On the eve of his first visit to this country, U.S. President Joe Biden approved a massive oil drilling project in Alaska – a project which will have significant impacts on the environment and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples in the adjacent territory of Canada’s North.
Oil corporation Conoco Phillips has given the gentle name “Willow” to its proposed $8 billion undertaking on Alaska’s North Slope, in what is known as the National Petroleum Reserve.
Willow is a name which will be ironic for anyone who has visited the area. The flood plains of the many rivers in this vast wilderness, which spans the Alaska-Canada border, are covered by willow trees.
The region, virtually untouched by industrial development, is also home to: significant fish populations, including the rare cousin of the whitefish, the inconnu (or “cony”); huge flocks of migratory birds; major endangered predators such as the Arctic wolf and the polar bear; and, most important, the 210,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd.
The caribou, a key source of high-quality protein for more than a dozen Indigenous communities in two countries, gather in north-east Alaska, in the summer, for calving.
Then, with their newborns in tow, they migrate across the international border in search of food and safety from predators. The most lethal of the latter are the massive clouds of mosquitos which blanket the region in summer.
During the U.S. president’s visit to Ottawa on March 23 and 24 there will be many pressing matters on the agenda.
Immigration and the flow of asylum seekers to both Canada and the U.S., the war in Ukraine, Canada’s military spending, and the fragility of the world’s banks will all be on the list.
As well, of course, there are the perennial, and always vexatious, trade issues between the two countries.
There will not likely be much time or opportunity to talk about a resource extraction project in a remote region of this continent, far from the power centres of Washington and Ottawa.
If such a conversation were possible, it would be helpful to hear President Biden explain why he did an about-face on drilling in the Arctic.
A rare Democrat representing Alaska in Congress
For decades, all Democratic presidents and presidential candidates – including Barack Obama whom Biden served as vice-president – have opposed oil and gas development in this fragile environment.
One reason Biden might give for his turnabout is the wide support for the project in Alaska.
It can be hard for a president to resist a project when the trade union movement joins forces with the oil and gas industry, supported by some Indigenous groups and by all of the leading elected officials of a state (of both parties), to push for its approval.
That’s what happened in Alaska.
The Alaska branch of the main U.S. labour federation, the AFL-CIO, key political figures at both the state and federal level, and even a number of Indigenous groups spoke with one voice, and their message was, to quote former Alaska governor Sarah Palin: “Drill, baby, drill!”
For Biden, as a politician, perhaps the single most important of those voices was that of Alaska’s sole member of the federal House of Representatives, Mary Peltola, a Democrat.
All states get two members of the U.S. senate. Both of Alaska’s are Republican, and have been for years.
Membership of the House, on the other hand, is determined by population. States with fewer than a million people get only a single House member. Alaska is one of them.
In August 2022 when Peltola won that precious House seat in a special election to replace Republican Don Young who had died a few months earlier, she was the first Democrat to do so in half a century. Peltola then went on to win a full two-year term in November, 2022.
These days House of Representatives majorities tend to be razor thin. The Republicans currently hold 222 seats to the Democrats’ 213. In 2020 the Democrats won a similarly slim majority.
The single seat in Alaska could be crucial to Democratic hopes of re-taking the House in 2024, and Joe Biden will want to do everything he can to keep that seat for his party.
Mary Peltola is an Indigenous person, but from western Alaska, not from the territory where the Willow project would happen. She joined Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to actively lobby for the Willow project in Washington.
Peltola justified her support for this greenhouse-gas-producing and environmentally dubious project by pointing to the economic benefits for her have-not state:
“While many other states have enjoyed development and economic growth, Alaska has gone backwards by 8% over the last 15 years. We can’t afford this. We need to make sure that our future generations have the schools that they need, have the public safety that they need, have the roads that they need, and Alaska can’t shoulder the issues of global warming alone.”
Reading between the lines, Peltola is telling us she would have little hope of keeping her seat if she dared oppose this project.
Environmentalists sidelined; Gwich’in way of life threatened
Beyond Alaska, U.S. environmental activists are furious with Biden’s decision. They’ll feel doubly aggrieved after they read the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concludes:
“Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all … The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
Among the choices the IPCC would not recommend to the U.S. would be to open a whole new wilderness area to the exploitation of fossil fuels.
But when the time comes to vote, U.S. environmental activists have limited choices. The Republicans are not an option for them.
And American activists for the environment do give Biden lots of credit for all he has done to combat climate change, most notably the massive investments in clean energy in Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act. Getting that legislation passed in both houses of Congress was a masterful feat by a canny and seasoned political operator.
That leaves the Indigenous group on whose lives the Willow project will have the greatest impact in a lonely position.
The group is the Gwich’in people who live in a handful of communities in northeast Alaska, the Yukon and the western Northwest Territories.
Like many Indigenous peoples the Gwich’in have seen their traditional territory divided among a number of different political jurisdictions.
The northern Alaska-Canada border is a straight line, drawn a century and a half ago by white politicians. It has nothing to do with the natural environment or the Indigenous population’s way of life.
The Northern Caribou Canada project, an Indigenous-run “collaborative source for information on northern caribou in Canada”, depicts the migratory habits of the Porcupine caribou herd on which the Gwich’in depend, in an infographic.
This educational tool shows that the herd, one of the largest in the world, is currently doing well because it can move through its vast range of over 200,000 square kilometres freely, with minimal interference from humans.
All that will change once Conoco-Philips starts building roads and work camps, hauling in tonnes of heavy equipment, and constructing oil-drilling platforms.
Caribou are not Santa’s friendly reindeer. They have a deep and inbred fear of humans and what humans bring with them. If the Gwich’in call themselves People of the Caribou it is because they have learned to co-exist with these wild animals over many centuries.
The Gwich’in harvest the caribou sustainably. They know not to disturb calves and their parents and they limit what they hunt only to what they need.
Among the Gwich’in and other northern Indigenous groups, such as the Inuvialuit, the ancient tradition of sharing the product of the hunt is still strong. Hunters do not hoard or sell what they kill; they distribute it to their neighbours.
Today, caribou continue to provide healthy meat to entire communities, where nutritionally-inferior store-bought food is prohibitively expensive.
They make possible the survival of a culture and way of life that might seem hard to fathom in this age of instant, technologically-furnished gratification. But it is a vibrant and viable way of life that has almost miraculously survived into the 21st century.
If the Canadian government cannot convince the U.S. government to re-think its plans for a huge industrial development in Alaska that way of life will be mortally threatened.
Editor’s Note March 27, 2023: This story originally stated that the Willow Project was located in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge when it in fact is located in the National Petroleum Reserve. This article has been corrected and rabble regrets the error.
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