The Sacred Place Where Life Begins. That’s what the Gwich’in people call the coastal plain of Alaska where they live.
The Porcupine Caribou on who the Gwich’in have relied for tens of thousands of years for their subsistence way of life
migrate hundreds of miles each spring to give birth to their calves there. So that Gwich’in name rings true.
It was that life that the Biden administration protected for years to come with the announcement last week that it was
cancelling oil and gas drilling leases in the 19.6-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and moving to prohibit
drilling in another 13 million acres of protected lands bordering the refuge.
It wasn’t just the Gwich’in, who have been fighting drilling for nearly 50 years, and the caribou who won. The Inupiaq
people who live at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, polar bears, musk oxen, Dall sheep, and birds you can find in all 50
states have roots in the Arctic Refuge.
That corner of Alaska is one of the world’s last untouched wild places, our country’s largest wildlife refuge, and the
only one designed specifically for wilderness purposes. Its continued existence in its pristine, rugged state signals
our commitment to nature and our appreciation of its wonder. It’s a sign of our national character.
But the value isn’t just symbolic. We’re on pace this year to produce more oil in the United States than ever before.
Creating a glut will only extend our addiction to fossil fuels when we know that we need to move swiftly in the
direction of burning less. And the trade-off is infrastructure needed to drill that will destroy the refuge forever.
It’s a trade that the American people repeatedly have said they don’t want to make. In polls in recent years, roughly
two thirds of voters opposed drilling in the Arctic Refuge. After the President’s decision to allow another Alaskan
drilling project to proceed months ago, this is the leadership most voters want.
The argument of proponents that Arctic drilling will boost U.S. energy independence and national security fall short
when you know that all the oil under that part of Alaska is barely a year of the nation’s consumption by many estimates.
We won’t drill our way out of the need for fossil fuels, but we certainly can drill our way to irreparable damage to the
climate in just a few years.
Protecting indigenous people and their way of life in Alaska should demonstrate that we can stand firm to defend more
communities on the front lines of climate change against the unabated greed of Big Oil. An unscathed, unmatched
landscape shouldn’t be the test for doing right be our neighbors and by the planet.
Too often, we’ve allowed a few people lacking political power and desperate for economic opportunities to bear the
immediate cost of bad environmental choices. The flaw is that more often than not, we all end up paying.
Whether it’s the cancer alleys created in the communities neighboring refineries along the Mississippi or coastal towns
repeatedly crushed by extreme weather, they’re only the first to feel the burden. As the hottest temperatures ever
recorded showed us this summer, no one can escape the toll that fossil fuel charges the planet.
Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental
organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People
Were Always Free,” published in January.