Super Eco

Photo credit: A Second Hand Conjecture, flickr

Sarah Palin is governor of Alaska and was John McCain's vice presidential candidate on the unsuccessful Republican bid for the U.S. Presidency in 2008. After great notoriety during the campaign in which she heralded her membership of the "Hockey Moms" sorority, her love for moose hunting, her catch-all descriptor as a "maverick," and her vocal and often very pointed reaction to criticism, she became a polarizing but very popular political figure. Many conservatives have already begun to encourage her to run for president in 2012.

Palin was born in Sandpoint, Idaho to Charles and Sarah Heath, but moved to Alaska when she was a baby and was raised and lived most of her life in Wasilla, Alaska, marrying Todd Palin in 1988. In 1984, Palin entered and won the Miss Wasilla pageant, going on to be third runner-up in the year's Miss Alaska pageant. In 1992, Palin was elected to the Wasilla city council, and went on to be mayor of Wasilla, the chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and then, in 2006, she defeated incumbent governor Frank Murkowski to become governor of Alaska.

On August 29, 2008, John McCain announced he was selecting Palin as his vice presidential candidate, bringing the governor and her family into the international spotlight. Palin has five children; Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig; and, as of December 2008, one grandchild, Tripp Johnston.

Notable Eco Activity

Sarah Palin has supported a number of causes which environmentalists and animal rights activists have decried. Her 2007 support of the "predator control program" allowing aerial hunting of wolves, and proposing a $150 bounty per wolf for pilots and gunners, was publicly attacked by the Defenders of Wildlife. In early 2009, actress Ashley Judd became a spokesperson for the cause, calling the aerial hunting "cruel, unscientific and senseless." Palin shot back that the "extreme fringe group" was wrong and the wolf hunting program was protecting moose and caribou, "vulnerable wildlife" being "decimated" by their natural predators.

In 2008, shortly before being named to the Republican ticket, Palin's backing helped pass the Alaska Gasoline Inducement Act, a bill giving the state authority to award TransCanada Corp. $500 million dollars in seed money to build and operate a pipeline to transport natural gas from the North Slope through Canada to the lower 48 states. The project, whose price tag has variously been put at $26 billion and "nearly $40 billion," has many opponents and the conventional wisdom during the election was that the pipeline stood little chance of ever being built. If it is successful, the pipeline will be carrying fossil fuels from the North Slope as soon as 2018.

• Sarah Palin Details

  • Birth Date

    February 11, 1964

  • Born In

    United States

  • Home Page

    http://gov.state.ak.us/

  • Lives In

    United States

  • Organizations

    Unavailable

  • Occupation

    Governor of Alaska