WHERE LIFE BEGINS
BY BOB MOORE
CONSERVATION SCIENCES
FALL 2004

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – a stunning wilderness thriving with wildlife – or a hostile, empty wasteland?

Is it a living ecosystem with all of its delicate strands intact, a rare gem of original North American beauty – or an oilfield that harbors a resource critical to our nation’s economy?

Like no other environmental cause, protecting this vibrant ecosystem in its immaculate entirety has been a national conservation priority for over 30 years. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has inspired millions of voices in passionate defense of this symbol of the Last Great American Wilderness.

Multinational oil corporations also covet the Refuge and have argued just as long and with equal passion for the right to develop it. Drilling advocates contend it will reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, and they deride the place as a barren, white wasteland empty of life for nine months of the year.

Can both sides be talking about the same place? How did the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge become such a lightning rod for the pro-development and environmentalist movements?

Practical and rational arguments can be made and weighed against each other, but the question is really one of values – of how strongly Americans view the importance of preserving wild, open land in its pristine state, versus the perceived need to exploit that land for human and economic purposes.

What most people don’t realize is that the question has largely been answered. America has already designated 95 percent of Alaska’s coastal plain open to oil and gas development. It is over the mere five percent that remains, tucked into the northeast corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that the debate rages. With hundreds of millions of acres already available for development, protecting these 1.5 million acres as pristine untrammeled wilderness has been elevated to a crusade. Those familiar to the drilling debate know it as simply the "ten-oh-two," after Section 1002 of the law that created the Refuge. There is a line drawn in the tundra there; backed into this tiny corner of Alaska, conservationists are making a desperate stand. They are doing it by taking the fight out of Alaska to every corner of the nation.

It is a battle they know they must not lose. There is far greater value to this place than its status as the last protected remnant of the Alaskan tundra. Here, the complete array of sub-arctic and arctic landscape remains intact and unfragmented. Boreal forests extend to the south slopes of the Brooks Range; rugged high mountain peaks and glaciers descend northward to undulating tundra; a dozen rivers empty into the coastal lagoons and barrier islands of the coastal plain.

"Where Life Begins"
At its widest, the coastal plain in the Refuge extends 35 miles between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea. Near the Canadian border it shrinks to eight miles. Fran Mauer, a career wildlife biologist who has spent 21 years in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, says, “Because of the compactness of such varied topography - with all the ecotones and transition zones in between affected by altitude and latitude - it hosts a variety of wildlife species in proximity to one another that you don’t see elsewhere."

The Refuge adjoins Canada’s two bordering National Parks to the east, Invvavik and Vuntut; together they make up a vast aggregate of land that, according to Mauer, is the largest complex of protected lands in North America. This harsh, frozen land is teeming with diverse and abundant wildlife. Rare Musk oxen, Dall sheep, polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, and untold millions of migratory birds inhabit the contested coastal plain.

Each spring and summer, the coastal plain pulses 24 hours a day with astonishing reproductive energy. The Porcupine River caribou herd – 120,000 animals strong – seeks out this narrow plain for their spring calving ground. Their characteristic wandering migration around the Brooks Range to the calving grounds is how the coastal plain earned its designation as “the American Serengeti.” But the herd knows no geopolitical boundaries: between their winter range and calving grounds, their movements are unpredictable, influenced by variations of weather and wind. “The most consistent thing they do is migrate to the calving grounds in the spring,” says Mauer. “So it is critical that we leave their calving areas protected.”

The Porcupine caribou are the lifeblood and cultural symbol of the Athabaskan Gwich'in people of northeastern Alaska and northwest Canada. Fearing the impact that oil and gas development on the coastal plain would have on this herd, the Gwich’ins opted not to join the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. To scientists and conservationists striving for its permanent protection, the coastal plain is the biological heart of the Arctic Refuge. To the Gwich'in, it is "the Sacred Place Where Life Begins."

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