Former Juneau mayor Sally Smith is returning to Fairbanks in January for a stint as interim director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center.
"My job is not going to be to make policy, but to carry out policy that the board sets," said Smith, who will serve as interim director from Jan. 14 to May 2. She will replace outgoing director Arthur Hussey.
The environmental center, founded in 1971, is one of the state's oldest conservation organizations. With a staff of six, 1,100 active members, a 15-member board of directors and an annual budget of $420,000, the center works to protect wilderness and wildlands in the Interior and Arctic Alaska.
"I'm not anti-development, but my values are such that I don't think we can afford to have development at all costs" said Smith, who represented Fairbanks in the Alaska Legislature from 1977 to 1983. "That's not development, that's destruction, and then there aren't jobs in the future. We all want to work, we all want to make money, but we don't want to create jobs that eliminate jobs in the future."
Smith said she felt there was too much hype and not enough real information on the potential of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. "And there are other areas to explore, such as NPR-A (National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska)," she said.
"It doesn't appear from the information that I have to be an environmentally sensitive area and it doesn't have the cultural impact that we know ANWR would. I think we are maybe looking in the wrong area," she said.
The center's official stance is that the overall picture be understood before more development is undertaken in the Arctic's fragile ecosystem.
Web Resources: www.northern.org.
