Chris Kemp

Recently, the debate raging over the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for more than 20 years has been thrust back in the public mindset.

Democrats in Congress lost the bid to add an amendment to the energy section of the Bush Administration’s budget proposal that would have removed references to oil exploration and development in the Coastal Plain region of ANWR.

A frequently heard overgeneralization in the debate is that the budget proposal advocates drilling in all of the ANWR. The actual area in question is the Coastal Plain region, located on the northern shore of the refuge.

The Coastal Plain region also is referred to as the 1002 Area, named after the section that addresses it in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980.

Years after the country’s largest oil deposit was discovered in nearby Prudhoe Bay, Congress passed the act designating the original ANWR region as protected wilderness.

However, protection did not extend to the Coastal Plain region, according to a historical summary from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In Section 1002 of ANILCA, the Senate outlined several criteria to be met before either extending full protection to the Coastal Plain or opening the region to oil development.

Since then, it has been difficult to ignore the fact that all signs point to the presence of oil in ANWR – specifically, in the Coastal Plain region.

The U.S. Geological Survey completed an assessment and analysis of the 1002 Area in ANWR in 1998.

According to its findings, USGS estimated that between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels of oil exist in the refuge, with an estimated range of 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels exclusively in the Coastal Plain.

Also in the report, USGS determined the oil was not expected to be tapped from one source, but actually was scattered in several deposits throughout the 1002 Area.

This only reaffirms that drilling in the Coastal Plain region undoubtedly will be an invasive and destructive event.

While proponents of oil drilling maintain that a region of about 2,000 acres of the Coastal Plain will be opened for development, the budget includes the entire 1.5 million acres of the plain. The whole of the 1002 Area, considered vital to the refuge’s entire ecosystem, potentially could be tapped for oil reserves.

According to a recent report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ANWR supports a diverse network of habitat and animal species, which is “considered unparalleled in North America and perhaps in the entire circumpolar north.”

According to the report, the coastal region currently under the scrutiny of oil advocates also is a vital hibernation habitat for polar bears and a calving ground for the porcupine caribou herd – two species that would suffer the majority of negative effects from drilling in the area. Countless other species also would be affected.

Also, taking into account the pollution that unavoidably accompanies even the “cleanest” oil fields, to suggest the environment of the entire Coastal Plain region will not be affected by development is ludicrous.

Another argument championed by drilling advocates is that the resources tapped from ANWR would decrease the United States’ dependency on overseas oil, specifically from the volatile Middle East.

Americans use about 7 billion barrels of oil per year, according to USGS. If oil resources in ANWR are at the high end of USGS estimations, then logically it would seem that Americans would be “self-reliant” for little more than two years.

Such a limited amount of time hardly makes drilling in a pristine ecosystem seem economical.

The bottom line is since Congress did not pass the amendment to remove drilling references in the Coastal Plain from the budget, it used an insidious, but effective, method to open ANWR to oil development.

If economic quantities of oil eventually are recovered, Congress will have set a precedent for oil drilling in areas under United States’ protection, and at the expense of the ecological systems existing in those areas long before drilling was even a possibility.

When this question is brought to the forefront again, involving another national park or refuge, drilling proponents will have ANWR as ammunition to use when arguing their cause.

Therefore, all action should now be taken to avoid a future open season on nationally-protected regions because of their potential oil resources.

The pro-drilling conversations about oil resources that will decrease our dependence on the Middle East should be countered by the fact that there simply isn’t enough oil in ANWR to have much of an impact on the United States’ chronic oil dependency.

We have a responsibility to protect whatever pristine ecological environments are left. It is almost impossible to see how the anticipated “payoff” of drilling would be worth the consequences.

Anderson is a senior print journalism major and a copy editor of The Spectator.