Right Whale Habitat in Bearing Sea Threatened by Proposed Oil Leases. Press release, Center for Biological Diversity, April 9, 2008. "The Bush administration today took the first step toward opening up 5.6 million acres in the Bering Sea off Alaska to oil and gas leasing. The proposal, published in today's Federal Register by the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service, would allow oil development in an area north of the Aleutian Islands near Bristol Bay that has been designated critical habitat for the North Pacific right whale. The North Pacific right whale, once ranging from California to Alaska and across the North Pacific to Russia and Japan, was decimated by commercial whaling and is now the most endangered large whale in the world. Perhaps fewer than 50 individuals remain in a population that visits the Bering Sea each summer to feed. 'Drilling in Bristol Bay would be drilling through the heart of the most important habitat of the most endangered whale on the planet,' said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity."
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