SCIENCE

ANWR: The Great Divide

The renewed debate over drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge hits home for the two Native groups nearest the nature preserve

Scott Wallace

October 2005

Raymond Tritt, 52, dresses a fallen bull on the spring caribou hunt. Like virtually every Gwich'in man, he still remembers every detail of his first successful hunt, four decades later. The 100,000-plus caribou of the Porcupine River herd are a focal point for the Gwich'in people: they are a main source of sustenance as well as the key element in the group's rituals, dances and stories. "If we lose the caribou," says a tribal elder, "we lose our way of life." Scott Wallace

Like many other villages across the Arctic, Kaktovik reaps the fruits of oil production on Alaska's North Slope: a new school, a police department, electricity and, just recently, indoor plumbing. A major oil strike on ANWR's coastal plain, two miles south of Kaktovik, could mean a windfall for many of the Inupiat villagers. Still, their support for drilling there is tempered by concern that it could lead to oil exploration offshore, which could threaten whaling. Scott Wallace

"We've never thought of ourselves as poor," says Sarah James. "We're rich in our hearts." Scott Wallace

Charlie Swaney, with fellow hunters: "Everything we need, nature gives us." Scott Wallace

The Porcupine River caribou herd has become the unlikely focus of one of the most intractable and divisive environmental debates in our nation's history: whether the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, should be opened up for oil exploration. Down in the lower 48, the tangle between oil industry proponents and environmentalists, between Republicans and Democrats and between conservatives and liberals over ANWR centers on issues of energy self-sufficiency versus preservation of a pristine wilderness. But above the Arctic Circle, the debate is less abstract, with two Native Alaskan peoples locked in a complex dispute over oil development on the coastal tundra.

On one side are the militantly traditionalist Gwich'in—7,000 people living in 15 settlements scattered along the caribou's migration route between northeastern Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. On the other are roughly 9,000 Inupiat Eskimo, whose once-ramshackle coastal villages have been transformed into modern communities with schools, clinics and indoor plumbing since oil started flowing from Alaska's North Slope in the late 1970s. Though the coastal plain where oil proponents wish to drill takes up a relatively small corner of the 19.6 million-acre refuge, conservationists describe it as ANWR's most important and environmentally sensitive area. The Gwich'in call it the "sacred place where life begins." An idyllic nursery for the nearly 40,000 caribou calves born here each year, the plain also happens to sit atop what is believed to be billions of barrels of untapped oil.

The Gwich'in fear that drilling in ANWR will put an end to their existence as subsistence caribou hunters, while the Inupiat worry that without development of ANWR's gas and oil reserves, the money to support their modern comforts will disappear. Inupiat Oliver Leavitte says, "We just want our lives to be a lot easier but to still keep our traditions." But Gwich'in Danny Gemmill sums up his people's fears. He pointed north, out over the top of the spruce trees, over the distant Brooks Range, in the direction of the refuge. "No one knows what will happen if they open it up," he said. "Maybe we won't see the caribou again for 1,000 years."