The sun never sets on Sarah Palin's Alaska
Hannah Sherk
Issue date: 4/23/10 Section: Forum
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In the documentary-style series, Palin will do what she does best: deliver scripted, prompted, heavily-edited rhetoric while propped against a background of Alaskan wilderness.
Environmentalist, Palin is not. But what the former Alaskan governor, of "Drill baby, drill" fame, lacks in a sense of ecological responsibility she makes up in opportunism.
Discovery bought the rights to the eight-episode series at a reported $1 million a pop, said Reuters. "Sarah Palin's Alaska" will join the ranks of The Learning Channel's (TLC) family-friendly programming, including "Jon and Kate Plus Eight" and "Little People, Big World."
TLC's Web site released a statement from Discovery's Chief Operating Officer Peter Ligouri, who said, "Discovery Communications is so excited to help Sarah Palin tell the story of Alaska ... to reveal Alaska's powerful beauty as it has never been filmed, and as told by one of the state's proudest daughters."
Palin is famous for shooting Alaskan wildlife, just not with cameras. In her family home in Wasilla, animal skins cover the furniture, an assortment of antlers guard the walls, and stuffed wildlife grace the coffee table.
Putting aside Palin's campy taste in home-decor, her political resumé makes her an even less likely candidate for hosting a nature show. This is the same Alaskan who consistently fights against expanding the endangered species list to include her home state's wildlife, enthusiastically supports offshore drilling, and denies environmentally-based causes of global warming.
In a 2008 op-ed piece for The New York Times, Palin wrote, "(Polar bears) are worthy of our utmost efforts to protect them and their Arctic habitat. But adding polar bears to the nation's list of endangered species, as some are now proposing, should not be part of those efforts."
It seems that the hunter is Palin's cause, her endangered species of choice. The former governor's efforts against the polar bear are only slightly less obvious than her support for aerial hunting. In this sport, pilots take to the sky and chase fleeing wolves to exhaustion while hunters shoot at the animals from the safety of the helicopter. Palin has promoted legislation and even offered bounties to uphold this decades-old tradition.
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