VOICES FOR A NATIONAL PLEISTOCENE RESERVE

Overlooking the Etivlik River and the Vast Tundra of the National Pleistocene Reserve

Voices for a National Pleistocene Reserve

John Davis and John Meikle

West of the fabled Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a land equally wild, equally spectacular and even grander in scale, yet totally unprotected. If a name can condemn, the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska is in grave jeopardy.

The “National Petroleum Reserve” of Alaska, while born under a bad sign, deserves the fullest conservation protections that we can provide. We seek fellow conservation voices to call for a National Pleistocene Reserve to replace the “National Petroleum Reserve” of Alaska (NPRA) and consolidation with Gates of the Arctic Park and Arctic Refuge and complementary holdings into a vast Arctic Wilderness Park.

Arctic Alaska is the closest semblance in the world to an intact Pleistocene landscape. Human settlements are very small, few, and far between. A full range of native species extant when Europeans began arriving still find ample habitat here; and even the Pleistocene mega-fauna, lost to the spears of early human hunters, still make their presence felt with bones and tusks periodically breaking through river banks and eskers. Moreover the sheer remoteness and silence of the land – a quiet oft punctuated by the howling or honking or singing of wind, wolves, geese, or loons – are almost unparalleled on Earth today. Even counting the Prudhoe Bay area, already largely lost to oil and gas exploitation, the number of year-round human inhabitants in Alaska north of the Arctic Circle is only in the thousands, in an area larger than the state of California. One can look out from atop any of the thousands of peaks in the area across hundreds of square miles and be reasonably confident that no other people are in the vista. The immensely varied yet open terrain and geology, strata and fossils, bespeak eons and eras and evolution as few other landscapes can do. Hiking or paddling through this vast wilderness, one feels one has gone back to the Pleistocene.

Two of us Rewilding explorers (one a veteran Alaskan conservationist, one a Wild Earth co-founder) recently traversed the “NPRA” to see what our nation was preparing to lease for oil and gas drilling and coal mining. What we saw – the splendors of geography and geology, the abundance and diversity of wildlife, the rich archaeological evidence, the colors, the skies, the magnitude and wildness – left us bedazzled, befuddled, and finally benumbed at the compromise our country is preparing to make, yet again, for the sake of cheap fossil fuels. Alaska’s Western Arctic is one of Earth’s few great remaining intact landscapes; and to condemn it to drilling and mining would truly constitute a national sin and a global defeat.

We began our 300 mile pack-raft journey in the Gates of the Arctic National Park, then bushwhacked, hiked, pushed, and paddled north and west into the “NPRA”. As expected Gates of Arctic Park was sublime throughout, with grand vistas and large mammals ever in sight. Not so expected, the “NPRA” exceeded the Gates for grandeur, abundance, and diversity of life and landscapes.

During our trek we were deeply struck by the extent of melting permafrost that we encountered. Entire hillsides were slumping into the rivers, exposing ice cliffs melting rapidly under the midnight sun. Even more troubling, these areas often smelled like a barnyard from the stench of methane escaping from the thawing ground.

Late in life, David Brower often remarked that his biggest regret was giving up Glen Canyon to save the Grand Canyon. He deeply regretted collectively compromising away a wild canyon he and colleagues did not know for the grand one they did know. In effect, we are making the same sort of fatal compromise in Alaska’s Arctic, saving the known treasure, Arctic Refuge, in exchange for silently accepting the sacrifice of the unknown treasure, the Western Arctic reserve.

The case for vast contiguous wilderness reserves is even stronger in the Arctic than in milder climes. Northern Alaska still has viable populations of the large predators and ungulates found here when Euro-Americans arrived several hundred years ago. In sparse tundra ecosystems, these wide-ranging species, some of them migratory, all of them integral to ecosystem health, require huge intact areas to meet their needs for food, cover, and reproduction.

Moreover, the proposed National Pleistocene Reserve includes one of the most extraordinary, patterned land- and water-scapes on earth. The central part of this reserve and much of northern-most Alaska is a complex water-board of wet tundra regularly punctuated by round and oval ponds and lakes, creating some of North America’s best breeding and nesting habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds.

Critics will predictably belittle such proposals for new reserves millions of acres in size as naïve and unrealistic. How pragmatic is it really, though, to accelerate the melting of permafrost by extracting more fossil fuels? No thinking person could look at those river banks, frozen in place for millennia, now thawing and sloughing into the Noatak and the Nigu and the Colville and probably most other Arctic rivers, and not question the wisdom of our current trajectory.

Conservationists have long stood together to oppose drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil, Where we do not yet speak with one voice is on drilling in other wildlands, particularly in the Arctic and off-shore Alaska. With the science of climate change becoming starkly clear, we should stand united and say “No new drilling or mining of wild lands or waters, not one more spoiled acre!” Exploiting the “NPRA” for oil and gas and coal would doubly doom the area. First, the extraction itself wrecks wildlife habitat. Second, the burning of fossil fuels warms the climate and thus melts permafrost, foundation of Arctic communities. Where we found permafrost already thawing, the earth was literally melting into the rivers; pingos were collapsing before our eyes.

Why, in the end, worry so much about an ecoregion, Western Arctic Tundra, which already enjoys a higher proportion of protection than almost any other in North America. In simplistic terms, for five reasons: climate, ecology, geology, history, and morality. To enfold these into the sort of pithy statement Americans seem to want these days, by redesignating the “NPRA” as a National Pleistocene Reserve and protecting it as National Park Wilderness or the equivalent, we’ve the patriotic opportunity to help stabilize global climate, preserve a fully functioning ecosystem with all its native inhabitants, study a geological wonderland, protect vital parts of our country’s natural and cultural heritage, and finally – after a long lapse of disastrous wasting – reclaim the moral high ground. For the sake of Life on Earth, particularly its glorious manifestations in tundra, let us as a people and a nation find the moral strength to leave it in the ground and let the land be wild.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Learn about the largest unit in the public land domain, the “National Petroleum Reserve” of Alaska. Write letters to your elected representatives and to local, regional and national newspapers, advocating protection for this Western Arctic landscape. Support the formation of a research and education team -- of ecologists, biologists, geologists, archaeologists, native elders, and writers and other artists – to do a deeper values assessment of the whole proposed National Pleistocene Reserve and report back to the American people on the condition of this public land and threats thereto…. Stand by your land.

--January 2008

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