Trump Opens Arctic National Wildlife Refuge To Drilling, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America's Largest Stretch Of Protected Wilderness Was Still Protected

WASHINGTON. Calling it the conclusion of a process the federal government had needlessly drawn out for roughly six decades, the Interior Department signed a Record of Decision Monday opening the 1.56 million acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing, resolving the persistent and long-standing concern that America's largest stretch of protected wilderness remained, at that hour, protected.

The decision clears for drilling a section of the 19 million acre refuge that Congress, presidents, and conservationists had managed to keep off the auction block since the Eisenhower administration, an oversight the administration moved swiftly to correct. Officials noted that the authorization to do so had been quietly secured years earlier, when a provision mandating lease sales in the refuge was inserted into the 2017 tax cut, allowing the question of whether to industrialize one of the last untouched Arctic ecosystems to be settled inside a piece of tax legislation.

Under the finalized plan, the coastal plain becomes available for the kind of development its protected status had long obstructed. The area serves as the primary calving ground for the Porcupine caribou herd, as denning habitat for the region's polar bears, and as land the Gwich'in people consider sacred, conditions the administration characterized as resolvable through a sufficiently expedited leasing schedule.

"For sixty years this land just sat there, not being drilled," said a source within the administration, describing the refuge as a problem the President had inherited and was now in a position to fix. The source added that the President had repeatedly noted, accurately, that Ronald Reagan and every president since had tried and failed to open the refuge, a streak the administration was pleased to end.

Interior officials emphasized that opening the refuge represented decades of bipartisan failure finally overcome, and that the only remaining step was the comparatively minor one of locating companies willing to drill there.

At press time, the nation's six largest banks had each announced they would not finance oil and gas projects in the Arctic refuge, leaving the administration to celebrate the long-sought opening of land that, for the moment, no one had agreed to take.