Conservationists Face Once-Remote Prospect in Arctic Drilling Fight: Defeat
Twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter expanded the refuge and set aside 1.5 million acres between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea — known as the 1002 area, after the provision
that created it — to be set aside for the possible study of oil and gas development.
The things she seems to want most is opening the Arctic refuge,” said Niel Lawrence,
Alaska program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It is critically important and I don’t think anybody knows it is stuck in a tax bill,” said Senator
Maria Cantwell, the Washington Democrat who led the 2005 fight against drilling in the refuge.
WASHINGTON — Carl Portman remembers watching, heartbroken, from Anchorage in 2005 as a Senate
effort to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge lost by two votes.
For environmental activists, protecting the refuge is about preserving the fragile beauty of the Arctic wilderness — where caribou herds calve, polar bears den
and millions of migratory birds gather — just as the effects of global warming are becoming more pronounced in the far north than almost anywhere else on earth.