Arctic Debate

By Jamie Murphy

It promises to be a classic struggle. On one side: environmentalists, guardians of the 18 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which sits on Alaska's North Slope near the Canadian border. An untouched domain of musk oxen, polar bears, golden eagles, wolves and a cherished herd of 180,000 caribou, the preserve is one of the nation's last pristine animal ranges. The opposition: developers who seek the vast energy riches believed to lie beneath the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain. These reserves may hold as much as 5 billion to 30 billion bbl. of oil and 64.5 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas.

Last week the U.S. Department of the Interior joined forces with the developers. The department's Fish and Wildlife Service recommended that the plain -- a carpet of delicate wild flowers in summer, an icy wasteland in winter -- be opened to exploration and leasing by oil and gas concerns. The report, which concedes that the environment would be affected, is due to be released in final form next March by Interior Secretary Donald Hodel.

If Hodel approves the plan, as is expected, it will go before Congress, where supporters of the two interest groups will clash in earnest. "It is an enormous land-use decision," says Fish and Wildlife Spokesman Phil Million. "At stake is the largest remaining U.S. reserve of oil (and) a fragile ecosystem. The issue will be the environmental battle of the late '80s."

Congress has waited for Interior's decision since 1980, when it passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The legislation set aside more than 104 million acres of federal territory in Alaska for parks, refuges and wilderness areas, including the Arctic Refuge. But the lawmakers left undecided the fate of the coastal plain. Instead they authorized the Interior Department to determine the region's potential stores of oil and gas and make a detailed -- and expensive (about $45.5 million) -- assessment of the biological impact of tapping them.

"It has taken years of study for Interior to make this recommendation," says Joseph Lastelic, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute. "Development should be a high priority for this Administration. There is a lot of oil there." Other proponents of development cite the impressive conservation efforts made by industry at neighboring Prudhoe Bay, the nation's largest oil field. Even ardent environmentalists cannot disagree with that. Says Jay Hair, executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation: "The oil industry spent the past 15 years profitably developing Prudhoe Bay and did a commendable job in protecting its wildlife resources."

But the comparison does not sway defenders of the Arctic Refuge. They point out that the preserve's coastal plain is one-third the width of Prudhoe Bay's and that the caribou herd that migrates there to calve is 15 times as large as Prudhoe's. Says Mark Troutwein, a consultant to the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment: "The area is a priceless wildlife resource that cannot tolerate airstrips and pipelines without a serious loss of quality."

Sources at Interior predict that years will pass before the debate is settled, and environmentalists are playing for time. Even if limited drilling is permitted by Congress, a decade could elapse before oil and gas companies emerge from the maze of additional environmental-impact studies that must be prepared prior to exploitation. By then, the refuge's defenders hope, Administration attitudes will be different.

With reporting by Patricia Delaney/Washington and Roberta L. Graham/Anchorage