Before the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980, conservationists fought for many decades to protect these lands that sit relatively untouched at the northeastern edge of Alaska. And for just as long, oil and gas interests have been trying to drill the refuge’s coastal plain—an area that the Gwich’in people have called “the sacred place where life begins.”
The refuge’s 19.6 million acres are home to an abundance of wildlife—musk oxen, wolves, caribou, and polar bears—and are the summer breeding grounds for millions of birds that migrate here from six continents and all 50 states. Its lands and waterways are also vital to the Gwich’in and other local Indigenous communities who have relied on these rich ecosystems for millennia. The debate over what to do with this landscape has raged for nearly a century, but now, in the midst of a…