COLUMN ONE : Chill Falls Over Arctic Refuge : The GOP Congress may allow long-thwarted oil drilling in Alaska’s most-celebrated caribou calving grounds. For many, the economic lure outweighs any threat to wildlife and native culture.

Every summer a wind-raked, bug-ridden stretch of Arctic desolation briefly transforms itself into the Alaskan equivalent of a teeming East African savanna.

It is that way again this year. An extravaganza of caribou, grizzly bears, wolves, foxes and musk ox has begun its promenade through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as if the looming prospect of an oil field in the midst of wilderness was one more crystal mirage on the polar horizon.

But the counterrevolution in Congress that has been firing away all year at environmental sacred cows is about to head north. With Alaska’s fiercely anti-wilderness delegation now heading key committees, pressure is mounting to open the Arctic refuge for oil exploration, as well as renew heavy logging in the state’s southeastern rain forests and permit commercial development in the heart of Denali National Park.

It is no sure bet that the Arctic refuge, America’s largest wildlife preserve and the end point for an annual migration of 160,000 caribou, will have to make room for an industrial park. But the odds against oil pipelines and service roads crisscrossing 1 million acres of tundra are shorter than ever.

For more than a decade, oil companies, Alaskan politicians and many of the state’s residents have wanted approval to drill in the northern tier of the refuge, in the heart of calving grounds for one of Alaska’s biggest caribou herds.

When Democrats led Congress, opening the refuge to oil crews was a dead issue. But in the Republican sweep last fall, Alaska’s pro-oil delegation gained new power. Sen. Frank H. Murkowski became chairman of the Energy and Environment Committee. Sen. Ted Stevens is a high-ranking member of the Appropriations Committee. And Alaska’s only congressman, Rep. Don Young, chairs the House Resources Committee.

In May, senators in favor of drilling made a deft move and tied opening the refuge to the pending federal budget bill. As a result, proponents of drilling may be able to avoid the noisy debates and filibusters that opponents used to block Arctic oil exploration in the past. President Clinton has pledged not to permit drilling. But it will be especially hard for him to live up to the pledge if it means vetoing the entire budget this year.

Focusing on the fate of the caribou, which are returning now to the refuge as they do every summer, the debate over the preserve is one of those classic conflicts over environmental values that appears to have little room for compromise.

A congressional nod to the oil companies would open up 1.2 million acres of coastal plain along the Beaufort Sea for energy exploration. That represents about one-tenth of the refuge, but it is a critical fraction. It’s where caribou have been drawn for centuries to calve at the end of an arduous late-winter migration over icy rivers and snowfields.

The loss of traditional calving ground could be devastating, according to one federal study, which estimated that over time the herd size could be diminished by more than 40%. Smaller herds elsewhere in Alaska have adapted to oil fields, but wildlife biologists say there has been a decline in reproduction.

The refuge herd isn’t the only large one in Alaska, but it is certainly the most celebrated. Its annual journey over hundreds of miles from its winter range along the Porcupine River in western Canada, and the caribou’s importance to native culture in the Arctic, have made the herd the object of international study, television documentaries and children’s books.

A steep decline in the herd size would be a blow to the balance of nature in the refuge, where the caribou provide sustenance to grizzlies, eagles and wolves, as well as people.

The Gwich’in, one of the first tribes of native people to inhabit North America, rely on hunting and trapping the Porcupine River caribou to get through the harsh winters in half a dozen isolated villages in Alaska and northwestern Canada.

Their leaders have traveled to Washington more than once to proclaim their opposition to oil drilling in the refuge, fearful of its effect on caribou reproduction.

“One of the last traditional native lifestyles could perish with the caribou,” said David Klein, a professor of wildlife management at the University of Alaska.

Natural Splendor

Even if the caribou adapt, there is general agreement that an oil field would change the character of the refuge in ways that cannot be camouflaged or fully mitigated.

“Even if it’s done in an environmentally sensitive way, you’re not going to have what you have today,” conceded an aide to one of Congress’s leading drilling proponents.

“You’ll have things sticking up in the air, people and noise, and the normal risks of air and water pollution associated with oil and gas drilling,” said the aide, who asked not to be identified.

For biologists who study the Arctic and the trickle of backpackers and river runners who brave the white-knuckle bush plane flights, mosquitoes, polar wind and boot-soaking terrain, a visit there is like a sojourn in an American Serengeti.

It’s a world strewn with shed antlers and polished bones indented with some predator’s teeth marks. The rivers are whiskered with the fur of thousands of molting caribou. The only noise is the grunting of lost calves calling for their mothers or the slightly demonic chatter of a willow ptarmigan guarding its earthen nest.

“You’re in this teeming outdoor laboratory on top of the world,” said Debbie Miller, author of a book about the refuge who spent 13 summers exploring it. “Nothing beyond you except polar bears and bowhead whales.”

But leaving this place alone means abandoning a potential energy bonanza. The optimists say the refuge could conceal the nation’s third largest oil field, smaller only than the Prudhoe Bay find 150 miles to the west and the East Texas discoveries of the 1930s.

Estimating how much oil is in the ground anywhere is pure guess work, but 3 billion barrels comes up a lot in discussions of the refuge’s potential. (Since 1930, East Texas has produced 5.4 billion barrels.)

Federal government reports have calculated the chances of finding recoverable oil in the refuge at 20% to 50%. Oil experts say there are no better prospects anywhere else in the country. Still, it’s a gamble.

No one will know for sure what’s down there until the drills bite into the permafrost. The result could be nothing but a scarred landscape and a huge reclamation bill for the oil companies. “It could turn out to be the most expensive dry hole in history,” said Daniel Yergin, an energy consultant and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the history of oil.

Nonetheless, if oil is found and pumped into the existing trans-Alaska pipeline, it could slow the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and offset the steady decline of Prudhoe Bay reserves.

Prudhoe and adjacent North Slope fields are the main domestic source of oil and drive the Alaskan economy. About 85% of the state’s general revenue is related to oil.

About two-thirds of Prudhoe’s oil is gone, and many experts predict that, barring a major new find, it will cease to be an economical source by the early part of the next century.

Drilling in the refuge, which Alaska’s senators routinely refer to as the “Arctic Oil Reserve,” has become a special cause in a Congress determined to remove the “no trespassing” signs erected by environmental laws--from the Endangered Species Act to the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

The lands conservation act more than doubled the size of the refuge, which was created two decades earlier. Combined with Canada’s adjacent Northern Yukon National Park, it ranks among the largest protected wild lands on earth.

Throughout Alaska, the act put 106 million acres of mountain ranges, rain forests, rivers, lakes and tundra--an area the size of California--off-limits to most commercial access and development.

But Alaska is so big it still has an area of at least that size open to develop. Some residents insist that is plenty of elbow room for a state with 600,000 people.

But from the days of the Yukon gold rush, Alaskans have been obsessed with the prospect of frontier bounty. And if America can still boast of an untapped frontier, it’s in Alaska’s vast federally protected lands, in the Arctic and elsewhere.

Timber interests want permission to log in the heart of the Tongass National Forest that sprawls across southeast Alaska. The Tongass is the last intact stretch of America’s only temperate rain forest, which once extended down the Pacific coast to Northern California.

In Denali National Park, where grizzly bears stop traffic the way they once did in Yellowstone, the state’s senators are talking up the idea of a 90-mile railway and 300-room back-country hotel that would turn some remote recesses of the park into a modern tourist mecca.

Alaskans themselves seem to be of two minds when it comes to wilderness development.

Along the southeastern peninsula, where logging restrictions in the Tongass and sawmill closures have cost jobs, many towns continue to prosper. And some residents fear that a return to clear-cutting policies--in which swaths of forest are denuded--would do more harm than good.

In Sitka, where population and employment have grown despite a recent mill closure, restaurant owner Bryan McNitt credits tourism and commercial fishing--two industries that would not fare well, he said, if the lush coastal forest was opened to intense logging.

“Heavy logging is a threat to the streams where the salmon spawn,” McNitt said, “and a threat to wildlife habitat, and that’s what the tourists come to look at.”

Defenders in Minority

Alaskan defenders of the refuge, however, suspect they are in a minority.

Aside from a handful of professional outfitters and bush pilots who get paid to lead trips into the refuge, there’s little economic incentive to keep the oil rigs out.

But even if there were other interests, they would be hard-pressed to compete with the oil industry. Thanks to oil, there’s no state income tax, and every man, woman and child in Alaska receives a dividend check averaging about a $1,000 a year. Support for drilling in the refuge cuts across political and cultural lines.

Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat elected with the help of some environmental organizations, is in favor of oil exploration. In June, over the protests of the Gwich’in, the Alaska Federation of Natives voted for the first time in favor of drilling after extensive lobbying by state political leaders.

Oil company spokesmen insist that an oil field in the refuge would bear little resemblance to Prudhoe Bay’s labyrinthine sprawl--8,400 acres of five-foot-thick gravel roads and drilling pads sprawled across an area the size of Rhode Island.

In any new oil fields, industry officials in Alaska promise fewer roads, exposed pipelines and buildings.

“I think people would be quite surprised at how small our footprint is becoming,” said Arco biologist Michael Joyce.

Proponents of drilling also make the point that the coastal plain, where any oil field would be located, is easily the least interesting portion of the refuge.

It is certainly less scenic than the snow-dappled mountains and sinewy foothills that lie just beyond the potential exploration zone. But any development that occurred on the treeless plain would be easily visible from the mountains above the coastal plain.

Moreover, the necessary roads and airstrips would drastically improve access to the refuge, making it much cheaper for tourists and hunters to enter a region that has remained mostly unchanged because of its isolation.

Prudhoe Bay, its airfield open to commercial jets, has become an increasingly popular tourist destination, drawing several thousand tourists annually to the once remote Arctic coast.

For wildlife experts, it is hard to imagine that kind of activity on the green tundra carpet of the coastal plain. And harder still to imagine a huge herd of caribou continuing to bear its young in the midst of such activity.

“No one knows what will happen the first time 50,000 caribou approach a pipeline or a road,” said Fran Mauer, a federal wildlife biologist who has studied caribou in Alaska for nearly 20 years.

If the herd chooses not to calve near the oil field, it has two options--to migrate east toward Canada or south into the foothills of the Brooks Range. That’s where they have gone in the past when late spring snow has kept them off the coastal plain, say Mauer, Klein and others who have studied them.

But the hills are a hazardous place to calve--in the hunting grounds of grizzlies and wolves.

Traditionally, the caribou have moved off the plain into the hills to feed on early blooming cotton grass, but only after the newborn calves were strong enough to have a fighting chance at survival.

Such was the case last month near the mouth of the Aichilik River Valley. In the space of a day, four bears and a wolf marauded the herd without success.

One chase was a breathtaking spectacle as a fleet blond grizzly galloped magnificently after an unwary calf that had strayed 50 yards from its mother. Coming to its senses at the last possible moment, the calf sprinted to the safety of the herd. The big bear ambled off.

“If that had happened a week ago, when the calf was a newborn, it wouldn’t have made it,” Mauer said. “It doesn’t take much to change the odds up here.”

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Wilderness Oil Wells

Alaska’s delegation in Congress favors opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Oil fields would be located on a coastal plain that is the calving grounds of the Porcupine River caribou herd, one of the state’s largest and most celebrated. Native Gwich’in settlements, such as Arctic Village, oppose the plan.