The outcome of the election will decide the fate of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
During the last week of July 2023, as the Arctic fall dawned, my husband and I listened to the roar of a bush plane receding until only one remained. deep calm. The pilot had dropped us off at the headwaters of the Ivishak River, quickly unloaded our gear, and took off just as quickly. My breath stopped. We were now profoundly alone, tiny specks in one of the greatest expanses of wild landscape in the world.
I’m from Montana. I’m no stranger to the great outdoors. But the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which spans 19.6 million acres of northeast Alaska from the Brooks Range to the ocean, dwarfs everything I understand, so much so that it became symbolic in my mind as an archetype of unspoiled wild lands. We planned to walk and paddle nearly a hundred kilometers, through the tussocks and stones and clear waters of the Ivishak. An eight-day trip, just the two of us, for our honeymoon. We would start in the dinosaur-aged mountains that make up the north slope of the Brooks Range, paddle across the tundra, and finish on the Dalton Highway that connects Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay.
We chose the end of the route, on the highway, to avoid the high cost of a second bush plane flight, naively failing to consider the distressing transition from wilderness to oil infrastructure we would inevitably encounter. Prudhoe is synonymous with Arctic drilling, which partly explains why the Arctic Refuge is also iconic in the national psyche as ground zero in the fight against climate change. We were, however, about to break away from the symbolism and confront head-on the real issues of the shelter’s status as a political sacrificial lamb heading into a critical election year.
But before the pot would come the wonder.
During our trip, we passed huge bear scats and the dragged bones of a moose. One morning we heard a single wolf howling in the distance. We paddled along banks thick with tracks, although glimpses of wildlife were rare. It was an unseasonably warm 80 degrees, unseasonably hot even for summer, and all that was smart was thrown to the wayside. As for the other people, we haven’t seen any evidence.
I had never felt so small. And I never understood how essential this feeling is to the humility of the human spirit and our understanding of our place on the planet. One day, just before the mountains gave way to tundra, the river became oceanic before splitting again into a lacework of braids. I looked at my husband floating next to me. He watched the landscape slowly pass by, so moved by the depth of this wild nature that tears streamed down his face. He was impressed, in the true transcendent sense of the word.
But not everyone agrees on the value of conserving such a vast expanse of wilderness for pleasure, and the fate of this pristine part of the world has been in limbo for decades. Alaska state officials have advocated opening parts of the wildlife refuge to drilling for oil suspected of being stored beneath the surface, thanks in large part to political capital from oil dividend checks that residents of the state receives from the extraction. The Gwich’in, whose ancestral land overlaps with the refuge and who still rely on these lands for their livelihood, have fought for decades to prevent access to oil and gas, joined by environmental organizations in Alaska and beyond . Even the Inupiat residents of coastal Kaktovik, who could benefit from oil jobs, are sharply divided on the issue. As a result, the Arctic refuge, unlike its neighbor Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to the west, remains unprotected from development.
In 2017, the Trump administration forced the sale of oil and gas leases in the shelter by inserting a provision requiring them into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Then his administration rushed to finalize the measure just two weeks before President Biden’s inauguration. In September 2023, the Biden administration canceled these leases as part of its climate action plan. However, without major action from Congress, no administration will be able to permanently protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In fact, it is still bound by the 2017 mandate to carry out another lease sale in December 2024. Although Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not definitively announced her position on the refuge, she said during her 2020 presidential campaign that she would ban fossil fuel leases on public lands if elected, sued oil companies for illegal spills and emissions, and, according to the Washington Post, has a long history of “commitment to climate and environmental issues.”
In contrast, the plan for the first hundred days of a Republican administration emphasizes reversing Biden’s climate change policies… starting with drilling in the Arctic refuge.
Halfway through our journey, I had come to a new understanding of humanity’s smallness and our inordinate power. on the planet. Although we were still roaming the pristine interior of the refuge, the effects of fossil fuel extraction are obviously not limited to developed areas.
For this trip, we had prepared for cold temperatures, inclement weather, and close encounters with large carnivores, including polar bears roaming further inland. What we weren’t prepared for were thunderstorms. However, it must be recognized that they were rare in the Arctic and that they constitute a new phenomenon due to climate change. They manifested in towering clouds and lightning that chased us from the river each day around mid-afternoon. By the time we paddled out onto the tundra, the landscape no longer offered shelter.
On the sixth day, my husband and I huddled in our tent pitched in the middle of a patch of truncated willows, in the ridiculous shelter of the most monstrous storm cell I have ever experienced. We both spent an hour and a half above us – battering each other in a raging wind, lightning and thunder cracking in our bones – wondering if every moment was our last.
When all that was over, we decided we’d rather skip our last night on the tundra than survive another arctic storm. Instead, we woke up early and paddled back to the Dalton Highway in one go, avoiding the planned ride we had coordinated in favor of hitchhiking back a day early for the safety of the buildings and more topography.
And here is this shocking moment. To reach the road, a mile from the river, we had to hide under the silver webbing of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, as wide as a semi-tank. After crossing what seemed a boundless wilderness, we were abruptly interrupted by an artificial and tangible boundary signaling the decisive end of this wilderness. The pipeline operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. At its peak in 1988, it transported more than 2 million barrels per day. Throughput has steadily declined – as the oil to be drilled dries up – and now stands at just under half a million barrels.
After clearing the pipeline, we reached the highway at a difficult time. Tourist traffic leaving Deadhorse at Prudhoe Bay had long since ceased, limiting our hitchhiking options. It was hot on the sidewalk because the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet; temperatures recently soared to a record high of 89°F in Deadhorse in early August. We counted ourselves lucky when a double tanker truck pulled up and its driver beckoned us into his cabin. He told us he drives the Haul Road, as the Dalton Highway is called because of its priority status to serve oil infrastructure, three times a week, year-round, to transport oil to Fairbanks. We passed dozens of trucks on the same mission, alongside the pipeline and everything it was already carrying. The dust raised by so many wheels mingled with the pungent smell of diesel.
This scene serves as a preview: such could be the fate of the clean, quiet expanse of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge we had just passed through, if we fail to protect it from drilling. This result only holds over this single upcoming election, all these decades of vagueness now brought together against a last minute decision.
Well, not one, exactly. There are 244 million Americans registered to vote. Each of these millions of electoral decisions, and they are not just symbolic. Our votes drive real results in real places that impact the future of the planet.
Personally, I’m in favor of one of the last great wildernesses left.
