My notebook from Day 1 of an eleven day, six-person trek through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge includes the following scrawled notes:
WALLS of MOUNTAINS.
Dappled light.
Jagged peaks right out my window.
Cold!
I landed in a tiny, four-person bush plane on a vast, flat stretch of tundra. We’d flown through the towering Brooks Range and made our way lower, through foothills, until finally approaching the coastal plain. I was deposited in the middle of a swirling, snowy cloud only 25 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, the place often described as the world’s air conditioner. The wind was a reminder that the A.C. was turned on high.
Our pilot helped unload our things directly onto the ground, and then pivoted on his heel and stepped back into his plane. Waving goodbye with his shirt sleeves casually rolled up his forearm, he departed within a minute. His plane disappeared into the fog, the buzz of the engine steadily grew quieter. Finally, silence. I looked down at my backpack. I sternly told myself I had everything I needed to survive. There was no second guessing my packing choices now.
I hefted my fully loaded backpack on, and started in on what we’d come to do: walking. We were tiny specks on a vast landscape of over 19.3 million acres, the largest wildlife refuge in the country. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is over 30,000 square miles; the size of South Carolina. If that sounds difficult to comprehend, it’s because it is, and it should be. There are no places like this left in the world.
Every step we took across the landscape I was reminded we were visitors. Birds skittered along the Aichilik River drainage. Herds of caribou curiously paused and faced us in a bloc, standing completely still, before turning in unison and carrying on into the fog. The fog! It was thick, salty and ocean smelling, and shifting with the wind. One minute I could see back into the foothills of the Brooks Range; the next I was surprised by a bird diving only feet away from me.
There were no trails. There was no cell service or internet. We navigated by paper maps. We encountered no other people on the trail (for an entire eleven days until we saw our pilot again). We saw a musk ox, a wolf, and countless caribou. Superhighways of animal traffic showed up on muddy game trails where we would pause to experience the awe of looking at seamless lines of bear, wolf, musk ox, and caribou tracks with no trace of a human shoe or the ubiquitous cigarette butts I’ve become so used to seeing everywhere.
My upbringing didn’t set me up to visit a place like this.
I grew up in a northeast suburb filled with big box stores, fast food, and an enormous network of Anyplace USA roads and highways. My mom used to joke that our town would be a mall if someone installed a giant bubble over it. I was a wheezy asthmatic kid who spent a lot of time watching daytime soap operas instead of doing the homework I needed to catch up on from missing school. I created colorful collages out of clippings from magazines instead of exploring the world outside of my room. I was hospitalized multiple times a year through the age of thirteen for asthma attacks. It seemed like I was allergic to everything.
Then I switched schools and my asthma abruptly disappeared, leaving in it a personality-sized vacancy. Who was I without sickness to define me? Shyly, quietly, and very slowly, I scoped out my options.
One day I made my way up to the top of a mountain on my first ever backpacking trip, organized through my school. Trip leaders told me later they weren’t sure at the time if I’d make it. But the feeling of my own capability, taken one manageable, wobbly-footed, heart-pumping step at a time was addictive. This backpacking trip made me determined and confident I would be exactly the person I wanted to become, even if I wasn’t sure who she was yet.
In college, I was introduced to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Well -- not exactly. A professor pointed it out to me on a map. This was 2005, in the middle of the last fight to protect the coastal plain from drilling, and he suggested I write a letter to the editor to demand protections for this place. I learned that the coastal plain, the biological heart of the Refuge, was often referred to as the “1002” (ten-oh-two) area. This number was referring to the section in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) that left the coastal plain in a kind of limbo between wilderness and oil development. Ultimately, it was (and is) up to the U.S. Congress to ultimately decide whether the coastal plain would join the rest of the Arctic Refuge as formally designated and protected wilderness, or be drilled for oil. At the time and under direction from President George W. Bush, Congress was seriously considering opening up the Refuge for oil development.
I didn’t know much about the Arctic. But I knew that I’d had a transformative experience outside, in the mountains, that gave me a critical sense of connection and purpose. I felt that wild places were important for small individual connections like mine, but also something much bigger. I’d grown up in a suburban world that was the product of oil, and the appetite for towns like mine was bottomless. Still, did I find solace in Bed, Bath, and Beyond; or in knowing that a place as wild, remote, and fragile as the Arctic Refuge existed?
I’d take the place I’d likely never visit any day. I felt angry at the idea that leaders in Congress would allow this place to be destroyed for short term gains; only enough oil at the time to supply the U.S. for 6 months worth of energy consumption. It believed we should be taking the longer view as a country, investing in renewable technology and protecting those few wild places we had left instead of digging up and burning everything we could. I wrote my letter, one of countless others from people like me across the country. Ultimately the coastal plain wasn’t opened to drilling that time. But it also wasn’t permanently protected, which brings us to a similar looming fight today.
I thought about my letter as I walked along the coastal plain itself, awed by how life works out and how incredible it felt to have an opportunity to be here at all. But, I was also angry that the question of whether to drill here was being raised--again. Oil drilling would destroy the coastal plain. I could see that with my own eyes, but now I also have data to back that up. Proponents have said that development would only impact a “mere” 2,000 acres of the coastal plain’s 1.5 million. The truth is that’s only the literal footprint of development -- where a pad meets tundra, for instance, not where the pipeline hovers above; where the polluted air hovers, where spills occur, the noises that scare caribou away.
The coastal plain has been described as barren as a “white sheet of paper” (2001, then-Senator Frank Murkowski). In a way, he was right. To me, the coastal plain did seem paper-thin in its fragility. But it was rich with wildlife and openness, not to mention cultural heritage.
The legacy and responsibility of protecting this place is an awesome one; one that has been carried down through many generations. The indigenous peoples of the Arctic are tied deeply and firmly to the coastal plain through grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents, back through time. The coastal plain is the bedrock of their food source; the caribou are what has sustained the Gwich’in since time immemorial. The porcupine caribou herd, the same creatures that paused to stare at us before going on, are critical to the survival of the Gwich’in Nation and for Inupiat people who subsist on these animals. The calving grounds of the porcupine caribou herd are in the coastal plain, and since the coastal plain was first suggested for development the Gwich’in people have been tirelessly advocating to protect it. It takes tenacity to fight for all of those years. It’s hard, hard work.
Once, I simply believed in this place on its own merit. That would have been enough for me. But now that I’ve seen it, I feel a sense of responsibility to share and inspire in others what I have experienced there, and what I think is a universal human experiences that ties us back to what is important in life: Wonder. Awe. The mystery of systems greater than and elemental to us. Gratitude. Humble and complete respect for places that we have not created or manipulated; the something that was always there. It is in our trust now to keep it that way.
In a world and in a country where it seems attacks are launched on all fronts and daily, the Arctic Refuge is a critical landscape. Do not let it become a casualty of greed. Please join me in doing everything we can to together ensure this place, for the Refuge itself and for the people it sustains, is not drilled and forever destroyed. Right now we need you to contact your member of Congress and let them know you want them to stand up and defend the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling.