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

National Review, August 6, 2001 by Jonah Goldberg

The day after my tour of Alpine, my pilot, Kermit Carns, and I fly out towards ANWR. To my left is the Arctic Ocean, a vast jumble of icy, slow-thawing jigsaw-puzzle pieces sitting on a table of dark water. To my right, another ocean, this one of green tundra with thousands of islands of water dotting the landscape: miles upon miles of tundra and puddles. We do see a couple of thousand caribou hugging the frigid beaches of the Arctic Ocean, where the cold and the wind protect them from the insects. The caribou look very bored, lounging along the shore, but I assume they are relieved.

When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's expedition stumbled upon the Grand Canyon in 1540, it did not occur to him or his party that it was a thing of beauty. Rather, it was a huge hole in the ground, and an even bigger hassle. Over the next three centuries, the Spanish and countless others encountered the natural wonder and considered it little more than a big obstacle. It wasn't until the 1870s that non-indigenous North Americans looked upon the Canyon as "beautiful."

So if it took hundreds of years for Americans to recognize that a giant gash in the ground was actually a marvel, perhaps I can be forgiven for failing to see the beauty in the coastal plain-if that beauty is actually there. But I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Moreover, the Inupiat Eskimos who actually live on the coastal plain are not Rousseauian noble savages living the life Ted Kaczynski wanted us to live. They are very poor people living in ramshackle housing, and they overwhelmingly support oil development on the coastal plain- because they will get a cut. Environmentalists don't mention these indigenous people because they muddle the story line. They do, however, mention the Gwich'in people very frequently. The "capital" of the Gwich'in nation is Arctic Village (pop. 150), which just happens to be hundreds of miles away from the coastal plain on the other side of the Brooks mountain range. The Gwich'in are regularly trotted out at congressional hearings in Washington, wearing native garb they only occasionally put on back home. The Gwich'in insist that even looking for oil on the coastal plain-with non-intrusive seismic imaging-would be unacceptable.

We are constantly told that the Gwich'in, with their premodern attachment to nature, put a human face on the fight against "corporate greed." But before you write your check to "Save the Gwich'in" (use an Internet search engine, and you'll see how easy that is), you might be interested to know that the Gwich'in invited those same evil oil companies to look for oil on their own lands more than a decade ago. Indeed, ask an Inupiat Eskimo why the Gwich'in are blocking exploration and he won't tell you about the Gwich'in's rejection of postindustrial bourgeois consumerism; he'll tell you the Gwich'in are furious because they don't have any oil of their own, and playing the noble savage for guilty liberals is the most lucrative revenge available.