Map: Arctic Alaska and Northwest Canada

Arctic Alaska and Northwest Canada

One of the most controversial environmental policy questions of the year is whether exploratory oil drilling will be allowed on the heretofore protected lands of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This map depicts the geographic and ecological context of this contested landscape.

On the northwest part of the Actic Slope is the the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska (NPR-A). This reserve, under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, has been closed to development until quite recently. In the Integrated Activity Plan/ Environmental Impact Statement filed in October of 1998, the BLM declared its intention to conduct "an expeditious program of competitive leasing of oil and gas." Exploratory drilling by BP and Phillips has begun this winter (2001).

Alaskan oil has heretofore come from the area around Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea, the origin for the Trans-Alaska pipeline. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation reports that the nitrogen oxide emissions in Prudhoe Bay are comparable to Washington, D.C. and that 100,098 gallons of petroleum products were spilled in 1993 alone.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) comprises 19.8 million acres in the northeast corner of Alaska, adjoining Ivvavik and Vuntui National Parks in the Yukon Territory, Canada. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the ANWR, calls it "the only conservation system unit that protects, in an undisturbed condition, a complete spectrum of the arctic ecosystems in North America."

Much of the debate, recent and in past decades, has focused on the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain, the northernmost part of the ANWR. This is the area that the new Administration would like to open for exploration. Although its 1.5 million acres comprise only eight percent of the ANWR, it represents a crucial calving ground for the Porcupine caribou herd. Studies by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game indicate that female caribou in contact with North Slope oil activities experience a decline in productivity.