society, in a statement, as The New York Times reported. "The federal government is recklessly rushing and irresponsibly denying the public adequate time to assess the application and submit comments."
The New York Times also noted that the proposal calls for the work to be carried out by Houston-based SAExploration, which declared bankruptcy, and was accused of accounting fraud earlier this month by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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