The Observer, January 2006
From the Executive Director
As citizen oversight spreads, much work lies ahead
The main mission of our council is monitoring crude-oil transportation in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.
But the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which gave us much of our authority, also gave us and our sister organization in Cook Inlet another responsibility: to serve as demonstration projects, with the hope that other citizen oversight groups would be formed as time went by.
Over the past year or so, it has come to seem that hope is being fulfilled. The seeds of citizen oversight are sprouting everywhere:
• Last year, legislators in Washington state set up an Oil Spill Advisory Council, primarily in reaction to a spill in Puget Sound.
• Here in Alaska, a citizen oversight body was set up for the Pogo gold mine near Fairbanks.
• This fall, I was invited by the Aleutians East Borough to speak in Cold Bay about the possibility of setting up a citizen group to deal with the risk of spills from oil and natural gas drilling in the area.
• Also last fall, I was invited to Murmansk, Russia, for a conference on oil development in the Barents region.
• And, in October, the 8th World Wilderness Conference in Anchorage (see story, page 1) endorsed the idea of citizen oversight on a worldwide basis, whenever an extractive natural resource project is launched.
These are all encouraging developments, but we need to be aware that getting to the point we’ve reached in Alaska may be a slow and difficult process in other places. Our council has adequate funding and is accepted as legitimate and credible by industry and regulators. At the state level, Alaskans have a government reasonably willing to enforce laws and regulations, a substantial budget for environmental protection, close monitoring of oil tankers, and a press free to criticize government and industry when regulations are not followed.
That’s not true everywhere, however, and the Murmansk conference provided some examples.
One woman told the group that Russia was planning to relocate her entire village to make room for an oil terminal. Many Norwegians at the conference expressed shock that people could be relocated at the whim of the government, but the Russians appeared to accept it as a fact of life.
There was widespread concern among conference speakers that older single-hulled tankers in the possession of former Soviet states have not been maintained and are not safe to transport oil. Papers presented in Murmansk suggested a great lack of response equipment in the region, as well as budgets inadequate to support prevention and response activities. Some Russian oil-spill response organizations have had to wait months to get their pay. One of them had only three tugs to cover thousands of miles of coast, and one of those had to be put on lease elsewhere for financial reasons. Many speakers indicated there was inadequate enforcement of environmental laws and inadequate funding for prevention and response efforts. We were told of oil spills never cleaned up and spillers never fined.
Will the citizens of Russia, the Aleutian Islands, and other areas be able to establish effective citizen oversight without the prod of an environmental catastrophe like the Exxon Valdez spill that gave rise to the Alaska citizens’ councils?
I hope so, but the road is apt to be long and trying. As our fellow citizens elsewhere start down it, we stand ready to do the one thing we can do to help: continue sharing the lessons we’ve learned since 1989 about the value of citizen oversight, and how to make it work.
• John Devens is the executive director of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council.