Home of Polar Bear and Caribou May Be Last Chance for Major Petroleum Discovery : Oil, Wilderness Battle Rages Over Alaskan Arctic Refuge

Wilderness guide Roger Rom and oil executive Harold Heinze agree on this much: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge represents a last hope.

The agreement ends there.

From where Rom sits--at the moment, on a lichen-covered rock in the heart of the refuge--this cold and lonely corner of Alaska has value as the nation’s northernmost tract of wilderness. It is a home for polar bears, waterfowl and 180,000 caribou, a place where visitors can soak up the undiluted essence of nature.

From where Heinze sits--600 miles to the south in an office atop the tallest building in Anchorage--the beauty of the refuge lies beneath the surface. Its coastal plain may hold the continent’s best and last chance for a major oil discovery.

For years, environmentalists like Rom have wanted Congress to make the refuge’s Delaware-size coastal plain an official wilderness area, closed to roads, settlement and oil exploration. Heinze and others in the oil industry have wanted it opened to drilling.

Congress put off the issue in 1980 by ordering a study of the area’s oil potential and wildlife resources. Last month, the Interior Department released a draft report recommending that the refuge be opened for oil and gas development.

The refuge is a major concern of national groups on both sides of the wilderness versus development debate.

One side wonders if it’s worth endangering a wildlife treasure for the chance of finding a few years’ supply of oil. The other asks why oil and wildlife can’t mix, and questions whether the nation needs to expand a wilderness system that has increased nearly tenfold in the last two decades.

The answers, of course, depend entirely on where one sits.

“This would be the only protected wilderness on the Arctic Coast,” says Rom, still perched on his rock. “They can drill on just about the entire coastline of Alaska. We’re not trying to lock it up. We’re just trying to stop development in one area that we believe is so special it shouldn’t be developed.”

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the largest in the country’s refuge system, occupying 18 million roadless acres of taiga (pine forests native to the far north), tundra and gravel-domed mountains in Alaska’s northeastern corner. Nearly half the refuge is already designated wilderness, and Rom is deep within it.

In late July, the height of the brief Arctic summer, he led nine people on a backpacking trip in the mountains of the Brooks Range, at the coastal plain’s southern edge. A reporter joined them for a few days at Lake Schrader, a sparkling alpine lake alive with trout and arctic char.

Alone on the wind-combed tundra, the hikers seem to have all 18 million acres to themselves. They almost do. Natives from two small villages hunt and fish on the refuge, and recreational use is limited to about 600 people a year, refuge managers say.

Cost and cold keep down the crowds. A traveler from Anchorage can spend $1,500 on scheduled and chartered flights to reach the refuge, where even in July the average temperature is only 41 degrees.

Rom loves the solitude of the northern places, where he figures he spends 100 days a year “on the trail.” He migrated from northern Minnesota to Alaska in 1980 and now runs Alaska Wilderness Inc., a guiding business he says has never made a profit.

At 31, the brown hair that once reached his waist now just grazes the collar of his pile jacket. A compact man, he can walk--and talk--all day without tiring.

This day, Rom and the reporter have left the others in camp and are hiking the length of Lake Schrader. They follow trails carved in the waterlogged tundra by the hoofs of caribou.

Rom says he led the group up a north-facing ridge a few days earlier.

“I wanted people up on the ridge so they could envision the coastal plain with big trucks and a pipeline on it,” he says. “That’s just totally alien to wilderness.”

They saw a 1.5-million-acre expanse of tundra--rolling hills in the foreground, a river-sliced plain near the coast. There, each June when the snow finally melts, the Porcupine caribou herd’s 180,000 winter-weary animals gather and the cows give birth.

Environmentalists say the herd’s annual migration between Canada’s Yukon Territory and the coastal plain is one of North America’s most spectacular wildlife events. They fear that oil development, with its noise, pipelines, roads and construction camps, would disrupt the caribou’s calving.

“Caribou are the main focus of the argument,” Rom says. “But there are probably a hundred other arguments for preserving the wilderness. Aesthetics, recreation, the importance to the polar bear, the brown bear, musk ox, Dall sheep, snow goose. This is an extremely important habitat area for animals.”

An example soon presents itself. Cresting a small ridge, the hikers come upon a grizzly bear prowling the tundra. A small bear, Rom says, not more than 300 pounds. Rom’s companion deems it large enough, here where the nearest climbing tree is 50 miles south.

The bear spots the two humans and dashes away, up the mountainside. It watches as they pass, then lopes in closer. For more than a mile, it follows about 100 yards behind.

Roger Rom is unconcerned. “He’s just going the same way we are,” he says.

Wilderness may put the romance in Alaska, but oil fills its bank accounts.

Anchorage, the state’s largest city, sprawls at the feet of high-rise office buildings built by oil companies--and the highest of all belongs to Arco-Alaska Inc.

There, in a many-windowed suite on the 21st floor, company President Heinze is holding forth on the coastal plain’s amazing geology.

“This is not a boring area of rock,” Heinze says, his feet propped up on a glass coffee table. “There are oil seeps on the surface. There are outcrops that, if you smell them, you get the smell of methane.”

Heinze, 43, has dark, slicked-back hair. His speech combines the refinement of a Long Island upbringing with an aw-shucks casualness born of years working in the Western oil capitals.

Schooled as a petroleum engineer, he speaks with animation about the coastal plain, and with frustration at not being allowed to explore its potential.

Geologists started finding the refuge’s more obvious signs of oil 70 years ago. But exploratory drilling has been banned since 1960, when the refuge’s precursor, the Arctic National Wildlife Range, was created.

Some clues about the plain’s geology have been provided recently by surface samples and seismic testing, a stethoscopic thumping of the land that produces a rough sketch of rock layers below.

The clues have been positive, Heinze says. But the proper reservoir rock may not be present, or the oil may have migrated away. Such factors are elusive. As Heinze says: “You don’t get a handle on them until you put it to the drill.”

Drilling doesn’t have to harm wildlife, he says, noting Arco’s operation at Prudhoe Bay. There, 60 miles west of the wildlife refuge, America’s largest oil field produces 20% of the nation’s domestic oil. But waterfowl still nest on the lake-dotted tundra, and the resident Central Arctic caribou herd has tripled in size during the last 10 years.

A Prudhoe Bay-size oil field would cover about 10% of the coastal plain, and less than 1% would be covered by roads or structures, he says.

“Prudhoe Bay is a huge development, but on the scale of the coastal plain, it is nothing. There will be plenty of room for caribou and waterfowl on the North Slope.”

Alaska has more than enough designated wilderness, Heinze says. It is beautiful land, he says, but accessible only to those with money for air charters and with energy to hike in primitive conditions.

“Backpackers are not representative of the U.S. population,” he says. “This concept that Alaska needs to be preserved as wilderness for visitors is a crock. Most visitors want to have some reasonable access.”

The feet are off the table now as Heinze leans into his subject. He says nearly all of Alaska is wilderness, without need of congressional mandate, simply because so few people inhabit so much land.

“Alaskans have a better understanding of wilderness. We know that you can go over a hill and be away from the presence of man. I don’t have to go 200 miles away from people to be in wilderness. It’s OK for me to go two miles and not see them.”

Heinze is no backpacker, but he enjoys the outdoors. He owns a rustic cabin a few hours’ drive north of Anchorage.

“I can drive to it. But I can get out of my car and I can be in a place that’s as pristine as any other place in this state. It’s pristine enough that I worry more about the bears than about other people.”

It is Rom’s turn to be frustrated. He has heard oil companies vaunt the potential of other areas that turned up dry--the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf of Alaska.

“How many times are they going to cry wolf?” he asks. “We keep blundering blindly ahead. We need to expand our vision.”

He says Congress showed such vision when it passed the Wilderness Act of 1964. For the first time, a nation vowed to preserve some lands as nature had made them; in the words of Congress, as areas “where the Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Wilderness System

The nation’s wilderness system started 22 years ago with 9.1 million acres. It has grown to 88.5 million acres, or 3.8% of the country’s total area. Two-thirds of the wilderness is in Alaska.

Some suggest that is enough, but Rom sees it differently.

“Every time we set a block of concrete, we should set a block of wilderness. Every time we develop, we should counteract it.”

Wilderness provides a reference point that may prove useful if man-made developments change the world in unexpected ways, he says.

“We have to realize that man is not the king of the hill. We are part of a larger community. People like Harold Heinze will never understand that. They want to stand alone on the horizon and be masters of the landscape, and the rest of us will suffer for it.”

They may be representative, but Rom and Heinze are not the only voices crying in, or about, the wilderness.

The Group of 10, a coalition of national environmental leaders, made the refuge one of its first stops on a recent tour of Alaska’s environmental hot spots. Most politicians in this oil-powered state, meanwhile, support opening the refuge to exploration.

Whatever Congress finally decides, one thing is certain: Someone will not be happy.

Heinze:

“We’ve horsed around so long we’re in trouble. We had better get going, or figure out how to make Saudi Arabia the 51st state. Lacking that, I think we had better get with the program.”

Rom:

“Are we going to burn up all the Earth’s resources until we have to come up with alternatives, or are we going to have the guts to make a stand before we run out? If there’s a will, we can develop alternatives to oil and gas, and we can keep treasures like this.”