Trump Opens Arctic Refuge To Drilling, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America's Largest Untouched Wilderness Was Still Untouched

WASHINGTON. The Interior Department announced Monday that it had finalized a plan to open the entire 1.56-million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing, resolving a long-standing concern that the largest stretch of undeveloped wilderness in the United States had gone nearly a century without a drilling rig on it.

The decision, signed as a formal Record of Decision, clears the way for lease sales across the refuge's coastal plain, a flat expanse of tundra that serves as the calving ground for the Porcupine caribou herd and among the most important onshore denning habitat for the region's polar bears. Officials described the area, long referred to in federal planning documents as the "1002 area," as finally available for its highest and best use.

"Reagan couldn't get it done. Nobody could get it done," the President had said of the refuge on several occasions, framing the opening of the coastal plain as a personal achievement that decades of prior administrations had failed to deliver. The authority to hold the sales had been quietly inserted into the 2017 tax law, meaning the single largest public-lands change of the term arrived as a line item in a bill ostensibly about taxes.

Sources within the administration noted that the timing was favorable, with the first lease sale scheduled for January 6, 2021, permitting the outgoing government to auction the refuge in the final days it would control it. The Gwich'in people, who have relied on the caribou herd for thousands of years and refer to the coastal plain as "the sacred place where life begins," were not consulted in a manner that changed the outcome.

Major U.S. banks, several of which had already announced they would not finance Arctic drilling, declined to participate. When the sale was ultimately held, the leading bidder turned out to be a state-owned Alaskan development agency, purchasing tracts of its own wilderness in the apparent absence of anyone else willing to.

At press time, the administration confirmed that the refuge had at last been made secure against the threat of remaining a refuge.