A visit to the pristine Western Arctic, which faces gas and oil drilling

Lynda Mapes, the former Seattle Times environment reporter, made a trip recently to the Western Arctic, a vast region in the northernmost part of North America. It’s an area that the Trump administration plans to open for oil and gas drilling. Mapes talked to KUOW’s Kim Malcolm about what she experienced on that trip.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: I'm excited to hear about where you went and why.

Lynda Mapes: So, this is the Western Arctic. We're talking about a place that very few Americans have even heard of. They've maybe heard of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That's not where I went. I went to the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which was designated back in the 1930s by President Harding, but has remained largely untouched ever since. We're talking about 23 million acres of pristine public land, one of the wildest places in the world, the birthplace of millions of birds.

It may seem far away, but we are actually all intimately connected to this place by these birds. We are the world's stewards of this place. This is in America. It's in America's Arctic. This is in Alaska, and it is in many ways, one of the very finest, biggest, last, best places in our country — 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Had you ever been there before?

No, I had not, and I wanted to go there now, because the Trump administration has, with an executive order, proposed maximum extraction of oil and gas for the United States, as he puts it, total energy dominance. What that means in the Western Arctic, and also in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is a call for oil companies to lease these areas, all public land, all belongs to us, for oil and gas extraction. In the Western Arctic, this would be the first time, other than a few spots far over in the southeastern corner, that it's ever been developed.

This place, Kim, is still just as it's always been for thousands of years, completely untrammeled, untouched, other than by bird feet, caribou hooves, the tracks of grizzly bear, wolverine, wolf, polar bear. It's a remarkable place, and I wanted to see it with all this in the news, with all the changes possibly coming. I wanted to really write something and see for myself what's at stake here.

You weren't traveling alone. You had a colleague, Gerrit Vyn, who was making audio recordings there for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Lynda, tell us about the red-throated loons.

To me, the sound of that voice, that plangent, sad, incredibly wild voice, it just seemed to encapsulate everything about this place so much on the cusp. It's a place of great power and beauty and strength, but also incredibly fragile. Everything here, all these cycles of life, of migration, of birth and rebirth, all of that is on such a possible bubble right now.

And so, when I heard those loons, and I sat with them and I watched them on their pond, these two parents and these two fluffy little chicks, I was so struck by both their strength and their beauty, to get all the way there, and how far they're going to go when they when they leave their breeding area in the Western Arctic. They're going to fly all the way to the coast of China. They do that. And yet they're so fragile, and the whole place is so fragile. Would they ever be there again? Would any of this still be there next year? It's a question.

I can hear the wonder in your voice, contemplating the scope of everything that you saw and experienced. I do recommend listeners go take a look at the photos and the videos in your piece. But before I let you go, just a last question for you, why does this place matter?

So many reasons, Kim. One, climate protection. We're the last generation that can take meaningful steps to protect the climate before it's too late. What happens in the Arctic will affect the entire planet. We're also the stewards of the world's bird life. The Western Arctic is the most important bird nesting habitat in the entire Alaskan Arctic, because of its wetlands. This is where millions of birds from all over the US and nearly every continent are from, and the place to which they must return to raise the next generation.

I think the thing that really struck me was flying out there over the Brooks Range in a little tiny bush plane. It can't go very fast or very high. So, the beauty of that, for someone like me is watching the landscape unspool, mile after mile as we fly ever north and north and north. And you look down, Kim, and as far as you can see in any direction for two and a half hours, you don't see a building, you don't see a road, you don't see a telephone pole, you don't see wires, you don't see anything but the ancient tracks of caribou. You know, they reuse the same paths over and over and over again, over these thousands of years, and so you see the tracery of their paths in the tundra. I saw running grizzly bears and the golden pelage of their fur rippling over their shoulders.

In other words, what I saw was wild nature, completely uninterrupted by us telling its long evolutionary story for thousands of years. I saw rivers running to the sea from mountains in their perfect natural shape, curved and just free, no dams, no dikes, all the things that we're trying to fix down here in the lower 48, that we've already lost, that we're trying to patch up and make better and make right, it's all still perfect up there. And if there's anything that's true about where we are right now in this stage of our coexistence in the natural world, is it's time to stop breaking things.

I think about these 23 million acres of perfect, pristine public land, and how essential it is to care for America's Arctic. It will never be again if we lose it. And it is an absolutely unique and special place. The idea of opening this place to ever more drilling for oil and gas and burning ever more fossil fuel, the Arctic is already changing faster than any place else on earth because of climate change.

And I think for Americans, even if you never go there, and you don't even want to go there, there's something special about just knowing this still exists, this last vast wild place, never ruined, never wrecked. That's something special in the American imagination, that we have these big wild places. And to a lot of people, Alaska has always meant that, and the Arctic especially means that. It's a part of the American character, and a gift to be home to this last wild place. It answers only to the seasons, the migrations of animals, to the timeless rhythms of nature and most of all, our need for wonder.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.