"Wilderness is precious and increasingly rare. Oil is also finite, although it is cheap and abundant today. This hasty election-year scheme squanders our nation's wilderness and oil and does nothing to conserve either," said Sylvia Ward of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center.
Babbitt acknowledged fears that even limited drilling could open the way for wholesale industrialization of the western Arctic plain.
"I understand what you're saying," he told conservation groups. "You're saying, with considerable justification, that the history of resource development says that once the camel's nose is in the tent, you can say goodbye to the tent, the landscape, the whole thing.
"But I invite you to consider that we are, in fact, offering a new approach, anchored not in some kind of brokered compromise, not based on some kind of notion of what's acceptable or what's practical," he said. "This plan is based on science, and it in fact offers a new approach to how it is we use resources."
