The Battle for the Arctic: Protecting Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The Arctic Refuge is a place teeming with life—polar bears, musk oxen, more than 200 species of birds, and the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, which has sustained the Gwich’in Nation for millennia. It’s also an important symbol of the wild, and an emblem of the hope and peace of mind that can only be found in connecting with nature, in knowing it exists.
 

The Arctic Refuge is one of the world’s last untouched wild places. Now it’s facing the greatest threats in decades.

 

The oil industry’s drive for bigger profits is increasingly threatening our coasts. Industry efforts to drill the Outer Continental Shelf threatens beaches and coastal economies from Virginia to Florida. As we’ve seen most recently with the BP disaster, drilling equals spilling. The Our Wild America campaign works to prevent the expansion of dangerous oil drilling, both onshore and off, especially in places like America’s Arctic.

 

America’s Arctic is one of the last great wild places on the planet -- a place many consider the final frontier in American conservation. Located north of the Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range -- the northernmost mountain range on earth -- the region is home to some of the finest wildlife habitat and most pristine wilderness in the United States. But America’s Arctic is under increasing threat from oil drilling and the effects of climate disruption.

 

The land in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve is the nation’s largest wild landscape -- larger even than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Spanning 23.5 million acres across the western North Slope of Alaska, the Reserve is the largest single unit of public lands in the nation. The Alaska Native communities that live along the Reserve has maintained a subsistence lifestyle for thousands of years based on the Reserve’s living resources.

 

In a notice posted to the Federal Register in April 2018, the Department of the Interior launched the process to hold a lease sale for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Last fall, Congressional Republicans slipped a rider into the budget opening up the Refuge for oil and gas drilling.

 

The sale will target the coastal plain, the biological heart of the Arctic Refuge and home to lands and wildlife vital for the subsistence way of life of the Gwich’in Nation. Additionally, the environmental review that is required by law, before any drilling is to begin, is being fast-tracked by the Trump Administration and are set to be concluded in half the time they usually take. Only one public hearing has been held outside of Alaska. 

 

Several companies, including SAExploration, have applied to do extensive seismic oil testing in the Arctic Refuge this winter. In a time when our climate is reaching a tipping point, we need to keep these dirty fuels in the ground and not threaten some of the most untouched and pristine remaining wild places in the country.