Going to Alaska is like going back in time. The streams are still choked with salmon. Large numbers of grizzlies, wolves and moose still roam the land. Clouds of birds still soar through the sky. It’s like everywhere else used to be.

Humanity has beaten back the primitive in a few places in the country’s forty-ninth state: the tacky sprawl of Anchorage, the picturesque state capital of Juneau, the urban outpost of Fairbanks. Beyond the cities, one of the few signs of technological civilization is in the state’s southeastern corner, where the lush rain forest that once carpeted an elaborate archipelago of islands has been extensively clear-cut. Another spot that bears the modern world’s stamp can be found—improbably—in the state’s far northern reaches, in the swath of tundra that stretches from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean. Here, spread out over an area that stretches almost 100 miles along, and inland of, the Arctic coast, is the complex of derricks, pipelines, processing facilities, gravel roads and waste dumps that makes up the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

This industrial center pumps out twice as much air pollution annually as Washington, D.C. Its soil and water have been contaminated by an average of 400 spills of crude oil, diesel fuel, ethylene glycol and other hazardous substances each year. Over 1 million gallons of oil alone was spilled from 1996 to 1998. It is a place of noise, of roaring machinery, of shouting men. Here, as in few other places, pristine nature and technological civilization stand in stark contrast. It is a small island compared to the vast open spaces that surround it. But it is growing. And it has displaced for the foreseeable future whatever wildness once reigned in the Prudhoe region.

Loss of wildness, the disruption of an ecosystem thousands of years in the making, is central to the debate over whether to drill for oil in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. More than thirty miles to the east of the most far-flung pipeline connected to the Prudhoe complex, the 1.5-million-acre plain is the biological heart of the 19-million-acre refuge. It is the birthing grounds for the Porcupine Caribou Herd, the second largest in North America. It is denning habitat for the Beaufort Sea polar bear population. It is the summer nesting place for 135 species of birds. It has been called “America’s Serengeti.” And, because it may harbor large amounts of oil, it could contain the seeds of its own destruction.

For every assertion that the refuge’s teeming wildlife would be decimated, for every claim that technological advances have dramatically reduced the “ecological footprint” of oil drilling, one thing seems irrefutable: the essential primitiveness of the place, its “wild music,” as former President Jimmy Carter put it, would be, if not lost, certainly diminished were the oil industry allowed in.

“If you want [the refuge] left alone to protect its wild or pristine nature, I think that’s totally legitimate,” said Matt Cronin, an oil industry wildlife consultant based in Anchorage who believes that drilling can be carried out in a manner that will prevent serious harm to species like caribou and polar bears. “I personally might or might not favor that in terms of exploring oil reservoirs. But I respect people who say it should be left alone for its wilderness value.”

POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

As with any hotly contested topic, details matter, and in this particular debate, no detail matters more than this: the president of the United States, George W. Bush, has made it a priority to drill in the Arctic refuge (or “Anwar,” as he and other drilling proponents like to call it—the term being a pronunciation of the refuge’s acronym, ANWR).

So far, however, his arguments have been less than persuasive. He used the electricity crisis in California to argue that the refuge should be opened to oil drilling—even though less than 1 percent of California’s electrical power is generated by oil. He has also asserted, like other drilling proponents, that oil from the refuge would reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil—even though the most optimistic forecasts say it would cut oil imports by only a few percentage points. One thing that’s clear is that Bush is taking a significant political risk (most polls show a majority of Americans want the refuge protected).

Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, the other political heavyweight pushing for drilling, would be taking a grave political risk if he wasn’t striving to open up the refuge. The reason can be reduced to one word: pork. Last fall, every man, woman and child in Alaska received a $1,963.86 check from the state—the annual dividend paid from the royalties the state receives for the huge oil operations in the vast North Slope fields along the Arctic Ocean. What worries many Alaskans who have grown used to receiving these annual checks is that North Slope production is declining. That’s why so many state residents support drilling in the refuge—it’s the surest way to extend the financial bonanza another decade or two.

Bush and Murkowski have run into surprising opposition from Republican moderates, most of them from New England states where environmental protection is favored. It is the emergence of this bloc that explains more than anything else the significant setback pro-drilling advocates received at the end of March.

Acting within days of each other, both the House and the Senate omitted from their budgets expected future energy revenues from drilling in the refuge—a signal that members do not expect such money to materialize because they do not expect drilling in the refuge to be approved.

That development has apparently removed environmentalists’ greatest fear: that Congress would seek to open the refuge to oil and gas drilling by tacking the measure onto a budget bill in the appropriations process, where rules forbid a filibuster. That would have meant that drilling proponents would have needed only a simple majority in the Senate to open the refuge. “What we’re expecting is a stealth rider hidden deep in the bowels of a budget bill,” Deborah Williams, executive director of the Alaska Conservation Foundation and a former top aide to former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, warned in January.

It’s still possible that a rider could be attached to some other bill. “There are still some tricks they could play,” said Chuck Clusen, a veteran environmental lobbyist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Nonetheless, it seems most likely that the battle will boil down to legislation introduced in late February by Murkowski, chairman of the powerful Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski’s bill, the first major piece of legislation in a decade aimed at overhauling national energy policy and spurring domestic production, has as its centerpiece opening the Arctic refuge to oil drilling.

In response, Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and an ardent proponent of protecting the refuge, publicly issued a warning that he would filibuster the bill. A filibuster can be overcome only if sixty senators vote to end debate. Since drilling advocates are unlikely to muster that much support, Kerry’s filibuster threat could thwart the effort to drill in the refuge.

Perhaps sensing the depth of the political opposition, Bush said in late March that he was prepared to look for oil and gas elsewhere on federal lands. “It doesn’t matter to me where the gas comes from, in the long run, just so long as we get gas moving into the country,” he said.

Another sign that the administration was backing off from the Arctic refuge came a week later, when an energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney reviewed a plan to open millions of acres of public land to oil and gas development, much of it in the Rocky Mountains.

A NUMBERS GAME

The lay of the land, both above and below ground, is key to understanding the debate over drilling in the Arctic refuge.

Geologists are excited about the area for the simple reason that the same type of rocks and geologic formations that underlie Prudhoe Bay—one of only three “supergiant” oil fields in the United States—appear to also lie beneath the refuge’s coastal plain. One such formation, the Barrow Arch, shoots out of Prudhoe like an arrow aimed directly at the coastal plain. “If you drill along the arch, you are likely to find oil. And it points right at Anwar,” said Ken Boyd, former director of Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas. Shallower formations that have yielded oil in the Prudhoe region may also lie under the refuge.

Whether there are large amounts of oil under the refuge is not known. Even in the twenty-first century, hunting for oil is an inexact business. “Uncertainty is the magic word. You won’t know until you get in there and drill,” Boyd said.

Congress recognized the uncertainty about the refuge’s oil supplies twenty-one years ago and decided not to extend formal wilderness protection to the coastal plain (see sidebar). Instead, Congress ordered studies of the plain’s oil potential and wildlife.

In 1983 and 1984, with the permission of the federal government, a consortium of twenty-two companies conducted a series of seismic tests at the refuge aimed at determining the subterranean makeup of the coastal plain. By sending shock waves generated at the surface into the earth and measuring the different speeds at which the shock waves traveled through different material, the companies were able to develop pictures of the underground geology—and make educated guesses about the likely location of oil deposits.

The pictures are pretty flat and fuzzy. Due to technological limitations—primarily the lack of supercomputers—and because the tests were conducted several miles apart (instead of being closely bunched together as is the practice today), the consortium came up with only two-dimensional images, not the three-dimensional seismic images that are common today. “It’s like the difference between an x-ray and a CAT-scan,” Boyd said, noting that the success rate for drilling on Alaska’s North Slope has been greatly increased by three-dimensional seismic imaging.

The other awkward thing about the tests is that to this day the results are considered proprietary information belonging to the consortium and are not available to the public. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have been allowed to scrutinize the data, however, and the agency has over the years made estimates about the size and arrangement of the potential oil reserves under the coastal plain.

The latest estimates, contained in a 1999 USGS report, have not lent clarity to the picture. As with any study of petroleum reserves, there are three categories of estimates: how much oil is in the ground, how much of that oil can be accessed with the latest technology and how much accessible oil can be pumped to the surface for a profit. In the case of the refuge, estimates are further complicated by the location and ownership of oil deposits offshore of the coastal plain, under submerged lands owned by either the federal government or the state of Alaska, or under inholdings within the plain owned by Alaska Natives.

Predictably, drilling proponents have seized on the largest numbers—the estimates that ignore cost factors and take into account both onshore and offshore lands regardless of ownership. This explains how Murkowski and Alaska Governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat who strongly supports the oil industry, can claim that there are 16 billion barrels of oil at the coastal plain, or enough for a twenty-five-year supply assuming annual production of 2 million barrels. Prudhoe at its peak produced 2 million barrels a year for about a decade.

Also predictably, drilling opponents have seized on the smallest numbers—estimates that pertain only to federal onshore lands and are restricted to volumes that are economically recoverable at today’s prices. This explains how Kerry, Carter and others claim that the refuge contains only 3.2 billion barrels, or less than half-a-year’s supply (the United States uses about 7 billion barrels of oil a year). What they don’t say is that the economically recoverable amount could rise if oil prices rise.

The USGS report also says that oil at the refuge is likely to be found in numerous small accumulations rather than in one giant reservoir, as at Prudhoe Bay. If that’s the case, it is unlikely that oil development—even with advanced new techniques such as drilling multiple wells from a single gravel pad—could be confined to a few, discrete areas. As a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report puts it, development in the coastal plain “would require a large number of small production sites spread over a largeregion.”

OIL’S IMPACT ON CARIBOU

A numbers game of a different sort is being waged over the likely impact of oil development on the refuge’s remarkable panoply of wildlife. The focus has been on caribou, particularly on the Porcupine Caribou Herd, since the coastal plain is where pregnant caribou come to give birth.

Probably the best way to predict how that herd, which currently numbers about 129,000, might be affected is to look at the extensive research that has been conducted on the much smaller herd that frequents the Prudhoe region every summer—the Central Arctic Herd.

The herd has provided drilling proponents with what would seem to be their strongest card because the herd has grown along with the expansion of the oil fields—from a population of 3,000 when oil was discovered at Prudhoe in 1968 to more than 20,000 today.

In reference to that expansion, the website of Arctic Power, an industry-funded lobbying organization, asks, “Are caribou affected by oil development on the north slope? It would appear not.” The website also features a photograph of grazing caribou with oil derricks in the background. The photo is captioned: “Do the Caribou Really Care?”

Ken Whitten, a wildlife biologist who retired last year from the Alaska Fish and Game Department, said they do—and that it would be more accurate to say that the herd has grown despite the oil fields, and despite registering some measurable negative affects.

Whitten and Fran Mauer, a wildlife biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said that the growth of the Central Arctic Herd was part of a natural population jump that virtually all North American caribou herds experienced in the 1970s and 1980s due to a long stretch of relatively mild winters. They said that the increase has masked clear signs of distress shown by female members of the herd due to oil development. Studies have shown that females that calve near the oil fields have lower birth rates and their offspring have poorer survival rates, compared with females and calves that spend their time well away from the oil fields. In addition, researchers have found that females near the oil fields gain less weight over the summer than females away from the oil fields.

Whitten said that as long as the weather is mild, the negative impact of oil field development does not appear to be great enough to cause actual population reductions. But Whitten said in times of harsh environmental conditions, such as a hard winter or a dry summer, “the animals go below a threshold.”

During times of poor environmental conditions, only half of the females near the oil fields may be pregnant, Whitten said.

Mauer expects that whatever negative effects the Central Arctic Herd has absorbed from oil field development would be magnified for the Porcupine herd on the refuge. The reason is simply that the coastal plain area is much narrower—fifteen to forty miles separate the Beaufort Sea from the Brooks Range—than the coastal plain in the Prudhoe region, where the nearest mountains are 150 miles to the south.

Mauer said that if oil development is limited to the western portion of the plain, there probably won’t be much of an effect on the Porcupine herd because the herd will be able to shift eastward along the coast. But if oil development spreads out along much of the coastal plain, the animals will be forced inland, where predators—and clouds of voracious insects—are more numerous.

ECOLOGICAL DISRUPTION

Mauer, who has conducted research on the refuge for the past twenty years, said that, caribou aside, there are clear signs of ecological disruption in and around the North Slope oil fields. He mentioned, for example, a rise in the populations of gulls, ravens and arctic foxes due to the presence of human garbage. That, in turn, has resulted in declines in populations of nesting birds. Why? Because gulls, ravens and arctic foxes are notorious raiders of ground nests.

Mauer hopes never to see that kind of degradation at the refuge. “The oil industry can minimize and mitigate its impact, but no matter what they do, it won’t be the pristine, untouched place it is now. Instead it will be another degraded situation like what we’re proliferating across the rest of northern Alaska.”