NY Times, February 28, 2001
Neither Barren Nor Remote
By WILLIAM CRONON
MADISON, Wis. - Oil or wilderness? This is the question at the center of
the new energy bill that Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska has just
introduced, following through on President Bush's campaign promise to open
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
When Americans encounter the word "wilderness," a number of images come to
mind. A dramatic mountain landscape of icy peaks and sublime vistas. A
place remote from human settlements, untouched by human hands. A land
worthy of protection precisely because it is so isolated. Unfortunately,
these images obscure some of the most important qualities of the Alaskan
lands that the Bush administration seeks to develop.
For one thing, the part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge whose fate
is now being debated is flat, boggy terrain of the kind most of us probably
associate more with mosquitoes than with sublimity. It doesn't exactly
conform to the scenic conventions of an Ansel Adams photograph. For
another, those who wish to drill in the refuge say it is so far away, so
isolated from places where most Americans live, that almost no one will
ever go there. For them, its remoteness is one reason we should exploit it
for oil.
But perceiving the Arctic Refuge as "empty" or "remote" is just plain
wrong. In fact, far from being pristine, uninhabited wilderness, the refuge
is sacred ground to the Gwich'in people, who have long inhabited this
landscape.
Today numbering 7,000 people in 15 villages, the Gwich'in are the
northernmost of Athabascan-speaking Indians. Their lives have traced the
path of the caribou for thousands of years, so much so that they say every
caribou carries some human heart in it, and every human heart some caribou.
The narrow coastal plain that the Bush administration would open to
drilling is where the 129,000 animals in the Porcupine Caribou herd give
birth to their calves - a region where the Gwich'in have long chosen not to
hunt, calling it "vadzaih googii vi dehk'it gwanlii" - the sacred place
where life begins.
Just as the refuge is not untouched by human beings, thinking of it as
remote and disconnected from the places where most Americans live is
equally wrong. Migratory birds in all but one state of the union - Hawaii -
spend important parts of their lives in this northern breeding ground.
We often forget how far the birds around us migrate over the course of an
ordinary year. See a semipalmated sandpiper in New York, a red-throated
loon in Minnesota, a snow goose in California, and you may well be
witnessing a part of the Arctic refuge.
Among the 180 bird species that use the refuge is the tundra swan, once
more familiarly known as the whistling swan. After raising their young,
these birds migrate thousands of miles across the continent to their winter
homes along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to Maryland. From the
perspective of a tundra swan, Washington, D. C., and the homeland of the
Gwich'in are part of a single ecosystem.
If migrating birds remind us that the neighborhoods where we live are in
fact linked to the refuge, then we should also remember that how we live is
what puts the refuge at risk. The ways we drive our cars, heat our homes
and otherwise consume oil are the biggest single threat it faces.
The United States Geological Survey estimates that the refuge might contain
between 4 billion and 12 billion barrels of oil, with a mean estimate of 7
billion (though much of this could never be pumped out economically).
Measured against our current rate of consumption of roughly 18 million
barrels a day, it would be gone in about a year if it had to meet our full
demand.
>From the perspective of history, it's worth contemplating the rather
astonishing fact that we're capable of consuming 7 billion barrels of oil
in a year. Such a supply would have provided all of America's needs from
the first discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 until about 1924: the
first 65 years of the modern petroleum economy.
The debate over the refuge, in other words, is as much about our dependency
on petroleum as it is about the fate of distant caribou and other wild
creatures.
The refuge contains oil, yes. But it also contains the largest, most
diverse example on our public lands of an Arctic ecosystem in its full
magnificence, with native people living in, using and cherishing that
ecosystem as they have for millennia. The fact that it does not completely
conform to our preconceptions of wilderness should not prevent us from
seeing that its value cannot simply be measured in barrels or dollars.
Deciding not to drill there is a way of recognizing how much the life of
that faraway land is tied to our own.
William Cronon is an environmental historian at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
Louis Proyect
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