It has long been federal policy in national wildlife refuges to allow multiple uses if they are compatible with the purpose of the refuge.

Two wildlife refuges owned by the National Audubon Society allow such development-the Rainey WR in Louisiana and the Baker Sanctuary in Michigan, a 900-acre wetland that provides hundreds of Sandhill cranes with a critical nesting and staging area. Many of the practices used by Audubon to protect wildlife on their lands were developed on Alaska's North Slope, including horizontal drilling and part-year production. Royalty revenues are reinvested in programs that help protect the environment and preserve wild lands.

The National Audubon Society has earned over $25 million by allowing industry to pump oil and gas from 37 wells in the midst of its sensitive Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary, which serves as winter habitat for snow geese that migrate every year from Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Not far from Rainey, The Nature Conservancy of Texas has entered into an agreement to drill for oil and gas in its Galveston Bay Prairie Preserve, home of the endangered Attwater's prairie chicken. The Conservancy expects to profit handsomely from the deal^.. One has to wonder:

What the Audubon Society and Nature Conservancy's position would be on drilling in ANWR, if they were receiving royalties from oil production in that area.

Why endangered species concerns, which they and other groups often use to stop federal projects cold in their tracks, are of no relevance where their own refuges are involved.

How much of its $25 million in royalties Audubon spent opposing proposals to drill in the Alaskan refuge.

Refuge Study

Representative Edward J. Markey, (D-Mass) commissioned a study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ascertain the extent to which wildlife refuges allowed oil and gas activities. The study was conducted between August and October 2001.

As the study reported, 77 of the 567 wildlife refuges in 22 states in the federal system had oil and gas activities on their land in 2000. Louisiana with 19 units, and Texas, with 11 units, had the most oil and gas activity.

Oil or gas was produced in 45 of the 567 units located in 15 states. The number of producing wells in each unit ranged from one to more than 300 in the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana.

While supporters of oil and gas drilling in ANWR argue that if energy is extracted from other wildlife refuges, it should be allowed in ANWR, Markey had a different purpose in mind for the study.

It was to show that, since passage of the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act of 1966, the only leases the government had signed for oil and gas exploration were in cases where drillers on adjacent private land were extracting fuel from under the refuges, or the petroleum companies owned pre-existing refuge mineral rights.

"There has been," said Markey, "a 35-year ban on drilling in any refuge in the United States, unless there is an oil company not in the refuge that has essentially put their straw down on their property, to come in sideways." Proponents of drilling "very disingenuously argue that many refuges allow for drilling," he said. He further argued that approving ANWR drilling could act as a Trojan horse to allow drilling in 297 other refuges identified by the USGS as having oil and gas potential.