Reporting from Nuiqsut, Alaska — The year the oil companies seriously began exploring the icy waters off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- where Nuiqsut whalers have hunted for as long as men have wandered on dark waters -- the villagers lost two bowhead.
The big whales had veered 30 miles from their usual migration path, and the men had no choice but to follow them through ice and mounting swells in their 20-foot boats. Hunters usually can kill the creatures with a fair amount of efficiency after they are harpooned. But this time was different.
The bowhead, longtime whaling captain Eli Nukapigak said, were "spooked."
One of the whales flipped and dove, with the harpoon line twisted around the propeller, dragging the boat toward the sea floor. The crew managed to leap to safety. Another boat had been towing the second whale back to camp when it was overcome in the fierce seas. The hunters had to cut the whale loose.
"That kind of disaster we don't want to see again," Nukapigak -- dressed in a parka on a recent 10-below-zero spring morning -- said of the 1985 hunt. For the captain and others in this Inupiat Eskimo village on Alaska's North Slope, that may depend on whether the oil industry is allowed to open more of the iceberg-strewn Arctic waters to drilling.
A federal appeals court this month put the brakes on a plan to lease more than 78 million acres of the Beaufort, Chukchi and Bering seas to oil and gas developers, ordering a full environmental review before the program can proceed. But that could be little more than a speed bump in the rush to commercialize the Arctic, which global warming (and the resulting shrinking sea ice) has made accessible as never before.
Though the conservation community has fought successfully over the last decade to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the remaining pristine areas of the North Slope have been going fast. In September, the Bureau of Land Management put 1.5 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, with its shimmering lakes and verdant tundra, up for lease to developers.
Now the battle is moving offshore.
The coast around Prudhoe Bay is already dotted with drilling operations such as British Petroleum's Liberty project, which, when completed, will have the world's longest diagonal wells -- reaching eight miles out from facilities near shore. In contrast, the proposed Chukchi Sea leases would start 25 miles offshore and reach 200 miles out.
