Keep polar bears white

Do you want your polar bears white or oily? You decide.

Pictures of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's Coastal Plain show a pristine landscape where your imagination can soar like some great bird with a 10-foot wingspan.

Now picture a massive oil drilling operation in the middle of an area that grizzly bears, black bears and polar bears all call home -- a place where tens of thousands of Porcupine caribou return year after year to have their babies.

For too long, the Arctic Refuge has been a doctor's hammer on America's knees.

The right one jerks up and demands the Coastal Plain be open to oil and gas exploration. The left one kicks about the environment and insists there's not that much oil there anyway.

Who cares how much oil there is? Let's focus on what matters.

America's greatest natural wealth is not under the breathtaking landscapes. It is the breathtaking landscapes.

I may never make it up to Coastal Plain. But I want it there -- fine and unspoiled. It's part of my inheritance as an American, and I want my polar bears white.

I don't ever want to have to associate the Arctic Refuge's Coastal Plain with oily disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon.

It's up to this generation to do for that place what previous generations did for the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite.

On Jan. 25, President Obama pushed that goal forward.

"Since the days of the Reagan administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had been saddled with an outdated but technically still in place administrative position that recommended the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge be opened to oil and gas exploration," Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, writes in the Hill.

During those years, Congress could never muster the needed votes to send in the oil rigs. But Republicans tried.

Obama's change in the official administrative position and his recommendation for Wilderness designation doesn't protect the Coastal Plain.

Congress has to do that.

Unfortunately, the GOP-led Congress likes to indulge the lust for fossil fuels.

The Senate just flexed its pro-development muscle by voting to build the Keystone XL pipeline. They are unlikely to take Obama up on his suggestion to protect the Coastal Plain as Wilderness.

But these tired old goats are playing politics when they should be planting trees for the next generation.

The Arctic Refuge has been around longer than the GOP's limousines. Congress has a duty to make sure it's around to stir the imagination of your great-grandchildren.