Quote of the day: Our debut stroll down "I Was Not Always As You See Me Now" Lane features Sen. Ted Stevens (Plus: Lewis Black on Sen. Felix Allen)

"As for helping to establish the Arctic [National Wildlife R]efuge, I did little except write a few letters. The refuge was basically set up by Alaskans. One person who did do a tremendous amount to have it set aside is now the senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens. He worked in the Department of the Interior at the time. Maybe that's something he'd prefer to forget."
--George Schaller, "one of the world's preeminent field biologists," interviewed by John G. Mitchell (for the October 2006 National Geographic) several weeks before returning to Alaska to re-create part of the trek he made--"most of it on the south slope of the Brooks Range"--50 years earlier with conservationists Olaus and Mardy Murie

And suddenly I for one have a very different image of at least the younger Ted Stevens, the man we know today as perhaps the most obnoxious and authoritarian blowhard in the U.S. Congress, which after all has been drained recently of such talent as Sens. Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm and Rep. Tom DeLay.

After minimizing his own role in the creation of ANWR, Schaller, now 73, longtime director of science for the Wildlife Conservation Society, notes that the refuge was finally established in 1960 and then enlarged by President Jimmy Carter under the Alaska Lands Act. "And now," interviewer Mitchell says, "the Bush Administration and Senator Stevens are looking for a go-ahead to drill for oil on the refuge's coastal plain. How do you feel about that?" Schaller replies:

It's a warning that you can never give up if you really treasure something. Nothing is safe. About 95 percent of Alaska's North Slope has already been opened for oil leases. Can't we save the rest? What kind of people are we if we don't? There are leased fields on the North Slope that haven't even been drilled yet. But now the oil companies are trying to get into the refuge, because if they can get in there, they can get in anywhere.

ALSO TALKING--Lewis Black on Senator Allen's, er, revelation

"We're not claiming him."
--the Jewish funnyman's phone response to a query by the Washington Post regarding the revelation that the mother of Virginia Sen. G. Felix "My Mother Made Great Pork Chops" Allen was born Jewish, meaning that by Jewish law so was the senator

Black, according to Post reporter Libby Copeland, "demanded DNA tests" of the senator. (Lewis, of course, is ranked in most of the most widely accepted polls as America's Funniest Jew.)