What We Lose If We Drill In Alaska
- colin7931
- Sep 9
- 33 min read
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is once again under threat. Politicians and oil companies see short-term gain; conservationists, Indigenous peoples, and outdoor advocates see the loss of one of America’s last truly wild places.
In this episode of Open Container, Doug speaks with Kristen Miller, Executive Director of the Alaska Wilderness League and co-chair of the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign. They explore what’s at stake in Alaska’s wilderness and why it matters for all Americans, even those who will never set foot there.
Doug & Kristen discuss:
Why Alaska represents the last frontier of American wilderness.
The scale and significance of the Arctic Refuge, the Western Arctic, the Arctic Ocean, and the Tongass.
Indigenous leadership and the cultural ties of the Gwich’in people to the caribou migration.
How development and climate change threaten fragile Arctic ecosystems.
The political battles over drilling, roadless rules, and public lands policy.
Why wilderness isn’t a partisan issue, and how ordinary people can use their voices to protect these lands.
Alaska’s wild places are more than resources to exploit; they are cultural, ecological, and spiritual lifelines that belong to us all.
Learn more and get involved at alaskawild.org
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Episode Transcript:
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:00:00.960 - 00:00:04.000
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is under threat again.
Kristen Miller
00:00:04.400 - 00:00:13.800
There are stories of them encountering one oil well or one piece of trash left from development and they will change their entire migration route to go around it.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:00:13.800 - 00:00:19.680
Do we simply urbanize everything or can we learn to use our technological dominance responsibly?
Kristen Miller
00:00:19.680 - 00:00:27.760
If you were to take Alaska and superimpose it on the lower 48, it would stretch all the way from the top of Minnesota down to Georgia.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:00:27.920 - 00:08:53.750
It's what North America used to be like when settlers first got here. Welcome to Open Container. I'm Doug Schnitzbahn. I'm a journalist, writer and overall lover of the outdoors.
I fought wildfires, reported on national politics, published magazines, and I can teach you how to find the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye.
On this podcast we're going to have an open conversation about culture, conservation policy, business issues that matter the most to the outdoor community.
Lets get some when the battle for Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR was raging in the 1990s and again in the early 2000s, many people who supported the refuge right to exist said they wanted it preserved even if they never went there. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is under threat again. The Trump administration has plans to drill here and in other parts of Alaska's Arctic.
The return is minimal, perhaps 7 billion barrels of oil for a country that burns through 20 million barrels a day.
The cost, however, is the loss of one of the last truly wild places in America, untouched by us, shaped only by nature, where animals like the great caribou herds continue the patterns they followed for millennia. The battle over preserving the refuge or drilling. It feels never ending.
What I can never understand, however, is the pure spite of those who want to run roughshod over wild places. I've seen it over and over again in the west and the Rockies.
Politicians who want to plow roads, develop, sell or give away what is most beautiful for short term gain or no reason at all.
As Roderick Nash writes in Wilderness and the American Mind, the urge to conquer and dominate wild places is baked into human history, and even more so in American history. Wilderness was once seen as dark and dangerous, a fearful place where humans struggled simply to survive.
But human history has changed dramatically since the 20th century. We now truly hold dominion over the planet and its wild things. The question is, what do we do with this power? Do we simply urbanize everything?
Or can we learn to use our technological dominance responsibly? Can we make room for the tens of millions of species we share the Earth with? Can we allow natural processes to Continue as they have for millennia.
Can we trust the wisdom of the Earth, the land, the wildlife, even our own deep, instinctive knowledge? This is the crucial question of our species. Time is very short.
The wild places, rivers, caribou, the Earth itself, have a right to exist on their own terms. I believe many humans feel the answer is yes. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has a right to exist as it always has, even if I never see it.
Right now, the right of wild places to endure seems far more valuable than 10 billion barrels of oil. The oil will be gone. We will find new ways to power our lives. But wild places, once destroyed, are gone forever.
I don't understand why we can't see that value now. It puzzles me why people with so much money, power and influence don't use their access to build a better world. Instead, they seem obsessed with ego.
Even the robber barons of old created foundations and preserved beautiful places. Today, greed consumes us. Even the moon, once a faraway, untouchable body, faces talk of exploitation.
The last thing I want is to look up and see lights glowing on its surface. We really do need to leave some things alone. I often turn to Walt Whitman for inspiration.
The older I get, the more I understand his wisdom, how words written in the 19th century still speak so clearly to us now. In Leaves of Grass, he wrote, this day before dawn, I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven.
And I said to my spirit, when we become the enfolders of these orbs and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then? And my spirit said, no. We but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.
There are countless utilitarian arguments to preserve wild places for recreation, for hunting, for indigenous traditions, for medicines not yet discovered. But the hardest argument is the one that comes from the heart, the one that defies logic and utility.
The truth is, these places simply have a right to exist. And we need them to exist for our sanity, for our humanity.
As Whitman suggests, when we hold dominion over everything, we will not feel better, we will not be better as a species. We will only have lost the great wonder and bounty of the wild world from which we came.
Yes, this may sound heavy and philosophical, but we need to go there, especially now, when our lives are filled with chaos, the constant pull of technology, and a profound sense of displacement and unhappiness. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has a right to exist.
It must exist not just for us, but for itself, for the land, the rivers, the animals, and the people who have lived with it for generations. In earlier days, we felt compelled to shackle an entire continent under industry and habitation.
In Alaska, we still have the chance to imagine a new future, a planet where humans build thriving, sustainable lives and where nature can still exist as it always has.
In the book Where Mountains Are Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, author Jonathan Waterman, who has spent a lifetime walking, paddling and climbing in Alaska and in the Arctic, comes to the conclusion that there is no bargain to be made in anwar. Drilling will destroy the place forever, he writes.
My beliefs about oil development are not all subjective or enlightened outdoor experiences, nor do I think it's necessary to walk the ground of northeast Alaska to make an informed decision on the controversy. For 21 years I have kept an open mind, listened carefully to both developers and conservationists and read widely.
I would like to believe that objective minded readers can make a wise choice on oil versus wilderness. We cannot have both right now. That possibility is under threat.
We must ensure these places endure on the planet and within the vast reaches of our own imaginations. Alaska, and the Arctic Refuge in particular deserve champions.
I want to thank you for listening to Open Container and ask that you please subscribe to the show by clicking Follow on the podcast app you're using right now. Following the podcast is the best way to ensure that we will continue to crack open the container every single week.
Thank you and let's get back to the show and My guest today has been a tireless champion for Alaska's wild places. Kristin Miller has spent her career in environmental policy and politics with a focus on the lands and waters of Alaska.
She joined the Alaska wilderness league in 2006 and became the league's executive director in January 2023. She also serves as co chair for the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign. So let's open the container with Kristen Miller.
Well, let's launch it off with a sort of big question here. I want to know what is something Americans in the lower 48 don't really know or understand about Alaska?
Kristen Miller
00:08:54.230 - 00:10:07.290
People understand that Alaska is an incredibly beautiful, magical state.
You know, it has Denali, which is the highest peak in North America, all the way down to the towering old growth of the Tongass with 800 year old trees and the only habitat for polar bears in the United States. There's just so much to go through. But a lot of times when I start talking about Alaska, I talk about the scale. The scale is just incredible.
Alaska is the biggest state, but it's the biggest state by far. It's more than twice the size of Texas.
So if you were to take Alaska and superimpose it on the lower 48, it would stretch all the way from the top of Minnesota down to Georgia. But it's also has 61% of that land is public land. So it has more than half of the nation's wilderness. It has 23 of our nation's 63 national parks.
There is so much within Alaska that is public land that belongs to all Americans, and that land still exists in a state of wilderness and a really wild state. Alaska is really a land of opportunity. It is the crown jewel of our public lands. It belongs to all of us.
And there's so much opportunity for protection and so much opportunity for Americans to be involved in that protection.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:10:07.530 - 00:10:30.800
Yeah, I mean, when I think of that Alaska on that scale, I think that it's an opportunity and a window back in time in a way. Right.
It's what North America used to be like when, you know, white settlers first got here, you know, mainly inhabited by indigenous people and resources left in the ground. And we also have this amazing opportunity to not treat it the way we treated the rest of North America.
Kristen Miller
00:10:31.120 - 00:11:11.660
Absolutely. I mean, I think the rest of North America is sort of death by a thousand cuts.
We lost so much wild land over time, and in retrospect, we can see it, but in Alaska, we still have the opportunity to stop it.
There's a statistic out there that during a certain period of time, we lost a football field's worth of wild land in the United States every 30 seconds. And we just don't have as much opportunity to reverse that loss in the lower 48.
In Alaska, we have the opportunity to protect it before that loss happens. This is about foresight and just the values that we want to carry for our nation long into the future.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:11:15.820 - 00:11:21.080
Is there a myth about. About Alaska that you think too many people hold on to or carry around?
Kristen Miller
00:11:21.320 - 00:11:52.620
For me, the myth is that because there is so much land there and because it is untouched at such a scale that it's okay to just go in and develop it, that myth needs to be understood in the context of what we're talking about, which is an opportunity to prevent the loss of land that we're not going to be able to reverse in so many other places.
And so I just don't buy into the idea that because there's so much up there and so much left untouched, therefore it warrants just sort of unfettered development.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:11:53.260 - 00:12:07.380
And obviously, you work for Alaska Wilderness League, and you mentioned wilderness in Alaska, and I believe the vast majority of congressionally protected Wilderness land in the US is in Alaska, and that's one definition of wilderness. But how do you define wilderness?
Kristen Miller
00:12:07.380 - 00:12:47.600
What is it the diversity of assets and the diversity of values and the scale and just how untouched these lands are, how some of these places have seen hardly any human traffic, any development for thousands of years at a scale that you just can't find anywhere else. And it's really quite unbelievable to get in a small plane and fly for two hours over a landscape that you don't see one ounce of the hand of man.
These are areas that are, you know, we'll talk about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's the area the size of South Carolina, completely untouched. And that's just hard to imagine when you're doing a road trip across the lower 48.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:12:47.920 - 00:12:52.640
And it's essential really too, isn't it, for wildlife and even for flora as well. Right.
Kristen Miller
00:12:52.800 - 00:13:42.840
Some of the animals that live up there. We'll talk about the caribou, for instance.
They do the longest land migration in all of North America, so they rely on thousands of miles of land to be untouched. And they're incredibly sensitive animals.
There's stories of them encountering one oil well or one just piece of trash left from development, and they will change their entire migration route to go around it. So they're very sensitive to this development that they see.
And they have been doing a migration for thousands of years in the northern part of Alaska.
That's just one species, and that is a continuous ecosystem that they go through, because they don't see lines on the map and they don't see the line between Alaska and Canada. They don't, you know, we don't provide them the maps. They've just been doing this instinctually for thousands of years.
And there's just hundreds of species that have existed like this in Alaska.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:13:43.640 - 00:13:50.760
Have you been to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? You spent time up there, and have you seen the caribou migrating? Have you seen these great herds?
Kristen Miller
00:13:50.840 - 00:14:08.580
I haven't seen the thousands you can get up there at the right time. They do the migration in June and July. And so you can go and sit among the thousands of caribou that are migrating through.
I have seen caribou in the, in the Arctic refuge, but I haven't gotten to see it and see the, like, migration of thousands. So that's sort of an aspirational goal for me someday for me, too.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:14:08.580 - 00:14:21.940
It's something I'd love to do.
And I think primarily because, I mean, as you said, like, we don't have many Places left where wildlife are still the primary users of the land and able to move in these great masses and great migrations.
Kristen Miller
00:14:22.180 - 00:14:29.140
Yep. And they don't even know who humans are. Right. We're in their space, and that is the respect that we have to show them.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:14:32.660 - 00:14:40.880
So tell me a little bit about, you know, your work. Tell me about the Alaska Wilderness League, kind of how it came about. What's your focus? Who are your constituents?
Kristen Miller
00:14:41.200 - 00:16:39.470
We're the only national organization that works full time to protect public lands in Alaska. We were founded in 1993 largely around the fight to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
So that's how long that's been going on and even longer.
You know, our sort of founding board members understood that there were these incredible, epic landscapes in Alaska that many people had already been working decades to protect.
And decisions are being made about them year after year after year in Washington, D.C. and so we set up shop and headquarters in Washington, D.C. because so many of the decisions that are made that impact Alaska are made here. We work on big landscapes. We focused a lot on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the Western Arctic in the north part of Alaska.
We work on the Tongass National Forest, worked on the Arctic Ocean, and then many, many landscapes in between. And what we do is we bring this national voice to the protection of these lands. People all across the country really care about the environment.
They care about our nation's public lands, and they really hold a special place in their heart for Alaska. I think a lot of people understand how unique and valuable it is to have what we have in Alaska.
And a lot of people like to use their voice to stand up to it. And so we work with other organizations. We work with different constituencies like hunters and anglers, veterans, religious entities.
And we do all of this work side by side with our indigenous partners. We work very closely with the Gwich' in steering committee.
The Gwich' in people live on the land around the migration route that we were just talking about of the porcupine caribou herd and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we have worked with them side by side to fight against oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge since we were founded.
So we bring all of these people together to fight these big, epic fights against mostly industrial interests to just keep these lands pristine and protected.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:16:39.630 - 00:16:55.710
I've heard it said before.
There have been polls put out there, and maybe you have more detail on this than I do right now, but that most Americans are happy to see places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge preserved, even if they never Go there. They just want it to exist somewhere.
Kristen Miller
00:16:55.790 - 00:17:26.810
Absolutely. And I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. My organization has been doing this for a long time. So we obviously pull often year after year.
And always, if you tell people about the place, you tell them that there is a place called the Arctic national wildlife refuge, this 90 million acre wilderness quality land in Alaska that hosts these caribou herds and polar bears and 200 species of birds. You just tell the story of the place, you tell the story of the Gwich', in, and a majority of the people easily want to see it protected.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:17:27.340 - 00:17:49.420
We've been talking a little bit about it.
But, you know, the really essential thing I believe in Alaska, too, is that Indigenous people, you know, the Wilderness act, if it can be criticized, it's the idea that it assumes that no one lived in these lands, but a lot of these lands have been used, so much so that working with an indigenous people. And it seems that the idea of wilderness is connected to the rights of Indigenous people as well.
Kristen Miller
00:17:49.500 - 00:19:16.990
In Alaska it is, but it's incredibly complicated, too. Similar to what you're talking about in the lower 48.
When Alaska became a state, they had to settle Indigenous rights the same as they did in the lower 48. But it happened later than a lot of what had happened over the years in the lower 48.
And so the reservation system had been tried and known to have failed by the time Alaska became a state. And they were going about settling rights for the indigenous people that had lived there for thousands of years.
And so what ended up happening is they created a corporate system to settle rights with the indigenous people. So they set up 12 regional corporations and over 200 village corporations as the means of giving the rights to indigenous people to their land.
But what it set up was a fiduciary system for these lands.
So these corporations run like any corporation that anybody knows and has a fiduciary duty to stockholders and a fiduciary duty to their participants. And that fiduciary duty often comes a direct conflict with the subsistence and cultural history of these tribes.
If you're trying to raise money off of the resources of a land that goes directly against maintaining the cultural survival of a tribe that has been subsisting and living on the animals that live there and the plants and the permafrost and, you know, the ecosystem for thousands of years. It is a different system in Alaska, but it comes with its own set of complications.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:19:17.970 - 00:19:21.650
How involved are Indigenous people with Alaska Wilderness League?
Kristen Miller
00:19:21.730 - 00:20:43.270
Well, we work very closely with Indigenous partners who are very concerned about things like oil and gas development and what it means for their cultural resources. The Gwich' in Steering Committee is an entity. The Gwich' in are indigenous people that live in and around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
They have lived there for thousands of years. Their villages exist on the migration route of the porcupine caribou herd.
The Gwichin people came together in 1988 as a nation and decided that they wanted to speak in one voice against oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and they created the Gwich' in Steering Committee. My organization was founded in 1993, and we've been working side by side with the Gwich's steering committee ever since we were founded.
They teach us how important this land is for their culture. They tell stories about the Gwich' in people. Their origin story is that the Gwich' in people and the caribou share a heart.
And so they've taught us their culture. They've taught us their connection to land. I mean, I've learned and learned and learned.
I never don't learn when I have the opportunity to go to a village or meet with our partners. Our job is to figure out Washington, D.C. and how we figure out the intricacies of Washington, D.C. what we can do to protect from here.
And so that's a really good relationship of, you know, how we come together with our different places that we come to the issue and find a way to fight together.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:20:43.830 - 00:20:54.870
Are there some, you know, places we don't talk enough about in in Alaska? You know, smaller spots or lesser known spots that you work in or you've gotten to know that you'd like to share with us.
Kristen Miller
00:20:55.030 - 00:20:57.510
I mean, it's a hard one. That's such a big state.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:20:57.990 - 00:20:58.910
Yeah, there's.
Kristen Miller
00:20:58.910 - 00:22:29.290
There's. When you're in the Arctic, you're in almost a different world.
And when you go all the way down to the Tongass with these towering trees and misty fjords and, you know, I mean, some of the public lands in Alaska, like the Chugach National Forest, for instance, which is our nation's second largest forest only to the Tongass, which is also in Alaska. The Chugach is just the backyard for people in Anchorage. So that's how close these public lands are to the people.
And that's what a lot of Alaskans that I know, they spend their weekends going to places like the Chugach National Forest and recreating and skiing and doing all the things.
It is a place that is probably lesser Recognized it is a huge priority for the Alaska Wilderness League is the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska, which has a terrible name, and we refer to it as the Western Arctic, because there's nothing really different about the western part of the Arctic region, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, insofar as ecological significance. It's just a difference in the way the land was managed by our nation over time.
That land was set aside originally during World War II as a reserve for petroleum, but really wasn't used for its petroleum for the first 80 years that it existed. Because of that, it still remains almost completely untouched. It's 23 million acres the size of Indiana.
Again, almost completely untouched by the hand of man. And so don't let a name distract you. This is an incredible piece of public land.
It's BLM land, and it's just another example of what we have the opportunity to protect in Alaska.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:22:32.730 - 00:22:40.340
And I think all this Arctic land, it's so fragile as well, right. Once you put roads on it, once you drill it, it's really heavily damaged.
Kristen Miller
00:22:41.300 - 00:23:38.510
It is.
And ironically, it's sort of in a feedback loop as we experience climate change more and more dramatically, because so much of the land up there is permafrost, which means it is partially frozen land. And the Arctic is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the world.
That land is melting, basically, and it's releasing methane, which also causes a feedback loop. But it also makes the infrastructure there very unstable, and the conditions doing any kind of activity that very unstable.
You know, for the indigenous people, it means they've seen these changes over time, and they can tell these stories much better than any of us. But for thousands of years, they stored their food in the winter in the permafrost as just natural freezers, and they're not able to do that anymore.
And they're seeing incredibly drastic changes in the wildlife, you know, in many cases, probably due to changing climate indicators. And all of this is a region that they want to develop more for oil and gas development. So it's a little bit of an ironic feedback loop.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:23:41.710 - 00:24:14.330
Speaking of development, we were all celebrating getting public land sales out of the budget reconciliation bill, otherwise known as the Big Beautiful Bill. But there was a lot in that bill that still is really going to be hard on Alaska.
And I know that Alaska Wilderness League put out statements immediately, you know, when Trump was elected, did and took office, about basically a war being waged on Alaska's public lands and conserving them. Can you tell us a little bit about the severity of that?
Kristen Miller
00:24:14.570 - 00:25:44.210
Obviously, There's a lot under attack in this administration, but Alaska has a particularly large target on it on day one, when a number of executive orders went out the door calling for unfettered development of pretty much every resource. The Arctic Refuge has been in budget reconciliation since 1995. This has been a reality for the Arctic refuge since the 90s.
They've been trying to use this bill to open it.
And it just kind of goes to show how high profile and how intense this fight has been for so many years, and for all of that time, all the way up until 2017.
So 1995, there was a budget reconciliation bill, and what ultimately happened there was President Clinton vetoed it, and he had a whole list of reasons, one of which was the language to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It was put in again in 2005, and that time there were 15 and more moderate Republicans in the House who held a press conference and said that they would not vote for the bill if the Arctic Refuge provision was in there, which is a story that I like to tell because this has long been a bipartisan issue. And so this has been saved by Democrats and Republicans standing up for it.
In 2017, during Trump's first term, it again was one of the only sort of non tax issues that was put into his tax bill, which was also a budget reconciliation bill. And that's when it was ultimately opened technically and legally for development. It hadn't been opened for development before that.
And so now the fight is to keep the oil rigs off the coastal plain.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:25:47.490 - 00:25:57.350
I mean, let's talk about Anwar, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When was it created and why is it special and different than other public lands?
Kristen Miller
00:25:57.670 - 00:29:10.990
Since the early 1900s, early conservationists saw this particular part of the Arctic as an incredibly biodiverse and amazing area that warranted protection. You know, you can look at a map, but it's 19.6 million acres in the northeast corner of Alaska.
And it has the Brooks Range, which is this incredible towering mountain range that cuts through it. And then above the Brooks Range, it kind of slights the slopes down and gets flat. And that area is called the Coastal Plain.
And this Coastal Plain area also has the geology for oil. So in the 60s, they discovered oil in Northern Alaska, west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And that became a development called Prudhoe Bay.
And they started developing up there and so obviously wanted to be able to access as much of the oil potential as possible.
It protected 100 million acres in Alaska, but they were already in this debate about whether they should be able to access the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil.
And because that debate was already so intense at that point that when they passed Anelka, they protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wildlife refuge, they protected part of it as wilderness.
But they took just that coastal plain area and put it in limbo by just having a provision in the law that said this shall not be open for development, but for an act of Congress, which sounds like a small thing, but that led to basically decades of attempts by Congress to override that one provision of law and open the Arctic National Wildlife up for development.
Obviously, that coastal plain they believe has a lot of potential for oil, but it also ironically, provides this incredible ecology to sustain incredible biodiversity. So there's the porcupine caribou herd that we talked about.
They actually end their migration if you, if it has a beginning and an end, because they give birth to the, their calves on the coastal plain every year. It has 200 species of birds. It has polar bears, brown bears. The list of species is just incredible.
So it is a beautiful, amazing landscape that also happens to have oil.
This was all identified when Alaska was originally, you know, going through all the various debates about statehood and protecting aboriginal rights and then this original conservation law. And so that set up this debate that has been going on ever since. We are a net exporting nation. We are producing more oil than we have in history.
I mean, what's really unfortunate about that is, yeah, we don't need the oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but we're in a political situation right now where we are losing gain on so much of the proactive work we needed to do to get our nation off of oil for the sake of climate change. So much of what happened in that big beautiful bill was turning backwards on renewable energy.
And the things that are going to make us innovative nation in the future and a sustainable nation in the future, we are going after policies of the distant past and it's really going to hurt us as a nation. And so all of this fits together. We absolutely have the means and the reason to protect places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
And we have to couple that with an energy policy that really prioritizes sustainability and getting off of oil over time.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:29:12.250 - 00:29:22.010
If the Arctic National Wildlife is developed and drilled, what do we lose? How much damage does that cause long term? Is it a short term thing or is it long term damage?
Kristen Miller
00:29:22.490 - 00:29:45.350
I will relay what I hear from my indigenous partners. They believe that it will be the end to their cultural way of life, the porcupine caribou herd impacting their birthing rates.
A small amount can impact their entire future. If the caribou go away, the caribou people go away.
And so it really could end an entire culture's way of life by allowing development on the coastal plain.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:29:48.870 - 00:30:10.160
I believe you've said that there's really four fronts that the Alaska Wilderness League is fighting on right now. And Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, obviously is a big one, and the one that's been going on for a long time.
Two of the other ones are the Western Arctic, which you mentioned, is the petroleum reserve, and the Arctic Ocean itself. Could you tell us a little bit about those fights and battles and threats as well?
Kristen Miller
00:30:10.400 - 00:33:05.560
The Arctic Ocean is an interesting story. We worked a lot on it. In the mid-2000s, there was a lot of work to stop pretty significant effort to open it for oil and gas development.
We went after Shell, which was the company that was the one that wanted to drill, and it sort of created this movement. And there are people all across the country getting engaged in the fight. And then this term of our kayaktivists came into play.
And so people would get in their kayaks and hold up Shell nose signs.
So it was this really inspiring campaign because it just went to show how many people there are across the country that do care about these places that are so far away from where they live. Ultimately, what happened is we were able to protect the Arctic Ocean with withdrawal by President Obama.
He withdrew 125 million acres of the Arctic Ocean from oil and gas development that is under threat.
I think there is a legal challenge because when President Trump came in, he put the Arctic Ocean into the five year plan and started acting as if that withdrawal didn't exist. And so that is going to be a legal fight that we see going forward in the National Petroleum Reserve. It's got a more checkered history.
It has been open for development, although despite the fact that it was originally set aside in 1923, the development story for the western Arctic is much more recent, really, in the last 10 and 20 years. And there has been some development that has crossed over into the western Arctic, but for the most part it is predominantly undeveloped.
Under the Biden administration, we were working closely with them because the reality is the oil potential under these places, if it were unleashed, we're not talking about oil that's going to go online tomorrow, we're talking about oil that's going to go online not for 10 years, and it's going to be in our system for 50 years plus.
So we are tying ourselves to these energy policies of the past by going into these untouched places and committing to these oil programs to draw billions of barrels of oil out of the ground at a time that we absolutely need to be getting off of oil. And so we were trying to look to a future in which the main focus of the Western Arctic was protection.
Unfortunately, at the same time, there was a major oil and gas project that was given approval called the Willow Project. And, you know, I mean, I think it. It became a little another point in history where millions of people rose up and raised their voice.
You know, upwards of 6 million people speaking out against the Willow Project being approved. There are so many people that care about this issue, but there's so much pressure from industry to develop these places.
And so we just got to keep using our voices, because these are the wrong decisions for our nation's future. The Trump administration, as part of their Day one executive order, made clear that they're going to go after the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska.
They've already set a process to overturn both a new right protective regulation that the Biden administration had put forth and then also a management plan under the Biden administration.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:33:05.720 - 00:33:30.440
So something you brought up there really hit me powerfully. And it's the idea that this isn't just something we're not fulfilling a need now that's going to make gas prices go down or something like that.
It's really keeping us on this system of oil, which causes climate change, war, all these problems. Right. It's keeping on us for 50 years, as you said. I mean, that's really going disturbingly backwards.
Kristen Miller
00:33:31.160 - 00:33:50.020
Yeah, it's just doubling down on policies of the past that we concede the failure of, and we're doing too little on the policies of the future, which is finding different energy sources, finding ways to get off of this type of energy altogether. We need to be proactive on all fronts in order to be able to solve these problems.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:33:50.810 - 00:34:14.170
So that's three of the forefronts, I think you said you're fighting on.
And then the fourth is the one that I think is the most critical right now, perhaps, which is the Tongass National Forest, which is really threatened not by the big beautiful bill as much as it is by the recension of the roadless rule. Tell us a bit about that. And one more battle that you have to fight, one more big, ugly battle.
Kristen Miller
00:34:14.490 - 00:35:53.110
So the Tongass is amazing. It's our nation's largest forest. It's a temperate rainforest, 17 million acres. I mean, these are huge pieces of Land.
The Tongass is a little different in that it has communities in it.
And so not only is it this incredible rainforest with fjords and these old growth trees, some of which are 800 years old, and streams that are filled with salmon, and also a deep cultural history and indigenous people that have lived on these lands for thousands of years. But there's also communities within the Tongass, a lot of them based around fishing, indigenous communities.
And so the Tongass sustains an incredibly important fishing and tourism industry. And so all of these extractive industries go into direct conflict with the sustainable industries that exist in the Tongass.
The roadless rule is something that would prevent new roads from being built in any areas of the Tongass that currently don't have roads. A lot of these policies are a game of ping pong.
And so we've gone back and forth between administrations trying to remove the roadless rule altogether, sometimes trying to remove the roadless rule just from the Tongass. The Biden administration put the roadless rule in place as a protective measure for the Tongass National Forest.
We have legislation called the Roadless Area Conservation act that we were trying to move to make those protections legislated. Now the Trump administration is coming in and removing all of those protections again.
So a lot of these policies that are really pushing for industrial development don't even make economic sense. So there's not a really good reason for any of this to be happening, except for this just myopic focus on more development.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:35:56.950 - 00:36:16.660
As someone who's worked in environmental causes and wilderness for a long time, it often seems to be the case that some of these politicians don't even really care about the economic value of these policies. It's almost spite. They just want to put roads in so it can be, I don't know, eradicated, erased from. Erased from the idea of being wild.
Why would anyone want to do that?
Kristen Miller
00:36:17.050 - 00:38:38.490
It's tough for the Arctic Refuge. It's a little bit like Alaska is so iconic. But we say this for the Arctic Refuge. Maybe it can be said for a lot of these fights. There's just this.
I think there's a belief that not the Arctic Refuge would solve anything real for our energy policy. It's that if they can win that battle and get in there, they can win a battle to get in anywhere. It's crossing that threshold of nothing is sacred.
And that's probably the scariest part of this. We run these campaigns and we get people involved. For the Tongass, this is the place where cruise ships go.
A lot of people connect to Alaska by going on the cruise ships. And so they are connected to the Dongass National Forest. They've been there. They might not know it.
And so we got to get the story out there, you know, both to connect people that have been there, but also to connect people that haven't been there. Talking about the places and just the values, usually, it really inspires them, you know, most people, and that's what gets people involved.
Just as importantly, we have a lot of members that have never been to Alaska. So we tell the stories, we show the pictures, the connection of the salmon to the trees, to the indigenous people.
The more we tell the story, the more people connect. I've been doing this work a long time, as you say, you know, and it. It's.
Right now is a difficult time, maybe one of the most difficult times in our history. And it is easy to lose hope, but it also seen this sort of ebb and flow before. And what I've seen happen is people stand up.
It's our job to tell you what to do, to stand up. It's our job to find ways to get people involved. But when people do get involved, things change.
And I don't believe that this last election changed anything about the way people feel about our public lands. I've been working on these issues for a long time. A majority of people like the idea of protecting these places.
I don't think that's changed, you know, with the change of. With the way things have changed between the last two elections, it's harder to get the message out there. But we. We're just going to keep doing it.
We're going to keep telling people to use their voice to get engaged. We use litigation, we use communications, we use direct advocacy, we use lobbying.
We have a lot of tools in the toolbox, but all of those tools involve people getting involved. And I believe if everybody keeps standing up for these values that they believe in, ultimately we're going to have a good outcome.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:38:42.010 - 00:38:45.130
How did you get involved? How did you get on this difficult path?
Kristen Miller
00:38:45.290 - 00:39:13.330
My background is law, but before I went to law school, I had actually gone up to Alaska and lived there for a summer. So I had a connection to Alaska. I went to law school, worked on the Hill, but always knew that I wanted to do environmental work.
And the first work that I did was working on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coming off of the Hill, and have been doing it ever since. So for me, you know, it's sort of the dream because I travel to Alaska for work, and I love it. I love Every single trip I take.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:39:13.330 - 00:39:33.180
To Alaska, it's hard work to do. Right. Because as a conservationist, as an environmentalist, it seems you're always losing. Right. There's always some loss that's going to happen.
You're always being slimed, you're always being told you're horrible. You know, while you're simply advocating, as a friend of mine once said, you're just advocating for places and creatures that have no voice.
Kristen Miller
00:39:33.260 - 00:39:33.700
Yeah.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:39:33.700 - 00:39:41.740
How do you keep going in a career in a calling where you're facing that kind of opposition every single day?
Kristen Miller
00:39:41.899 - 00:41:32.310
The longer I'm in the fight, it's weird. It gives me more perspective. And our fights are unique in that they are these epic, long battles.
I mean, we're talking decades of fighting and you would think that would be more discouraging, but instead you see, you see the winds too. And so we see ourselves make progress. And yes, we have to take steps backwards, but we can see our progress towards victory for the Arctic Refuge.
We're more than 30 years into this fight and there's been no industrial activity that has touched the coastal plain. So that is an incredible place to be.
After all of these years of fightings and after a lot of things that have felt like losses, that's an incredibly important place to be in the Tongass National Forest.
You know, I mean, after years of really pushing back and fighting for protections, we have seen a decrease in the pressure on industrial scale, old growth logging. It's sort of like all of these fights over time have led to the inevitable conclusion that that's not a sustainable industry for southeast Alaska.
And you know, so we have to make sure that that sticks. But there is an alleviated pressure from these big old growth sales in the Tongass from the many years of fighting this.
And then also I'm an outsider to these places.
So going to place and talking with the indigenous people and what they have withstood and how they maintain their connection to land and their connection to way of life, and they maintain a way forward after everything that they have seen change in their culture and what are their lands, that I always keep them in the back of my mind and everything that I do and make sure that I honor this work for them.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:41:32.710 - 00:41:53.940
Another interesting thing I think that you brought up and is really important when thinking about conservation and I think we need to talk about more going forward is how it's not really political. Right. I think we saw that again with rising up against public land sales.
Democrats, Republicans, both care about these places, care about wild places. It shouldn't be a polarizing issue.
Kristen Miller
00:41:54.260 - 00:42:49.960
Yeah. For the American people, it isn't polarizing.
There are certain parts of the political spectrum that will sometimes take these issues and make them political.
You know, we've seen all kinds of iterations of that over time, but I don't believe that that is where the American people are, you know, and a lot of our work is just getting people involved and talking to them.
And, you know, I mean, there might be a belief that our nation needs a certain amount of oil and gas development, but once you dig in, there's also an equivalent desire for protection. And none of this is easy. You know, a lot of the solutions that we have to pursue are complicated.
But if you can have a dialogue and if you can, again, tell the story, people really believe that they want to see a path forward in which we, you know, have the energy policy we need, but also have the places, these places for our future generations.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:42:50.280 - 00:43:13.160
Yeah, and I know you're kind of dug in in the fight, right? You're very much on the side of, you know, you've got to be dug in, you've got to fight. You really can't compromise much. How can we depolarize?
How can we get people to look at conservation? Look at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Arctic Ocean, Tongass. Look at these places.
Not through a political lens, not through this dialogue that's polarizing.
Kristen Miller
00:43:13.400 - 00:44:14.220
There's a lot of statistics around this. There is how much oil is there, there is how much we're exporting.
You can go and have an intellectual debate about any of this, but really it's just about kind of love of land and love of wildlife and love of our cultural history.
When you get down to that base, if you can keep the conversation there, you know, maybe it's our job to figure out the politics of it, but at its very base, we're just talking about people that love the outdoors and they love their mental stability. And it helps, you know, with so much in our lives just to go into the outdoors and have that opportunity.
There's so many people that believe that that's where the conversation should stay. The politics of it, you know, I, I, that's not really what I want to bring into this.
For, you know, the average person that's, this isn't their job, but what they need to understand is if they care about these places, they just use their voice, and we're going to do everything they can to facilitate that into a win.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:44:17.420 - 00:44:32.190
And we're getting towards the end of the show now, so do you think you could let listeners know how they can work to protect Alaska and wild places and indigenous ways of life and stop climate change? How can they learn more about the work you do and get involved?
Kristen Miller
00:44:32.350 - 00:45:13.290
Yeah, I mean, we have a website, alaskawild.org if you go into our website, you can learn about the issues, but then you have the opportunity to sign up for emails. You know, we feel like our job is to constantly feed you the opportunities to weigh in.
Sometimes it's in a formal public process, a formal public comment period around an administrative process. Sometimes it's to go to an event locally and hold up a sign. Sometimes it's a trip to Washington, D.C. to go talk directly to your decision makers.
And our job is to sort of figure out those opportunities at every moment and constantly present them to you. All of this work is about us bringing people together around it. So I would love the opportunity to talk to anybody more about getting involved.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:45:14.170 - 00:45:23.210
Well, we have our final question for you. It's a question we ask everyone at the end of this podcast, and it is simply, what gives you hope?
Kristen Miller
00:45:25.540 - 00:45:58.230
Talking to people, talking to people gives me hope. There are so many people that care about this country. There's so many people that care about the things that we care about.
There's so many people that want to see better for this world.
Politics is politics, and sometimes you have to endorse things that don't feel right or don't directly correlate with, you know, the way that you think.
But especially for issues like ours, there's so much common ground and just continuing to facilitate people finding that common ground just gets me through day after day.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:45:58.390 - 00:46:13.590
And I really want to thank you for the work you're doing and being there and the work that Alaska Wilderness League is doing and everyone who supports it. Thanks again for being on the show. Really great to meet you.
I hope that the next time I see you, it is in person and we're watching thousands of caribou migrating.
Kristen Miller
00:46:13.590 - 00:46:18.550
Absolutely. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really, really appreciate it.
Doug Schnitzspahn
00:46:20.680 - 00:46:58.930
Thanks for imbibing Open Container, a production of Rock Fight, llc.
Please take a second to follow our show on whatever podcast app you're listening to us on and send your emails and feedback to myrockfightmail.com if you want to learn more about Anwar and the Alaskan wilderness, I suggest you pick up one of Jonathan Waterman's outstanding books of adventure, insight and history in the Shadow of Denali Antarctic Crossing. But most of all, read where the Mountain Is Are Nameless Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Our producers today were David Carsad and Colin True. Art direction provided by Sarah Gintzert. I'm Doug Schnitzbahn. Get some. Thanks for listening.
