KAKTOVIK, Alaska — To view the seismic divide over the future of America's last frontiers of wilderness, consider two young men who live on opposite edges of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Start with Berdell Akootchook, 21, who grew up in the Eskimo village of Kaktovik, population 293, alongside one of the nation's most promising oil reserves. Akootchook dreams of becoming a pilot, flying in oil workers and supplies during the boom that will catapult his village into the 21st century if the refuge is opened to oil drilling.
"I'm sure there'd be a lot of people who would want to work over there," he said.
Then there's Evon Peter, the 25-year-old Gwich'in Indian chief of Arctic Village, a town of 152 lodged on the other end of the refuge, in the foothills of the majestic Brooks Range.
Peter has no oil dreams. To the contrary, he is convinced that oil production will doom the caribou that pass like a moving carpet across Timberline Mountain every spring on their way to lay down calves on the Arctic coastal plain.
"The whole history of Alaska is of white people coming in for natural resources, oppressing native people and becoming rich," Peter said. "We are in a dynamic relationship with all other things: animals, land, spirits, us. If you have these things in balance, you're being human."
This is a tale of two villages and what could happen if Congress decides to open drilling on the refuge's 1.5-million-acre coastal plain, alternately described as the most important of America's wildlife refuges and the nation's best chance of countering its dependence on foreign oil.
In a surprising way, these two remote villages, many of whose residents have never traveled farther than Anchorage, resound with much of the same debate heard on Capitol Hill, as America seeks to balance its escalating demands for energy against protecting what's left of its last, great wild places.
Policymakers talk about energy security, wildlife protection, economic development, global warming. In Kaktovik and Arctic Village, people talk about gasoline for snowmobiles that costs $2.60 a gallon, about a broken-down school with lead in the plumbing, about houses with buckets in the kitchens that serve as toilets; they talk about how to make a fine mattress pad out of a caribou skin, how to teach a boy to lay his first fur trap line, how the sea ice is melting back faster than it ever did before, how a grizzly bear sleeps on what's left of a caribou calf when he's too full to eat any more.
