Ugh, Wilderness!: The horror of 'ANWR,' the American elite's favorite hellhole

National Review, August 6, 2001 by Jonah Goldberg

We take an SUV down the gravel road to the oil wells, a couple of dozen mosquitoes in tow. As we drive up to the wells, a man walking down the road waves at us, and presumably smiles, from behind a mask of tropical mosquito netting, the sort worn by the crews who finished the Panama Canal. Our guide declares, "I've got to get one of those."

Me too, I quickly decide. The mosquitoes are not fast flyers, but if you stand still they swarm around you like senators spotting a TV camera. The DEET works well, where it works. But since the warning label suggested avoiding my face, the buggers go straight for my nose, mouth, and, most distressingly, the air pockets of my safety goggles. While they are not the size of blue jays, I can't help wondering how so many journalists have scoured the area without mentioning the fact that on a bad day, according to the villagers in nearby Nuisquit, you can't open your mouth for fear of inhaling the mosquitoes.

All right, it may not be great shakes for people, but this is Eden for the caribou, right? Well, that's what you might think from reading the purple prose found in, for example, the New York Times. Perhaps because of the politics involved, a seemingly limitless number of journalists from the Lower 48 put on their "nature lover" hats when writing about the spring thaw along the coastal plain. They write about the "majestic" and "glorious" return of the "majestic" and "glorious" caribou herds to their ancestral and, yes, "majestic" and "glorious" calving grounds. From these dispatches it's a wonder teenage girls ever bothered with unicorn posters when they could have pinned serene Arctic caribou to their bedroom walls.

The roughnecks in Prudhoe Bay have a saying: "Life begins at forty." This is not a self-help mantra, but a statement of fact. Once the temperature rises above 40 degrees, torrents of insects-the mosquitoes among the least nettlesome-emerge to dash through the winged portion of their life cycle before the winter returns. Perhaps because they are in such a hurry, they don't take much time to be kind to the caribou; the swarms can kill calves and even adults.

Consider the warble fly, a vicious bumblebee-like insect that is so mean it can cause a whole herd to go berserk, stomping the ground in a panic and eventually stampeding; not even wolf packs can make them do that. The warble fly lays its eggs on the caribou's leg hairs. When the larvae hatch, they march like Germans through Paris-which is to say, unopposed-through the caribou's flesh to its back, where they feed off its skin and fat from the end of summer until the following spring. Starting in late May, the creatures burst out of the caribou's skin and fall to the ground. A biologist's text asserts: "Every caribou hide I've ever examined has had anywhere from 20-350 warbles along its back."

And then there's the nostril fly, or nosebot, which reproduces by harassing the caribou's ample nostrils. In the process of trying to rid themselves of these agonizing pests, the animals lick at their muzzles or press their snouts into the soil, which delights the nosebots because it pushes the larvae into the caribou's nose. The grubs hatch in the nostrils and inch their way back to the base of the throat, where they feed and grow into a larval mass so large that the caribou's breathing can become difficult. The following spring, the caribou do get to sneeze the fly larvae onto the ground-but the expelled critters only hatch and start the process all over again.