“Here in the arctic, the smallest of lives are miraculous,” said poet Terry Tempest Williams during a trip to ANWR.
In 2005 I knelt in the tundra along the Kongakut River, turned my binoculars upside down and fell head first into layers of flowers and fantasy shapes. Everything tucked just so for warmth and wind protection. And beauty. I watched the 4500 year-old lichen, as the guide explained how it weathers the cold. This ancient presence sings sonnets to the Far North. Not plant and not animal, lichen grow their own vegetables.
And how did life devise itself these stunning survival ways? Each animal and plant reveals a story of adaptation made for tender telling around the campfire. ANWR displays a National Gallery of artwork. Even the stones sort themselves as the soil heaves into patterned ground. Check out the pingos, palsas, frost boils, felsenmeer, strangmoors in E.C. Pielou’s gripping “The Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic.” Pielou calls it “splendor and surprises.”
Since birds from all the states migrate to ANWR for breeding, many Americans want to preserve the Coastal Plain.
No surprise that the measure of our democracy is how carefully we protect vulnerable beings. ANWR honors one of the last places Native people can live their subsistence lives. In sacred trust, we have the American duty of safe harbor for the Gwich’in ancient home. The 7,000 Gwich’in are 100 percent opposed to oil drilling. How unjust to harm the Coastal Plain, the Gwich’in spiritual center where caribou calve free of predators.
We Alaskans know oil spills occur all the time. Possibly 400 per year. We remember 2006 when BP’s leak detection failed in Prudhoe, and an oil worker smelled fuel-scented wetlands. 260,000 gallons leaked into the tundra. And last week a helicopter spotted the gas leak in Cook Inlet.
Oil spills do not belong in wildlife refuges. Clean-up is not profitable. When crew and equipment get weathered in, days go by, black warmth oozing.
Last week KTOO’s “Alaska Nightly News” revealed that oil companies spend $400,000 per mile to build ice roads. Each winter each company constructs 30 to 80 miles. This protects the fragile tundra but how special if Alaska were more fossil fuel free and this corporate money could fund Alaskan engineers and their sustainable energy projects.
This is an especially dangerous time to push ANWR drilling. The Administration reaches malignantly, as Dan Rather says, into every corner of American life, dismantling, harming, smothering.
The indigenous peoples’ respectful connection with homeland and animals is not easily translated into English, and I’ve listened to Nora and the late Richard Daunenhauer explain how we English-only speakers have much to learn. This refuge has much to teach us.
• Lin Davis is a 24-year Juneau resident who hikes every day. She recently testified to the House Resources Committee in opposition to drilling in ANWR.
