His appearance is sponsored by Hamilton's departments of economics and environmental studies, the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, The Kirkland Project and the Hamilton Environmental Action Group.
Kohm in 1987 was hired by a national environmental magazine to photograph the coastal plain of the Arctic national Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. "Since then," he says, "I have lost my journalistic objectivity and have devoted my life to assisting Aboriginal people in trying to protect their cultural and environmental values from irresponsible industrial development."
The 100-mile stretch of Arctic coastal plain in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the only fragment of the United States' total 1,100 mile arctic coastline not already open to oil and gas development. Now, oil industry officials are pushing for access to this fragile heartland of this last complete eco-system in North America. If oil and gas development were to occur, the U.S. Department of the Interior estimates up to a 40 percent loss to the Porcupine Caribou (165,000 animals). "It is puzzling that people and the government would be willing to sacrifice a renewable resource, such as the herd, and the lives of the Gwich'in Indian people, who depend upon it, for merely the possibility of the short-term benefits we could gain by extracting a small amount of petroleum, a non-renewable resource," says Kohm.
