Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Stymied in his plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Bush has raced ahead to fast-track oil development elsewhere in Alaska -- imperiling an entire way of life.
Nov 1, 2004 | "Let's go shoot something," Jeffrey Long says with a grin, sliding his 18-foot boat into the water. We're 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the Eskimo village of Nuiqsut, Alaska. I hop in next to Long and his friend Eli Kilapsuk, who are armed with a bolt-action Ruger M77, a couple of .22s, a 12-gauge shotgun, a harpoon and a vicious-looking hook for grappling with any kind of animal we might encounter today: caribou, geese, ring seal, bearded seal, walrus, even a polar bear. It's early July, more than halfway through the short Alaska summer when the sun doesn't vanish below the northern horizon, and Inupiat hunters like Long and Kilapsuk have only a few more weeks to harvest the season's bounty and lay in a store for the long winter ahead.
It seems like half the village is patrolling the rivers and channels this evening, their outboards buzzing like the ubiquitous mosquitoes. Kilapsuk, 29, his black ponytail flapping under his "Native Pride" brim, uses the VHF to trade reports with other hunters in both English and Inupiaq. I ask Long, 38, if we're likely to bag a caribou, or tuttu, as they're known in Inupiaq. The Inupiat use virtually every part of the animal in their daily lives: the meat for steaks, stews, roasts and jerky; the skins for parkas and winter boots; the sinew to sew together traditional whaling boats; even the brain, which is rubbed into leather to soften it. Along with the bowhead whale, caribou represent a cornerstone of Inupiat life. Long, who looks like an Eskimo Bruce Springsteen, with salt-and-pepper hair and scraggly goatee, throws the throttle down on his 70-horsepower Yamaha. "What we get, we get," he says.
We speed down the Nigliq channel toward the ocean seven miles away, eyes peeled for motion on the tundra above the banks. "Look, somebody got a caribou," Long says, pointing to a pair of eagles feasting on a gut pile.
Suddenly, out of the vastness that is Alaska's coastal plain, I see the incongruous silhouette of an airplane. I point it out to Kilapsuk, who has long since taken it in.
"DC-6," he says, without looking at it again. "Cargo plane. Going to Alpine."
His spare words contain more than a trace of bitterness. Alpine is an oil field, one of dozens of new and proposed developments popping up around Nuiqsut like poisonous mushrooms, transforming the open tundra into a vast complex of brown gravel pads, white elevated pipelines, lime green processing facilities, bright orange storage tanks and white Quonset huts. The oil rigs lie on the edge of a vast area of the Arctic called the NPR-A, short for the Northeast National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska. Covering 23.5 million acres, it's the single largest unit of public land in America. It also contains crucial nesting areas for migrating birds and critical calving areas for hundreds of thousands of caribou. For the past 80 years, "biological hot spots" in the NPR-A have been off limits to oil drilling and other development, granted special protection by the federal government. But now the Bush administration, with its no-holds-barred push for oil production, is fast-tracking new oil fields throughout Alaska's North Slope, the cumulative environmental consequences be damned. If the administration has its way, its allies in the oil industry could soon displace the caribou and other wildlife around Nuiqsut -- and with it, alter a way of life that has survived among the Eskimos for more than 8,000 years.
As we approach Alpine, Long steers the boat past pump stations and drilling rigs that would look more at home in industrial New Jersey than they do here at the continent's northern edge. A helicopter rotors by and a flock of geese scatter. I ask Long what he thinks about Bush's effort to expand oil drilling across the North Slope. He shrugs. "We tried to stop Alpine, but we couldn't," he says, as we motor past one of the drilling sites. "It bothers me, but what are you going to do about it?" Kilapsuk, as usual, is even blunter. "Man," he says, shaking his head, "it's messed up."
Long, sensing that the caribou have wandered too far inland for us to hunt, turns the boat out to sea to hunt seal. About five miles offshore we reach the edge of the broken ice, blue-green and white chunks floating in a sea of gray-green water. We park on a mini-iceberg and sip coffee as if we were holed up in a cafe rather than floating in the Arctic Ocean. Soon we see a ring seal bobbing its head above the water, and scramble to follow it in the boat. Kilapsuk takes a shot, misses. The seal dives underwater, but the sea is so calm that we can follow its underwater trail. When it surfaces, Kilapsuk hits it with the 12-gauge. Long hops on the bow, harpoons the dying seal and hooks it on board, the first of three natchiq we will harvest today. "The elders love this," Kilapsuk says. Since it is the first seal of the year, he explains, he'll give it away in traditional fashion to people in the village who don't have men to hunt for them. "Have you ever had caribou meat dipped in seal oil?" he asks. "It's good munchies."
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