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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Alpine development near Nuiqsut.
The NPR-A may not be as well-known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- the unspoiled tract of federal land in Alaska that Bush has made the unsuccessful centerpiece of his energy plan -- but it's every bit as vital to the environment as ANWR. The remote area around Teshekpuk Lake, a sprawling maze of undulating marshes, grassy meadows and rolling green tussocks of moss, is considered one of the most important tundra-wetland ecosystems left on the planet. In addition to the caribou herds that give birth around the isolated lake each spring, rare birds flock here from as far south as Antarctica to breed, nest and molt: Arctic terns, the threatened Steller's and spectacled eiders, northern pintails, tundra swans, Pacific black brants and rare yellow-tailed loons. The area is "the most important goose molting area in the circumpolar Arctic," says John Shoen, a former Alaska state wildlife biologist and current senior scientist for the Audubon Society. Schoen says that the cumulative effects of all the proposed development -- from roads to seismic exploration -- would unequivocally cripple critical wildlife habitat. "All of the science is clear," he says.
Since the NPR-A was set aside as a strategic reserve in 1923, oil companies have been barred from drilling around Teshekpuk Lake. In 1998, when the Clinton administration opened a big chunk of the reserve to drilling, it made sure to place nearly 600,000 acres surrounding the lake off-limits to oil and gas leasing. But over the past year, while environmentalists have been focused on the fight to protect ANWR from drilling, the Bush administration has quietly moved to strip Teshekpuk Lake and other key "buffer zones" of their protections and auction them off to big oil companies. "ANWR was a convenient distraction," says a state wildlife biologist who declines to use his name because of political sensitivities. "It kept people from noticing that Bush's steamroller of development is already moving west across the North Slope."
In June, Interior Secretary Gale Norton put 8.8 million acres of the NPR-A's "Northwest Planning Area" up for bid -- a move that netted $53.9 million in oil leases. Companies like the European giant TotalFinaElf and the Canadian company Petro-Canada, as well as ConocoPhillips Alaska and Andarko (which are already vastly expanding the Alpine Satellite fields near Nuiqsut), hope to cash in on the new Arctic bonanza. Absent any objection from whoever's in the White House, the westward push is expected to continue, with new fields consecutively coming on line over the next decade.
After the Northwest lease, the Bush administration quickly took steps to open more area to leasing, notably including the critical area around Teshekpuk Lake -- and has developed a novel way to speed up the process. Instead of evaluating how oil companies could harm the environment, the administration has ordered federal land managers nationwide to do exactly the opposite: consider how the environment could harm oil companies. Land managers must now file a "Statement of Adverse Energy Impact" justifying any provision that protects the NPR-A from development, and grant "exceptions" to environmental safeguards that the industry considers "economically prohibitive." In addition, the administration-backed National Energy Bill wending its way through Congress also gives the interior secretary extraordinary discretion to allow oil companies to drill in the NPR-A without paying royalties if doing so "is in the public interest."
"This administration considers any level of protection to be too much," says Brooks Yeager, a senior Interior Department official in the Clinton administration who was intimately involved in opening up new leasing in the NPR-A in 1998. Yeager, who now works for the World Wildlife Fund, says that the science supported some drilling in the reserve, but also supported keeping some areas off the table. The Bush administration, says Yeager, "obviously regarded any restrictions as unnecessary."
In the past, the Inupiat have often sided with industry in fights over development. Eskimos, by and large, have viewed environmentalists with distrust since the Save the Whales campaigns of the 1970s helped deprive the Inupiat of a critical subsistence resource for years. "We don't want to hold hands with environmentalists," says Leonard Lampe, a former Nuiqsut mayor and president of the native village of Nuiqsut. "They were against our bowhead whale harvest." These days, people like Lampe are ready to bury the harpoon and work together with state and national environmental groups to slow down oil development.
As long as federal officials agree to protect wildlife needed for subsistence hunting and keep royalty payments flowing into local governments, Eskimo leaders on the North Slope have generally supported oil drilling in places like Nuiqsut. But that good will diminished quickly during the current administration. First, oil giant ConocoPhillips proposed expanding its small, contained oil pad at Alpine into a multisite industrial complex that will crisscross the area with oil pipelines, bridges and miles of new roads. Then the Bush administration proposed new offshore oil rigs in the Beaufort Sea and rushed to tear up the Clinton-era protections for Teshekpuk Lake that had been approved only a few years earlier.
"I really feel like we've been stabbed in the back," says Taqulik Hepa, deputy director of wildlife management for the North Slope Borough, a political conglomeration of eight Eskimo villages. "The more they want, the more people they impact."
The sale of oil leases in June shook up people in Barrow, where Hepa lives. It was the first significant development approved around America's northernmost city, which serves as the seat of Eskimo government. And the plan to allow drilling in millions of acres around Teshekpuk Lake has enraged even more people -- including the area's most powerful politician. "It seems that all sense of balance has been lost," says George Ahmaogak Sr., now in his fifth term as mayor of North Slope Borough. "The politics of power and influence are clearly at work."
