ARCTIC from Page 9
We’d been out working on Florian’s film The Refuge for several weeks, filming bears and scattered caribou groups. But we hadn’t found the fabled Porcupine Herd, a family of some 218,000 antlered beasts that would be thundering through the 1002 Area any day, traversing frigid rivers, storming over mountainsides, outrunning bears and wolves (sometimes), getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, grazing, drinking and migrating, always, in a 1,500-mile clockwise circle — a never-ending diaspora that has been in motion since the Ice Age. At the time, things were looking very hopeful for the ANWR. President Obama had used some of Florians’ footage in a campaign ad in an attempt to federally designate the region a wilderness area. This designation would’ve made it nearly impossible for oil and gas developers to worm their fingers into that precious landscape. But that wilderness designation never came to pass. Not long after my time in the ANWR was over and I had returned to the lower 48, America had elected a new president, one who would undo decades of conservation progress with a tax bill that would open up the ANWR to be leased off, block by block, to corporate interests. In what politicians call “progrowth tax legislation,” the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 is the largest overhaul of tax code in three decades. It reduces corporate income tax rates by 14%, shifts income tax brackets for the middle class, places an expiration date on many tax benefits intended to help individuals and families, and, of course, includes a seemingly random provision to open the 1002 Area of the ANWR for oil and gas development. That provision requires “not fewer than two lease sales area-wide under the oil and gas program” — each of which must be a minimum of 400,000 acres. That’s 800,000 acres (minimum) out of the 1,563,500 acres that comprise the 1002 Area. Which, besides being allegedly saturated with oil, also happens to be an extremely rich and sensitive ecosystem; one that’s now fair game for fossil fuel companies. In September, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released 10
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its final Environmental Impact Statement for the “Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program.” And, according to Molly Block, the press secretary for the Department of the Interior (DOI), the first land lease sale is intended to take place before the end of 2019. “Of all the threats [the ANWR] has been under ever since they found oil at Prudhoe Bay (just west of ANWR), this is probably the most serious situation,” says Francis Mauer, a retired wildlife biologist and the Alaska chapter representative for Wilderness Watch. “If this [development] happens on our watch, it
Two days later, on Dec. 22, 2017 President Trump endorsed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. With a flourish of his presidential pen the ANWR was suddenly more vulnerable than it had been in 60 years. “It just sets us further back,” Mauer says. He points out that the oil and gas program at Prudhoe Bay, which began in the 1960s directly adjacent to the ANWR, has never been reduced in size or scale. It has only ever expanded. The same could play out in the coastal plains, in the 1002 Area. And for what? Mauer asks. Realistically, the cumulative addi-
would be a colossal tragedy for that land and our relationship with Nature in general.” Mauer has been on the forefront of the fight to protect the ANWR for most of his adult life, and earlier this year, I called him to hear his thoughts on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. “It broke my heart,” he says, matter of factly. “Literally, to tell you the truth.” The night before Congress gathered to vote on the Tax Act that assembled this leasing scheme, Mauer developed an atrial fibrillation. Mauer’s heart quite literally shuddered at the prospect that the place he had worked so hard to protect might be desecrated at long last for oil and gas.
tional oil production from the ANWR is projected to be between 1.9 and 4.3 billion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would account for 0.4 to 1.2% of world oil consumption by 2030. As for the wildlife and natural ecosystem, Joe Balash, Trump’s appointed assistant secretary for land and minerals management at DOI, remains adamant that environmentalists and conservationists need not worry. In an interview with E&E News, Balash said that he believes drilling in the ANWR can easily be done without affecting animal populations like caribou herds: “[W]hat we know from decades of experience dealing with caribou on the North Slope is that infrastructure
in and of itself is not harmful, it does not disrupt or effect caribou behavior except during their calving period,” Balash said in the interview. Mauer, however, has a different take. Could the oil and gas operations actually proceed without affecting caribou herd migrations? “Absolutely not,” he says. The caribou herd on the North Slope that Balash referenced is the Central Arctic Herd. Mauer explains that the Central Arctic Herd is much smaller than the Porcupine Herd. And because they are located farther west, closer to Prudhoe Bay, they have a lot more open space to work themselves around the oil and gas operations. The Porcupine Herd, on the other hand, is 10 times larger and has to squeeze through that narrow corridor of tundra between the Arctic Ocean and Brooks Mountains — the very place I was camped: the 1002 Area. Mauer says if an oil field goes up in the middle of the 1002 Area (and all the roads, pipelines and infrastructure that come with it) the caribou will be displaced — they will flee from all that activity — to the south, towards the Brooks Mountains. There, Mauer says, the predator density is significantly higher and the animals will be exposed to a serious new pressure; one that the Porcupine Herd has never known. Oil and gas operations will throw a wrench into a delicately evolved system. It has the potential to be utterly devastating, Mauer says, which will affect all the native settlements and villages in the ANWR — all the people who rely on these caribou as a primary source of food. And that’s only to speak of the effects of fossil fuel development in the 1002 Area itself, but in fact, it will affect a far greater area. The migratory birds that fly to the ANWR to nest come from six different continents, and many of them play vital roles in other ecosystems around the globe; the caribou who migrate through the ANWR spill into Canada; and many of the hunting grounds for the ANWR’s wolves and bears extend well into the Yukon. It’s a natural network that flows out well beyond the borders of the 1002 Area, beyond the ANWR and beyond Alaska at large. It’s a vast sys-
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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
NOVEMBER 7, 2019