This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Mr. President. I don't know if you recognize this is a very historic day, of course, but it's also the beginning of winter solstice. It doesn't feel like it...
This is Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, recorded by CNN at the signing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017. Although the focus of that bill was taxes, it was a mega bill, with lots of different puzzle pieces, and one of them was something that Senator Murkowski had been trying to put into place for a very long time.
For us in Alaska, we've had some pretty dark days recently, but with passage of this tax bill, with passage finally, to allow us to open up the 1002 area, this is a bright day for Alaska. This is a bright day for America. So we thank you for that. We thank you for that.
The 1002 area is a particular part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. This tax bill included a provision allowing for oil and gas drilling there.
This has been a multi generational fight.
That fight started in the 1980s and one of the people who was leading it back then was another Murkowski, Frank. Lisa's father, a long time US senator, then Alaska governor, Frank pushed for oil and gas development in the Wildlife Refuge throughout his political career, but he was never able to make it happen. But at the end of 2017 with Republicans in control of the Senate, the House and the White House, Senator Lisa Murkowski saw an opportunity to complete the work that her father had begun.
Know that our promise to you today is a bright future.One where we care for our environment, where we care for our people, and we also care for our country in providing a resource that is needed, not only by the United States, by Alaskans, but by our friends and allies. This, Mr. President, is what energy dominance is all about. So let's go.
And with that, the largest wildlife refuge in the country was open for business.
Drill, baby drill and drill now.
Whose lives? Our lives! Whose planet? Our planet!
Welcome to Threshold. I'm Amy Martin, and this is season three, a journey into the battle over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And before we dive in here, I want to acknowledge that chances are good you already know where you stand on this issue, and whether you're opposed to drilling or in favor of it,it's likely that the other position seems insane to you. Most Americans have never been to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and probably
would have a hard time finding it on a map. But that does not stop people from having very intense feelings about drilling there, both pro and con. And I think this might be because most of us look at this place from a distance and from far away, the issues here seem pretty black and white. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is owned by the federal government. That means the land and the oil and gas beneath the surface belong to all Americans. These are public resources meant to be used or
not used for the public good. So do you want oil to be drilled in this remote wildlife haven or not? A simple yes or no question. But the closer you get to this place, the more complicated the picture becomes for the indigenous people of this region, the refuge isn't remote at all. It's their homeland, and the whole concept of it being owned by the federal government is offensive to some people. In fact, this fight over drilling is actually part of a much bigger and older fight
about sovereignty and cultural survival. And then to add to the complexity, these two conflicts over oil and over indigenous rights intersect in different ways in different communities, leading some people to be strongly pro drilling, and some to be just as strongly opposed. In short, there's a whole lot more going on here than you might think, and after 40 years,
all these fights are coming to a head. As we release this in the fall of 2019, the Department of the Interior is saying they will start auctioning off development rights to oil companies as soon as this winter, but some of the opponents to drilling are trying to stop that from happening through legislation and lawsuits. So passions are likely to be running hotter than ever in coming months. Our goal in this series is to bring some light to all of that heat to help you understand what this
place is. And what's at stake if the oil gets drilled and if it doesn't. So as Senator Murkowski said, let's go.
ANWR is the most misrepresented place I think I've ever seen.
We are the caribou people. If it wasn't for the caribou, we won't be here today. It's a big opportunity that we be able to profit off of. It's easy to fall back on ideology when there's the dearth of first hand experience. Our permafrost is melting. Our snow doesn't stick like it used to. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: It's definitely not a done deal. What they're doing is legal, but it's immoral.
I'm standing in a small boat about to head out into the waters of northern Alaska. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Alright we're ready to go. That's our captain, 23-year-old Vebjorn Aishana Reitan, inviting me into the cabin. But the answer is no, I do not want to come inside. I want to stay right where I am shivering in the wind and taking in everything I can about what this place looks and feels and sounds like.
So after two years of Arctic reporting and multiple Alaska adventures, we are finally, finally on our way to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Vebjorn lives in the village of Kaktovik, which sits on a small barrier island just off the coast, and he's taking my colleague Nick Mott and me over to the mainland. It's a cloudy day, and as we motor along the edge of the North American continent, slowly emerges from the mist.
Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: What you see is a great ocean, a line of green and black that is the land, and above that big gray and that's the sky. That doesn't tell you much. I think that's actually a really great description. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Oh yeah? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge fills the whole northeast corner of Alaska. It's bordered by Canada to the east and the Arctic Ocean to the north, and it's the northern part of the refuge where we're headed today, the coastal plain.
This is the place where tens of thousands of caribou come to nurture their newborn calves every spring, and it's the area where oil companies may someday build pipelines and roads and start drilling for fossil fuels. The Coastal Plain is the epicenter of this fight. It's been the subject of countless news stories, scientific reports, government documents and angry letters to the editor. But for Vebjorn, it's just his backyard. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: I don't think people think of it as a
refuge. Even we just think of it as our it's where we come from, kind of. Vebjorn's dad is from Norway, his mom is from Kaktovik, and the village of Kaktovik is actually inside the refuge boundaries. So when he says the refuge is where he comes from, he means the Alaskan side of his family, the Inupiaq side. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: I've been on the refuge since before I have to walk, my mom would carry me in the back of her parka. So it's just been part of your whole life.
Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Yeah. Refuge is important to us. As we move toward the coast, the palette is simple, just like Vebjorn said- it's all grays, muted greens and soft browns. It's kind of like we're floating through a Mark Rothko painting, one of the dark ones. But there are some light spots in this painting too, and they're big and white and fuzzy. There's a bunch of bears! Oh my god, so cute!
Oh yeah!
About 200 yards away, nestled into long green Vebjorn cuts the motor as we float by. grass on a small island, we spotted a cluster of ivory white polar bears.
Mom and two cubs? Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Yeah. We'll see if they let us look at them.
So we're on our way over to the mainland, and there's a mom and two baby polar bear cubs hanging out right on the lip of the island. It's sort of cliffy.
They're all cuddled up. It's adorable.
They're all cuddled up. Nick's taking pictures. How did they look through the camera?
Even more adorable.
They're kind of looking at us and we're looking at them, and they're all just kind of lounging about. If you listen to the second season of our show, which is all about the Arctic, you might have noticed that we didn't mention polar bears, like not at all, and that was intentional. Polar Bears have gotten so much attention that I decided I wanted to focus on other things. I told our team that unless or until a polar bear happened to amble directly across our path,
we weren't going to cover them. But here they were in our path, snuggled up together on an Arctic Island, and we couldn't take our eyes off of them.
It's just a polar bear cuddle puddle. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen.
And it's not warm like I would actually be kind of stoked to be in that cuddle puddle if it didn't involve claws and teeth. Vebjorn moves us past the bears. We don't want to stress them out by watching them for too long. Wow, it's beautiful out here. And as we round the island, we see another bear. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: There's another one. Where? Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Yellow, bright yellow, kind of. Oh yeah! Yup. You see it Nick? Twelve o'clock, kinda.
I do, I do. I've heard of Kaktovik as polar bear central, and I thought it was, you know, an overstatement.
It's definitely not. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Yeah, all over. Vebjorn knows a lot about bears. The "bjorn" part of his first name means "bear" in Norwegian, and like his father and brother, he's a licensed guide for the thousands of tourists who flock to Kaktovik every year to see the polar bears. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: We get orders for trips two years ahead, sometimes for the very busy part of the season, people buy as many tours as we're willing to sell.
There's a whole lot more to say about polar bears in this area, and I promise this is not the last you'll hear from me about them in this series. But for now, just know that the coastal plain of the refuge is very important to polar bears, and that's where we're about to land. Vebjorn tells us to hop out while he secures the boat. I'm more than happy to comply. Yes! I'm feeling a little giddy because I'm finally standing in this place that I've been hearing about for my entire adult life.
We're on a little spit of land, gravelly beach and little blustery, windy, dewy, wet in front of us is that green tundra of the coastal plain. It's gorgeous. My first impression is just wide open space. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is huge, almost 20 million acres, or about
30,000 square miles. So if we were to hike from this spot on the coastal plain down to the southern boundary of the refuge, it would be like walking across the state of South Carolina or the entire country of Austria without seeing a single town or house or road. I cross the pebbly beach to where Nick is standing. How would you describe it?
It is, I mean, from far away, it looks like a blob of great green, but up close it's all different. There's these little grasses and little shrubby things and leafy things, and it's there's reddish and greenish and yellowish and grayish, and everything's wet. Everything's squishy.
You can picture the refuge as having three main regions, brushy foothills in the south, the mighty Brooks Range, cutting across the middle, and then in the north, where we are, this swath of tundra resting between the mountains and the ocean. And all of these habitats, high alpine, riparian, coastal plain, they all flow together with nothing human made
to intrude or interrupt. This variety and connectivity is part of what makes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge unique and highly attractive to so many different species of animals, birds from as far away as India and Central Africa fly into nest here. Salmon, grayling and char swim in the rivers. And in terms of Northern mammals, there's an all star cast, wolves, Arctic Foxes, wolverines, Canada lynx, moose and all three types of
North American bears, black, brown and polar. Plus the Porcupine caribou herd, named after the Porcupine River, one of the largest and healthiest herds of caribou in the world. This is wild country. It's just this beautiful, huge, wide open plain. I lie down in the grass to listen and look. It's like an ocean of grass. And there's this sense of solitude.
This might seem like kind of an odd comparison, but the coastal plain reminded me a little bit of the prairies of eastern Montana, another place defined by grass and wind and huge horizons. There is an austerity to this landscape. You can feel immediately that anything extraneous you bring here will be blown away, including your own pretensions. But there's a gentleness to it too. The ground is soft, the grass whispers and
waves. The land somehow manages to be both wide open and highly mysterious at the same time. Just feels like another world. We just flew directly over the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And there's like beautiful green tundra with the Brooks Range in the background. And then you land here and it is, it's not that. A few days after Nick and I visited the coastal plain, we were in Deadhorse, Alaska, the nerve center for the Prudhoe Bay
oil field. For decades, this was the largest oil field in the United States, and it's just 100 miles away from the refuge.
It's just all industrial. It looks like a big, giant industrial park anywhere you look.
Big machine shed, type looking things, lots and lots of trucks. As Nick and I walk along the side of this gravel road, it's clear that Deadhorse is not a town designed for pedestrians. It's not really a town at all. It's a network of roads and equipment and anonymous buildings, some housing machines, some housing workers, blocks of trailers stacked one on top of another. They look like something a kid would play with, almost like they kind of interlock and fit together.
In the 1960s the discovery of an enormous pool of oil at Prudhoe Bay sparked a transformation in the state of Alaska, and especially across its northern tier, known as the North Slope. Today, you can almost think of Prudhoe Bay and the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as twins raised
by different families. They started out with the same basic DNA- flat tundra located on the remote Arctic coast of Alaska, but they've been under the wing of two different communities, and now they've grown into distinct and even opposing entities. This is a completely changed landscape. It's like a industrial city dominated by giant machines, roads and big trucks. Nick and I can see drilling rigs nearly 200 feet high, dotting the horizon line, and we're only looking at a small fraction of
the Prudhoe Bay operations. Roads and pipelines, spire web, dozens of miles out from here, across the tundra. The airport is full of people from around the country, most of them men flying into work or flying home to rest. I talked to one of those guys while he grabbed his last cigarette before getting on the plane home to Anchorage. He told me his name was Jadyn. He didn't want to give his last name, and he said, in the winter, he's part of an exploration crew.
You're helping build ice roads so that different companies can go and they can drill, search for oil, and then they can tap into a reservoir and see if it's producing. That's pretty much what it is, is you're just accommodating the rigs that are gonna come over.
And how far, like, if you're out in the furthest part exploring, like, how long would it take you to get back here?
Oh, well, it depends on if the ice roads are built. If the ice roads aren't built, probably take you 16 hours to get to Deadhorse.
Holy smokes, it's way out there.
Yeah.
Jadyn said that's 16 hours in a really slow-moving vehicle, but still, that gives some sense of the scope here. Deadhorse is kind of like a base camp with hunting parties sent out across the tundra to track down and capture more oil. Do you know that there's a possibility they're going to start drilling over in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?
Yeah, I've heard about that.
Yeah. What do you think?
Honestly, I think that, I think that it could be good for our economy. I think that it would open up a lot of jobs for Alaskans and from people, for people from the lower 48. I think that it's, with all of the considerations that are given to the environment and to the indigenous people that are up here, I think that it could be a really good thing.
A lot of people in the country disagree with Jadyn. In one recent national poll, around 67% of registered voters said they were opposed to oil development on the coastal
plain. But in Alaska, those numbers are almost flipped. In a recent state poll, 65% of Alaskans agreed with Jadyn in supporting drilling, and that likely has something to do with the fact that for the last 40 years, oil has paid for almost everything in Alaska, social services, public infrastructure projects, the university system and the annual dividend checks that all Alaskans receive. 80 and sometimes even 90% of the state budget has been supplied by taxes and royalties from oil
development. But now Prudhoe Bay is drying up. There are still smaller pockets of oil to be had. That's what Jadyn is helping to find, I'm assuming. But most of the easy to reach oil is gone, and the declining production at Prudhoe is wreaking havoc on the state. There's no sales tax or state income tax here, so without oil, everything starts to grind to a
halt. To make things worse, at the same time that production at Prudhoe Bay has been slowing down, global oil prices have also been declining, so there's less oil coming out of Prudhoe and less money generated per barrel. It's in this context that Senator Murkowski and other Alaska leaders are eager to find new places for the industry to work in the state, places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So the connection between the refuge and the oil field has never truly been
broken. Their fates remain intertwined. But what's the back story here? Why did one piece of Arctic tundra stay wild while the other became a huge oil field? We'll have more after this short break.
Hey everybody, this is Erika Janik, Threshold's Managing Editor. Did you know that we have a Threshold newsletter? Our newsletter is a great way to stay connected to Threshold between seasons, find out what we're thinking about and what we're reading, listening to and watching. So subscribe to the Threshold newsletter today using the link in the show notes or on our website, thresholdpodcast.org.
Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and for season three of our show, we're telling the story of the 40-year fight over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And if we zoom out here, it's really not a surprise that the northern coast of Alaska has become something of a battleground. We've got the largest conventional oil field in the country living right next door to the largest wildlife refuge in the country. So how did these two sibling areas end
up taking such different paths in life? Well, one place to start answering that question is in the 1940s. Alaska had been a territory of the United States for over 75 years at this point, and many Alaska Natives were already very familiar with outsiders. Trappers and commercial whalers and prospectors lured north by the promise of gold. But for most Americans in the lower 48 the Alaska territory was a vague abstraction.
Most people, if they thought of Alaska at all, thought of it as a cold, rugged wasteland of little value except for its gold, fur, and fisheries.
But because of Alaska's proximity to Japan and the Soviet Union, that started to change during World War Two.
Now suddenly it seemed to have considerable additional value.
The US military started to get much more interested in the territory during and after the war. This is from a 1944 US Army film about the building of the first road connecting Alaska to Canada.
This is the road through the brooding wilderness. This is the wedge which is pried open the last great frontier of America, the key which has unlocked the treasure chest of Alaska and the Canadian Northwest.
And some of this treasure was black gold. Oil prospectors started to come north in the 1940s and 50s, some of them attracted by stories of Native Alaskans who cut chunks of oil-soaked sod out of the ground and took it home to burn. But around this same time, another force was growing in the country, the conservation movement. A new ethic of concern for wild places, was taking hold, and groups like The Wilderness Society and the National Wildlife Federation had thousands of members by this point.
He needs our help, Smokey does. To keep our forests green and growing.
Olas and Mardy Murray were two early leaders of this movement. He was a wildlife biologist, she was a naturalist and author. They met in her hometown of Fairbanks, got married, and spent their lives together, having epic adventures, studying the wilderness. In 1956, they spent a summer in the Brooks Range, that big mountain range that cuts across the northern part of the state, and that inspired them to lead a campaign to protect the northeast corner of
the Alaska territory. The idea was to preserve an intact, diverse ecosystem with all of its original species moving freely across the landscape. In 1960, the year after Alaska became a state, the Murrays succeeded in their effort to protect that big piece of Northeast Alaska, President Eisenhower designated almost 9 million acres as the Arctic National Wildlife range. It was one of the world's first
attempts to protect land on this scale. Just by way of comparison, this new wildlife range was more than four times the size of Yellowstone, and there were no roads, no hotels, no souvenir shops. This was wilderness preserved four years before the Wilderness Act was passed. It was a landmark moment in the American conservation movement. But then just eight years later, and 100 miles to the west, an oil company hit the jackpot.
In the near future, crude obey the largest reservoir yet discovered on the North American continent will provide nearly 10% of the oil consumed in the United States.
This is from a short film made by the Atlantic Richfield company, or ARCO, after they discovered the huge oil deposit at Prudhoe Bay. It was the biggest oil field in the US prior to the fracking boom.
Since the first discovery of oil in 1968, Atlantic Richfield company's operating area at Prudhoe Bay has been the scene of an ongoing adventure. Oil men and their rigs are part of a massive operation designed to tap some 10 billion barrels of oil locked in a natural reservoir beneath the Arctic tundra.
The Prudhoe Bay oil field was both a windfall and a massive headache for ARCO, because the oil was in a really hard to reach spot. They had no way to get it out to market. Attempts to load the oil into tankers and send it South by sea proved disastrous. The sea ice was too dangerous for the ships, so ARCO and six other oil companies decided to come
together and build a pipeline. It would start on the North Slope and cut through 800 miles of Alaskan wilderness and native land down to the port of Valdez. Many Alaskan native tribes and conservation groups were strongly opposed to the pipeline, but they lost that fight. The pipeline was approved.
Pitting himself against nature, man has beaten the odds.
This film was made in 1975, when development of the Prudhoe Bay oil field was kicking into high gear. ARCO built a network of roads over the spongy tundra and shipped in huge metal structures containing the equipment needed to drill through 2000 feet of permafrost to get to the oil below. Many of those structures are the same ones Nick and I were looking at as we walked around Deadhorse.
Soon the modules will be hauled onto shore, set into the Arctic landscape, permanent monuments commands ingenuity and spirit.
In 1977, oil started to flow through the Trans-Alaska pipeline, and in turn, money started to flow into the state budget. So in very broad strokes, we can think of the cast of characters at this time in three groups, the oil
industry, the conservationists and Native Alaskans. None of these groups is a monolith, but especially among the indigenous people, it's important to know that we're talking about hundreds of different communities with different traditions and different responses to the changes happening around them. With the infrastructure in place to move oil out of the North Slope, companies began to look around the neighborhood, wondering where more crude might be
hiding. The conservationists saw the writing on the wall. Any land that didn't get protected in Alaska might soon be changed forever. And meanwhile, indigenous Alaskans were fighting just to get a seat at the table. Native Alaskan land rights hadn't been officially clarified in federal law until 1971, and as these outside groups started to argue over their ancestral lands, many Native communities felt forced to choose a side, to align themselves, either with industry
or conservationists in order to be heard at all. And all of this change was happening in Alaska while the rest of the country was freaking out about oil.
Good evening for millions of Americans. This may be the worst weekend they've ever faced for finding gasoline to give them the automobile freedom they take as their due. Gasoline shortages are spreading across the country.
In the 1970s, conflicts in the Middle East led to multiple oil embargoes, and people found themselves waiting in line for hours to fill up their cars with very expensive gasoline.
I've been here since 4:30 this morning. It's ridiculous. Waiting in line here. People are very desperate. They depend an awful lot on their cars.
Many Americans began to feel like their freedom and security were in the hands of unfriendly foreign governments.
After 30 days of unsuccessfully trying to get the American hostages out of Tehran, the government of the United States is now trying to get the deposed Shah of Iran out of this country.
All of this turmoil in the global oil markets was a big incentive to produce more oil at home, and the flat northern swath of the wildlife range, just 100 miles away from Prudhoe Bay, seemed to be beckoning with untapped potential. But several conservation minded members of Congress were already busy piecing together a massive
federal bill to protect that land. It was called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA, and it proposed doubling the size of the wildlife range and protecting millions of additional acres across the state. ANILCA had quite a bit of bipartisan support in Congress, but as it got closer to passage, several sticking points emerged. There was growing resentment among some Alaskans about the idea of the federal government making rules about their state.
In Fairbanks, President Carter was burned in effigy to protest in ANILCA, and with people all over the country clamoring for an end to gas shortages, some lawmakers wanted to keep as much oil flowing out of Alaska as possible, so some in Congress said they wouldn't vote for this conservation bill unless oil companies were given permission to drill in the wildlife range. But other lawmakers said exactly the opposite, that they would
withhold their votes unless the wildlife range was protected. So there was a bit of a stalemate.
Thank you very much.
Until November 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president in a landslide. Suddenly, it was clear that if ANILKA didn't get passed before President Carter left the White House, the bill would die. So lawmakers struck a deal. They basically agreed to table the question of drilling on the coastal plain. They said more study was needed to determine what the impact of oil and gas development would be, and they specified that drilling could only occur through an act of
Congress. This compromise was written into Section 1002 of ANILKA. That's how the coastal plain came to be known as the 1002. In December 1980, President Carter signed the bill into law, protecting land across the state and doubling the size of the wildlife range to 18 million acres. Later, a million more acres were added, and it was renamed the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So this compromise written into Section 1002 of ANILCA allowed the bill to pass, but it also allowed
this fight over drilling to live on. It stamped a big question mark over the coastal plain, and between 1980 and today, dozens of lawmakers have tried to resolve that uncertainty. Many have pushed to make drilling legal. Many others have tried to permanently protect the coastal plain, and in the process, the refuge has become a symbolic battlefield, a place where anger over American environmental policy from all sides has been
collected and concentrated. But all of that drama feels very far away from here. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: Behind us is the ocean and assanspet driftwood on the side. Front of us is the tundra. I'm back on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with Vebjorn Aishana Reitan. And although I said earlier that this place and Prudhoe Bay are like twins being raised by different families, it's important to remember that that's just the story of the
last 50 years or so. Different Native Alaskan tribes have relationships with this place that go way, way further back than that. Vebjorn and most people in Kaktovik are Inupiat, a sub-group of the Inuit whose territory spans the far northern parts of the Western Hemisphere, from eastern Russia all the way over to Greenland. And on the southern side of the refuge, there's the Gwich'in, part of the Athabascan family of tribes, who also have a large territory on both sides of the US/Canada
border in northern Alaska. So although this place is currently designated as a home for wildlife, it's also a home for people, and it has been for a really long time. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: So if they set up oil operations here, they probably would limit people's travel across so it would be a lot harder for us to get out on the land. Probably be a bit of friction from that. Vebjorn says both the animals and the people that live in this area move around from mountains to plains, rivers
to ocean, it's all integrated and interdependent. And he's concerned about how oil development could change that. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: It wouldn't feel like... It's not the land that I imagine this place to be. It's not that's not how it is here. They already make enough money. They don't need to come here. The village of Kaktovik is the only community located inside the 1002 area. So if drilling happens in ANWR, it could mean people in Kaktovik have to live with an industrial
complex more or less in their backyard. But because the village owns some of the rights to the resources in the 1002 oil development could also mean a flush of new money here. So the people of Kaktovik have a lot to lose or a lot to gain, depending on your perspective. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: It's not just me that this matters for i guess i. Everybody has to agree on it. For some people, it might be worth it. I don't have an issue with oil people. They're good people.
It's just that I don't want the industry right outside here. I just have to pause for a moment here to call attention to what Vebjorn just said, that people he disagrees with are good people. That attitude is so hard to find in our country right now, around this and so many other issues, and it's especially noteworthy to hear it coming from someone with so much personally at stake in this debate. Vebjorn has a palpable love for the refuge, born out of years of experience
out on this land. But he also has a strong love and respect for the people of his community, and he knows that many of them support drilling in the refuge. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: I know some people are and they're, they're for all development, for good reasons. They have good reasons. They just prioritize differently than me. So we just
have to decide what we prioritize. Some people want a good livelihood for their family, and they think they're going to get it through oil development, they're probably right. We're going to have to sacrifice to get those jobs, I guess. I guess they have decided that's a sacrifice they're willing to make. And you're just not. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: No. I'm not like everybody else in the village. I could get a job wherever else. I just, that's
not an opportunity most people have. I don't have the insight that they do. Vebjorn has always moved back and forth between Norway and Alaska, but he says, if he had to name one place as his home, this would be it. I've heard people say this thing about, oh, the coastal plain, it's just a wasteland. It's just tundra, as if this is like, not worth anything. I don't know what is your response to that?
Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: They've probably never been here, or they haven't been here in a way that they get to appreciate all the life that lives here. This is the home of, uh, thousands of different animals and a whole bunch of different species and even little animals, mice. And the mice are hunted by snowy owls. So, yeah, all the animals, they depend on this land. And he says, so do the people. Vebjorn Aishana Reitan: This, this is what people from here
are. People from Kaktovik. They're from here. 50 years ago, Prudhoe Bay probably looked and felt a lot like the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And 50 years from now, the refuge might look and feel something like Prudhoe Bay. Standing here next to Vebjorn, it's hard to imagine this place buzzing with trucks covered with pipelines. Proponents of drilling say new technologies will keep the footprint small and that the
refuge will not end up looking like Prudhoe. But at the same time, the Department of the Interior is recommending making one and a half million acres here available to oil companies with permission to build up to 175 miles of roads. The first steps in that process could begin as early as this winter. To some people, that would be a tragedy. To others, it would be a blessing and a restoration of justice.
We are not an exhibit in a museum. Nor should the land that we have survived and strived for centuries be locked away for the peace of mind from those from far away places.
We're headed to the village of Kaktovik, next time on Threshold.
Our reporting was funded by the Pulitzer Center, Montana Public Radio, the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the William H and Mary Wattis Harris Foundation, and by our listeners. Our work depends on people who believe in it and choose to support it, people like you. Join our community and find pictures from our trip to the refuge at thresholdpodcast.org.
This episode of Threshold was produced by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott. The threshold team includes Eva Kalea, Michelle Woods and interns, Caysi Simpson and Brooke Artziniega. Our summer intern, Megan Myskofski, also contributed to this series. Special thanks to Frank Allen, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Michael Connor, Kara Cromwell, Katie
deFusco, Matt Herlihy and Rachel Klein. You can find links to all of the films, newscasts and other archival footage that we used in this episode at our website, thresholdpodcast.org. All of the original music is by Travis Yost.