The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge covers only a small part of Alaska. Smaller still is the coastal plain of the refuge, a narrow, 1.5 million-acre strip flanking the Beaufort Sea. The plain is an ecological and biological wonder, the hunting grounds for Alaskan natives and home to caribou, polar bears, all manner of marine life and countless bird species. It may also contain one of the biggest unexploited oil fields in America.
For all these reasons, the plain has been the subject of a bitter tug of war between politicians and oil companies that covet its commercial resources, on one side, and conservationists who think that opening it would be a calamity — “the equivalent,” the former secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt once said, “of offering Yellowstone National Park for geothermal drilling, or calling for bids to construct hydropower dams in the Grand Canyon.”
President Obama has now come down emphatically on the side of conservation. At the recommendation of Sally Jewell, his secretary of the interior, and John Podesta, his senior counselor, Mr. Obama proposed on Sunday to set aside more than 12 million acres of the refuge as permanent wilderness, including the 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain. Wilderness designation is the highest level of protection the government can confer on public land. It would bar commercial development of any kind, including, crucially, oil-and-gas exploration.
The proposal is the latest instance of the president’s use of his executive authority, which he has deployed in an effort to circumvent a hostile Congress on issues like immigration and climate change. While Congress must put the final stamp of approval on any wilderness proposal, under law the areas so designated by a president will receive full wilderness protections until Congress acts. Mr. Obama’s action also stirred echoes of former President Bill Clinton, who used his last two years in office to protect millions of acres of land from commercial exploitation.
From the perspective of the nation’s energy needs, Mr. Obama’s timing was just right. Estimates of the oil under the coastal plain have varied wildly over the years, but while extracting the oil never seemed worth the devastation it would cause, it seems less so now that major new oil deposits have been discovered in the lower 48 states and consumption is dwindling along with America’s reliance on imports.
Other measures to protect the Arctic are likely to emerge in the days ahead. A new five-year leasing plan in the works at the Interior Department reportedly includes restrictions on new oil leases in the Arctic Ocean, where existing leases owned by Shell and other companies are already controversial. The Obama administration is also considering whether to further limit oil-and-gas production in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, half of which was placed off limits to drilling by Ken Salazar, a former interior secretary, shortly before he left office in 2013.
None of this, obviously, pleases Senator Lisa Murkowski and many other Alaskans, who have been complaining of federal land grabs for decades. “A stunning attack on our sovereignty,” is the way Ms. Murkowski put it, echoing her father, a former Alaska senator and governor, Frank Murkowski, who worked tirelessly to open up the refuge for drilling. That his daughter has been no more successful is cause for cheer.
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