Mideast Crisis Endangers Pristine Alaskan Refuge : Oil: Shortages may make drilling a certainty. As emotions shift, environmentalists plead for calm.

Once again, distant drums of man and crisis resound across the great lonely overpowering vastness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

First there was the Exxon oil spill in Prince William Sound. That seemed to seal the future of this fragile tundra plain, America’s Serengeti. Surely, this land would be preserved, not drilled and put in jeopardy by big oil.

Now, however, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has recharged the national debate over oil development in this largest remaining Arctic preserve, placing enormous and swiftly building pressure on Congress to OK exploration along 1.5 million acres of the refuge’s coastal reach.

Sloping north out of the Brooks Range down to the Arctic Ocean ice pack, this land is so forbidding that only 440 visitors and 200 or so local Eskimos are believed to have ventured into it in the last year.

It is summer range for a herd of 180,000 caribou, winter ground for the polar bear. Grizzlies, musk ox and wolves roam its spongy, utterly treeless expanse. In winter, the temperature drops to 55 below.

By the reckoning of experts, there is a 1 in 5 chance of finding recoverable oil here, and even a fractional possibility of a massive underground pool on the scale of Prudhoe Bay, America’s largest oil field, which lies over the horizon to the west.

These odds are just about as good as oilmen get. They say there are no better prospects anywhere ashore in the United States.

“Here, smell this,” says British Petroleum Exploration geologist Peter T. Hanley. In the Arctic late-summer silence on a bluff above the Katakturok River, an hour helicopter flight from Prudhoe, Hanley breaks off a chunk of exposed sandstone and holds it to his nose.

Oil. The rock smells of greasy crankcase oil.

The oilmen ask how a country that is increasingly dependent on imported petroleum and sometimes hostile suppliers can ignore a place like this.

With American troops standing in harm’s way on the oil fields of the Mideast, environmentalists are suddenly on the political defensive in the debate over the North Slope of Alaska. Emotions have shifted. They appeal for calm, for sober reflection.

They note that there are huge, multibillion-barrel oil fields already discovered in developed areas of the Arctic but not put into production because of cost. There is more oil still to be freed up by requiring more efficient automobiles, perhaps mandating a 60% increase in fuel efficiency standards to 45 m.p.g.

“In two years, that would save more oil than the Arctic refuge would contribute in its 30-year life,” says Sierra Club Alaska issues specialist Jim Young. “That’s like finding a huge new oil field under Detroit.”

The conservationists also appeal to the good hearts of citizens on the “outside.” There is nowhere in the United States, not a single place, where the air is so pure as in the refuge, the water so clean and the land so untouched.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR (ann-wahr) many call it, encompasses 19 million acres in northeast Alaska, about the size of Maine. It was established in 1960 and enlarged in 1980. Combined with Canada’s adjacent Northern Yukon National Park, environmentalists call it the largest protected block of wild habitat in the world.

Today’s debate over drilling on the coastal plain of the refuge is an unsettled matter left open a decade ago by a divided Congress.

One test well was drilled jointly by BP and Chevron, but the results are guarded as a corporate secret, to the chagrin of other oil companies and policy-makers.

Drilling supporters, which include the bipartisan political leadership of Alaska, note that one-quarter of U.S. domestic oil production comes off the North Slope, and the volume of oil from the mother field at Prudhoe Bay is now on the decline. The famous Alaska pipeline, which once carried 2.2 million barrels of oil per day now is down to 1.7 million barrels.

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) warns that it will drop to only 50% of capacity by the end of the decade. He believes Congress will avoid the difficult issue of drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge until after the 1990 elections, and then probably reconvene in a postelection session. The way Stevens figures it, lines at gas stations will have reappeared by then and it will be time for him to seek drilling authorization.

“Then you’re going to see everyone scrambling to say they are doing something--the Santa Barbara Channel as well as the North Slope of Alaska,” Stevens says.

His colleague, Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) has already introduced an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would instruct the President to lease all potential oil tracts outside of national parks, including the refuge, if U.S oil imports exceed 50% of consumption.

Alaskans have a special incentive to keep the oil flowing. There are no taxes on individuals here, indeed residents get an annual dividend check of $800 to $1,000 as their share of the petroleum booty. State government is financed 88% by oil.

Politicians budget according to the price of oil. Gov. Steve Cowper, a Democrat, had to veto $300 million from the Legislature’s spending plan this summer, just before the Kuwait invasion sent prices soaring. Now, officials are wondering if the new high prices will allow for a restoration of government services.

Up here in the Eskimo village of Kaktovik, however, the terms of the debate are not so transitory. In this village of 200, they talk about the effects of drilling on this fragile wonderland--on its biology, on the timeless hunting and fishing cultures of small clusters of native Eskimos and Indians, and the effect on aesthetics, its beauty.

Don Voros has the carriage of a classic Alaska sourdough, heavily bearded and sharply rawboned. He watches over the refuge for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He treads a difficult line as scientist, as dispassionate expert and as spokesman for an Administration in Washington that is strongly pro-drilling.

“The biology?” he begins. “I think the refuge can be opened up in an environmentally sensitive manner. It’s possible for it to work, and with adequate mitigation measures the ecosystem is not going to be significantly affected.”

But then he allows, as if revealing some ambivalence, “There could be some major effects, possibly” on wildlife.

Since 1970, scientists have tried to measure the impact of man and drilling on flora and fauna of the Arctic slope. Oil company officials delight in bringing doubters into the airstrips at Prudhoe Bay and the other fields sprawled across the region. Caribou of the central Arctic herd graze along the runways, they hide from the summer sun in the shade of elevated pipelines, they stick their faces up to ventilation exhausts to blow biting flies out of their eyes.

Ducks, swans and foxes abound. The great predators of the region rarely venture too close to the development, so their ability to co-exist is not so visible. But Arco biologist Michael R. Joyce challenges anyone to show damage to animal populations.

“The question is this: Are the critters you share the space with up here doing what they would be doing if you weren’t here? Without exception, the answer is yes,” he insists.

Some worry that drilling will be tougher on the large herd of caribou, which roams the Arctic refuge. They fear that having more animals in a smaller area will possibly cause cows to squeeze closer to predators during calving. At the very least, environmentalist biologists say there will be a steady degradation of the wild habitat that can only get worse over time.

Already Prudhoe Bay is one of the fast growing tourist destinations in Alaska, with scheduled airline service, a new modular “hotel” in nearby Deadhorse, tour buses and all the sights, noises, smells and demands of increasing “civilization.” Against that, environmentalists believe the Arctic reserve is all the more important for a future that must be gauged in hundreds of years, not the immediacy of a single moment.

For those far away in the Lower 48, the argument over aesthetics may be abstract. Not so, though, for those who have ever set foot on the lonely tundra 250 miles above the Arctic Circle. Rivers run free in crazy braids, winds blow clean and silently because there is nothing to rustle. On close inspection, the tundra plants are as diverse and exotic as those in an equatorial jungle, only in miniature as befitting a 50-day growing season. Horizons stretch without end, the rhythms harsh and ancient.

“When you look at this, you understand why people call it the Serengeti of the North, why they compare it to the Grand Canyon,” says Fish and Wildlife supervisor Voros. His arm sweeps an arc from icebergs to the north and mountains off the south, with so much nature and so little change in between.

“I think they have a pretty good argument,” he says.

Voros is among a small group of people standing insignificantly on the Katakturuk River bluff this day, and even the oilmen don’t venture a contrary word.

Yes, new technology would significantly reduce the “footprint” of the oil drillers. At Prudhoe Bay, they had to build 8,400 acres of elevated, five-foot-thick gravel roads and drilling pads spread around an area the size of Rhode Island. Now, they use ice paths and pads and reduce the maze of roads. But they cannot eliminate the need to gouge out gravel pits and build reservoirs. There will have to be giant oil processing plants, electrical generating plants big enough to power cities, long gravel causeways that serve as roadways to docks located miles offshore in deeper waters.

“You’ll never preserve the qualities that are here now,” Voros says.

Debbie S. Miller is an Alaska teacher who recently published a book about her explorations of the Arctic refuge. “Oil and wilderness have one thing in common,” she writes in her volume entitled “Midnight Wilderness.” “There is a finite amount of both.”

Oilmen such as Julian Darley, president of BP Exploration Alaska, see a difference. Oil is different from wilderness because oil can bring countries to the brink of war. Today’s confrontation in the Mideast shows that much. “It’s an opportunity for a reality check,” he says. “This country needs more domestic production.”

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.