Under the Radar
News: With the public focused on the election, a small group of government officials and oil executives has been closing in on a deal to open one of Alaska's biggest wildlife refuges to oil drilling.
October 28, 2004
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The environment has been a virtual non-issue in this year's election campaign, with even the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- such a hot topic in the 2000 race -- off the radar for now. So, with the public focused on terrorism, war, taxes and healthcare, a small group of government officials and oil executives has seized the moment to close in on a deal to open one of Alaska's biggest wildlife refuges to oil drilling.
Government scientists, environmentalists, and Native Americans in the area say the arrangement -- which has the support of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and which won preliminary approval last week from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service -- will be a precedent-setting erosion of historic environmental protections of Alaska wildlands, and could open the way to widespread oil exploration in the nation's wildest places, starting with the 9 million-acre Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
For two decades, the debate over drilling in Alaska has focused on the Arctic Refuge. Drilling there would require congressional approval and victory over a formidable array of opponents from more than a dozen well-organized environmental groups. But Alaska's 16 other wildlife refuges have no congressional drilling ban; rather, they have been protected from new oil activity for 30 years by an administrative rule that can be lifted at any time. In recent years, oil companies have taken aim at reserves in these other refuges, and they seem to have hit their target in Yukon Flats, a swath of wetlands and forest that borders the Arctic Refuge's southern boundary and that is home to salmon, waterfowl, caribou and moose, among other species.
Rushing to complete the deal before election day, a group of Alaska politicians, an oil drilling company, and, inexplicably, a prominent environmental group are working overtime to trade 100,000 of forested foothills in the heart of Yukon Flats to Doyon Ltd., a native-owned corporation, in exchange for Doyon-owned wetlands that are not threatened with oil development and are currently protected by the Clean Water Act.
Doyon, one of 13 native corporations created by Congress in 1971, is Alaska's biggest private landowner, and it has an abysmal environmental record. The company paid a $1 million fine in 1998 for intentionally dumping oil waste at a drilling site in Northern Alaska. According to Jim Mery, Doyon's vice president of land and natural resources, oil exploration in the refuge will begin upon the deal's completion.
Ted Heuer, the manager of Yukon Flats, says the arrangement makes sense because the refuge would receive wetland acreage in excess of the forest acreage it gives up. The refuge's primary concern is the protection of migratory birds, and wetlands have a higher conservation value than upland areas.
But Heuer also said that several of his staffers are upset with the proposal; they argue that without the land transfer, Doyon would not be able to drill at all. There is no known oil or gas in the wetlands, and the land has no development value. Designation as refuge land would have little real impact, whereas removing protections for the forested areas would open now-protected land to drilling operations that could harm wildlife and infringe on Beaver Creek, a federally designated Wild and Scenic River. But it is the precedent the deal would set, rather than the specifics, that really upsets the conservation community.
Since the modern Alaska refuge system was created -- along with the native corporations, including Doyon -- in 1971, new resource extraction has been prohibited. The concern is that, with a structure in place for companies to swap land with no oil potential for refuge land with fossil fuel reserves, the Yukon Flats deal will set off a wave new drilling in areas set aside for preservation.
"Once you do a land exchange that facilitates oil and gas exploration within refuge boundaries in one place, you establish a precedent for all refuges," said Deborah Williams, a former assistant to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt under Bill Clinton, and now the director of the Alaska Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit environmental organization.
The government of the native village of Fort Yukon has also objected to the deal out of concern for the environmental effects of oil exploration and drilling on animal stocks it relies on for subsistence. "We live in one of the most pristine and impact-sensitive areas in the world; any oil development would disturb this fragile ecosystem. That is why this area was designated as a wildlife refuge -- to protect the environment from any sort of major environmental impacts," wrote Adlai Alexander, first chief of the Gwichyaa Zhee Gwich'in Tribal Government in a Sept. 21 letter of opposition.
A biologist with the refuge -- who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution -- said that Alaska's congressional delegation and high-ranking officials in the Department of the Interior are pushing the arrangement precisely to set a precedent under which oil companies will be able to gain access to the refuges. There is an emphasis on completing this before the election, when a Bush loss could set back efforts to tap refuge reserves. "[Doyon] came to us about two years ago, and I think there's been a strong effort to continue negotiations," he said. Last month, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens tacked a rider onto an interior appropriations bill, setting a Dec. 31 deadline for the agreement.
Environmentalists' frustration is paired with dismay that the Conservation Fund, a well-known land preservation organization, is brokering the deal at Doyon's request.
The facilitator has been Glen Ellison, manager of the Arctic Refuge from 1982 to 1992 and now a Conservation Fund staffer in Alaska. Ellison has met repeatedly with officials from Doyon and the Department of the Interior to hammer out the exchange. "We believe it will result in a net gain in conservation," Ellison said this week. "Otherwise we wouldn't be supporting this."
It's unclear how any party other than Doyon stands to benefit from the arrangement, since refuge officials -- with the exception of Heuer -- say there will be a net loss in conservation, and the Conservation Fund stands to make a maximum of only $15,000 for brokering the deal, according to Todd Logan, the National Wildlife Refuge system's Alaska chief.
Deborah Williams and Pam Miller, a former Arctic Refuge biologist and now an environmental consultant, said that the Conservation Fund's imprimatur on the deal gave the appearance that a reliable environmental watchdog was looking out for the best interests of the refuge. But on Sept. 14, Stevens proposed legislation that would allocate $750,000 to complete the land deal by Dec. 31, 2004, and set up a system for the government to collect royalties on any oil or natural gas extracted from the area. This raised the hackles of several environmental groups, who authored a letter of protest, complaining that "[t]he land exchange is still being negotiated in secret, no public meetings or notices have been held to inform the public about the details of the proposed exchange, and no environmental reviews have been conducted."
Stevens' staffers did not return phone calls seeking comment. The senator -- along with the rest of Alaska's congressional delegation -- has long been supportive of opening Alaska wildlands to drilling.
Amid the din of the election season, the protests have drawn little public notice. Miller, Williams and others are trying to stop the arrangement, but most activist groups have been focused on voter mobilization. The exchange's low profile, they say, masks the potentially devastating legacy it could leave. As the Yukon Flats biologist said, "Maybe the most endangered thing here is ... the notion of a wild place."
Justin Scheck is a freelance writer.
