Written by: Dane Lester
In Alaska, conservation is a critical form of sustainability, particularly as the state faces greater and greater challenges to its continued existence. Climate change continues to warm the Arctic and expose indigenous populations in the state to the disastrous effects of permafrost melting, habitat loss, and the destruction of natural ecologies their ways of life depend on. Despite the critical concern climate stability poses to Alaska, the state’s economy is chiefly reliant on its production and sale of natural gas and oil resources found on its North Slope—development which contributed $4.1 billion to Alaska’s economy in 2022. The mining of this oil typically occurs in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil region, which is located on Alaska’s North Slope, or northern border with the Arctic Ocean. These regions were historically and continue to be inhabited by the Inupiat peoples, who’s lives and livelihoods are uniquely affected by drilling and the effects of climate change and the ever-higher Arctic temperatures that threaten to melt permafrost, destroy native ecologies, rise sea levels, and disrupt Indigenous communities.
In recent years, Alaska’s oil economy has been greatly diminished due to the extraction of resources from the Prudhoe region. Since the oil economy’s peak in 1988, Alaska’s fossil fuel production has dropped by around 75%. Though production in the state is expected to make another upswing in the next two decades, these development plans neglect the fact that oil reserves are becoming more and more costly to extract and will eventually run out, putting the state into financial limbo. According to a National Energy Laboratory Report, instead of expanding Alaska’s existing oil reserves, the state’s economy would be better prioritized by preemptively limiting Alaska’s natural resource extraction and pivoting 76% of their energy production towards renewable resources which could continue to serve the state’s economic needs effectively indeterminately. In spite of this need, however, oil corporations and Alaska lawmakers alike have repeatedly turned to expanding Alaska’s northern oil extraction opportunities in recent years, and have paid particular attention to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
ANWR is a 19 million-acre refuge on Alaska’s northeast, bordering both the Arctic Ocean and Alaska’s Canadian border—about the size of South Carolina. ANWR was established in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and was designed to protect the Arctic’s incredible wildlife diversity—“at least 42 fish species, 37 land mammal species including the endangered polar bear, eight species of marine mammals, innumerable numbers of insects, and more than 200 species of migratory and stationary birds” according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Despite ANWR’s express purpose to protect natural Arctic habitats, the region’s coastal plain, or “1002 Area,” has drawn significant attention due to its potential for oil reserves. This area constitutes around 1.56 million acres of the preserve initially set aside upon ANWR’s creation for future oil drilling. Despite its non wilderness designation within ANWR, Section 1002 is still integral to natural habitats: the land serves as the central calving grounds for the Porcupine Caribou herd, which the Gwich’in people indigenous to Alaska rely upon for their subsistence lifestyle. Since 1988, the Gwich’in people have protested drilling in the region due to the significant ecological harm it would bring to their way of life, disrupting the caribou mating patterns that are responsible for their continued existence.
Luckily, though, despite increasing calls for the region to open up to drilling, the calls of their protests are beginning to be heeded. In 2020, every major US bank including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citibank stated that they would not finance any future drilling in the ANWR region due to the disastrous environmental consequences such drilling would have. When President Donald Trump pushed forward the sale of ANWR leases in his first term, the sale generated just over $14 million in bids in 2021 with the majority of sales going to the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, who made an agreement with the subsequent Biden administration to not sell any of their tracts to large oil companies. In January of this year, further land leases on 400,000 acres of ANWR’s coastal plain were auctioned, but this time zero bids were received. Though there is still uncertainty as to the future of ANWR, this series of recent successes are clear sustainability wins for Alaska’s ecology, global climate stability, and—most importantly—for the Gwich’in people who have fought continually for their voice to be heard by fossil fuel corporations and national leadership alike. The current lack of ANWR leases going forward towards oil extraction not only means that the ways of life of Alaska’s Gwich’in people will be secured, it also means the billions of barrels of oil projected to be located in the 1002 area will remain unintroduced to the carbon cycle, preventing catastrophic levels of warming that would only further damage Alaska’s ecology.
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