Arctic (Rewind)

The Liturgists Podcast

The Liturgists

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2020

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have been working on a documentary for over a year about The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The full documentary will be released on September 22, 2020 and we will be hosting a live stream that same day with the people who produced it including William Matthews, Jamie Lee Finch, Christian Adkins, Anna Jane Joyner, Karlin Itchoak and others. To find out more visit https://theliturgists.com/arctic As we prep to launch the film, we wanted to re-release this episode from October 2019. In the last 3 weeks the refuge has come under even more severe threat as the Trump Administration takes steps to open it up for drilling. In August of 2019, Michael Gungor, Science Mike, William Matthews, and Jamie Lee Finch embarked on a trip to the Arctic circle to experience some of the last untouched wilderness on the planet and hear from the Gwich'in people. The Gwich'in are Athabaskan-speaking Indigenous peoples who lives in the Arctic region of Alaska and Canada. Their sacred lands include areas within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In September 2019, the Trump Administration said it would "seek to open up the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, picking the most aggressive development option for an area long closed to drilling" to cite The Washington Post. The violence and destruction caused by the removal of long standing protections by the United States is difficult to overstate. This episode is the story of our trip to that area, and what we learned from the people there. We want to give a special shout out to The Wilderness Society for making this episode possible and to Dan Ritzman from Arctic Wild for his guidance in Alaska.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, it's William Matthews and I'm excited about this episode of the
0:04.4	liturgist podcast. See last year, August 2019, myself, Jamie Lee Finch, Mike McCart,
0:11.3	and Michael Gunner, went on a very special trip to the Arctic Refuge. Now if you
0:16.5	don't know what the Arctic Refuge is, it's a wilderness sanctuary that's
0:20.7	located in the northern tip of Alaska and is so far removed from modern
0:25.5	civilization. Now we went up there to visit the land but also to talk to an
0:30.2	indigenous community, the Gwitchin Nation, who are embroiled in a legal issue as
0:35.3	it pertains to their land, the porcupine caribou that exists on that land, and
0:39.5	the Trump administration who wants to drill oil on that land. So here's a quick
0:45.0	update from our trip. We know that the House of Representatives has to bill to
0:50.0	protect the Arctic. Unfortunately, that bill is being held by Mitch McConnell,
0:55.2	who's the House Majority Leader in the Senate. As it pertains right now, we have no
1:00.7	legal protections for the Arctic Refuge. The only protections we have are the bill
1:05.8	that's stalled in the House and a commitment from presidential candidate Joe
1:10.5	Biden to stop all drilling, particularly oil drilling, on public lands, which
1:17.0	includes the Arctic Refuge. But as of now, the Trump administration is still
1:21.8	planning on moving forward with leasing the Arctic Refuge out to oil companies.
1:27.6	And depending on what happens this fall in the presidential election, we may
1:33.3	very well be in a situation where the last food source for the Gwitchin Nation
1:37.6	is under threat due to oil drilling. So we decided to re-release this episode
1:43.3	of the Arctic in part to highlight the continuing struggle that the Gwitchin are
1:48.2	facing, but also to announce that we have recorded a short documentary of our
	...

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