No environmental battle in the last 25 years has aroused more passion than the seesaw struggle over the future of a strip of coastal tundra at the northern tip of Alaska.
The Senate's vote Wednesday to allow oil and gas drilling there did not seal the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Legislative hurdles remain. But for the first time in more than 20 years of debate, the president and Congress have signaled that they agree the nation's energy needs justify tapping into the nation's largest wildlife preserve, a place many Americans believe should be untouchable.
Moreover, both proponents and critics of drilling in the preserve see Wednesday's vote as the opening wedge in a broader campaign, reflected in pending legislation to open other areas currently off limits to energy exploration, including areas off California's coast.
Oil industry executives have tied exploring the preserve to a larger agenda of opening areas that are closed to exploration. In a speech in Washington in June, Exxon Chief Executive Lee R. Raymond said: "We will need to muster the political will, based on a realistic energy outlook, to allow further development of the energy resources to be found in the United States. This includes those that may be [in] offshore California and Florida, in the Rocky Mountains and in northern Alaska."
Language in the pending energy bill would give the Interior secretary the authority to override California's bipartisan opposition to exploratory drilling off the coast, where, according to some industry estimates, there are at least 1 billion barrels of untapped oil.
"If this refuge is not special enough to be saved, then there is no place in the United States that is safe from oil rigs, including the coastlines that for now are protected from offshore drilling," said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
The 19-million-acre refuge, which lies between the Beaufort Sea and the 9,000-foot peaks of the Brooks Range, was created in 1960 to protect wildlife. In 1980, Congress and President Carter earmarked the 1.5-million-acre coastal slice of the preserve as a potential site for energy development.
Although drilling in the Alaskan preserve would affect, at most, 8% of the total area, opponents argue that the targeted zone that borders the Beaufort Sea is the biological heart -- a marshy tableland that supports millions of migratory birds, polar bears, marine mammals and musk oxen. It is also the summer range for the 150,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd that travels hundreds of miles each year to bear its offspring on the coastal plain.
