caribou

caribou https://www.dailykos.com/news/caribou News Community Action Copyright 2005 - Steal what you want Sun, 26 Jan 2020 17:43:19 +0000 Sun, 26 Jan 2020 17:43:19 +0000 Daily Kos rss@dailykos.com (Daily Kos) Daily Kos rss@dailykos.com (Daily Kos) Sun rises in the Arctic for the summer. Now, melting will kick into overdrive. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2018/5/15/1763804/-Sun-rises-in-the-Arctic-for-the-summer-Now-melting-will-kick-into-overdrive “I really didn’t care about it (referring to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), and then when I heard that everybody wanted it, for 40 years they’ve been trying to get it approved, I said, ‘Make sure you don’t lose ANWR.’” Donald Trump speaking to congressional Republicans at a retreat in West Virginia. At the northernmost city in the United States, <a href="https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=VM3m1owF&id=534F8562242EDF43A92AD76EBC59C9A2E3D6090D&thid=OIP.VM3m1owFUCQW5mYhHja8XQHaE7&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fwww.climate.gov%2fsites%2fdefault%2ffiles%2fAK_locator_Utqiagvik_620.jpg&exph=413&expw=620&q=utqia%c4%a1vik+formerly+known+as+barrow+map&simid=608023541552384951&selectedIndex=18&qpvt=utqia%c4%a1vik+formerly+known+as+barrow+map&ajaxhist=0" target="_blank">Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow)</a>, the sun rose on May 10th and will not set again until August 2nd. Utgiagvik is on the great coastal plain located in the State of Alaska along with the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada, and it is to the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that the vast herds of pregnant female caribou begin their long migration by crossing international lines to their calving grounds at ANWR where they give birth in early June. The females give birth near the edge of the <a title="" href="https://weather.com/news/news/2018-04-23-beaufort-ice-holes-arctic-nasa-photo" target="_blank">sea ice in the Beaufort Sea</a> where they arrive exhausted and hungry. Once the cow gives birth she feeds on the tundra vegetation to produce milk for her nursing calf. ANWR is critical for the survival of the calves as it provides an area mostly devoid of wolves (because of a lack of denning sites), and steady cool breezes from the sea ice that keeps mosquitoes at bay. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gwichin" target="_blank">The Gwich’in</a> name for this vast coastal plain is “Sacred place where life begins”, as it is the breeding ground of the caribou”. <div class="dk-editor-embed center-block" data-twitter-content='&lt;blockquote class="twitter-tweet"&gt;&lt;p lang="en" dir="ltr"&gt;Midnight Sun! Sunrise this morning in Barrow was at 2:59 AM. The Sun won&amp;#39;t set in Barrow until August 2nd.&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; NWS Fairbanks (@NWSFairbanks) &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/NWSFairbanks/status/994728882640183297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"&gt;May 11, 2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; '><div class="remove-embed-content">x</div><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Midnight Sun! Sunrise this morning in Barrow was at 2:59 AM. The Sun won't set in Barrow until August 2nd.— NWS Fairbanks (@NWSFairbanks) <a href="https://twitter.com/NWSFairbanks/status/994728882640183297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 11, 2018</a></blockquote> </div> It is in this very polar region that Donald Trump, <a href="https://thenarwhal.ca/how-canada-could-stop-drilling-alaska-national-wildlife-refuge-and-save-porcupine-caribou" target="_blank">apparently on a whim</a>, recently unleashed fossil fuel interests into this fragile eco-system with a quick rubber stamp of approval by the GOP held congress. This <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/10/1763436/-Trump-Cancels-NASA-Greenhouse-Gas-Monitoring-Program" target="_blank">assault on the Arctic</a> will destroy habitat for not only Caribou, but Walrus and many other arctic species as well. These animals get incredibly freaked out by human activity. While beached, walrus for example, will stampede to get away from the slightest sound of a human presence, crushing many in the herd as a result. The cruelty of the GOP decision on ANWR is not just limited to the loss of the Arctic’s coastal plain, but it’s also incredibly bad news for most life forms on earth, including humans. What Trump is clearly incapable of understanding is that the funneling of more untapped carbon into the atmosphere is altering the climate in such a way, that a <a href="https://phys.org/news/2018-05-uncertainty-long-run-economic-growth-greater.html" target="_blank">new study</a> suggests a “35 percent probability that emissions concentrations will exceed those assumed in even the most severe of available <a href="https://phys.org/tags/climate+change+scenarios/">climate change scenarios” </a>because of the larger range of (economic) growth rates. “"The implication is that if we are producing more and consuming more, we must assume that emission rates will grow significantly faster than we thought," Christensen says. "In the absence of meaningful climate policy, higher baseline growth scenarios likely imply higher emissions growth around the world. The level of <a href="https://phys.org/tags/uncertainty/">uncertainty</a> revealed by this study will shift our modeling of physical and social processes related to changes in the climate and the baseline for policymaking."” <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img title="@CopernicusEU near realtime #Sentinel3-A OLCI image reveals bare ice near the start of the #Greenland melt season across the southwestern ice sheet periphery. The area is normally snow covered by now, making it pre-conditioned for abnormally high ice loss from melting in 2018." alt="@CopernicusEU near realtime #Sentinel3-A OLCI image reveals bare ice near the start of the #Greenland melt season across the southwestern ice sheet periphery. The area is normally snow covered by now, making it pre-conditioned for abnormally high ice loss from melting in 2018." src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/535073/large/31179576_10215640235868736_8718619989805891584_n.jpg?1524494009"> <figcaption>@CopernicusEU near realtime #Sentinel3-A OLCI image reveals bare ice near the start of the #Greenland melt season across the southwestern ice sheet periphery. The area is normally snow covered by now, making it pre-conditioned for abnormally high ice loss from melting in 2018. Jason Box</figcaption> </figure> </div> As can be seen in these satellite images, Greenland’s glacial ice is primed for rapid melt. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img title="Satellite images of the dark zone of Greenland ice sheet clearly show the impure ice in remarkable contrast to the pristine snow. Satellites however miss out on details in the composition of the impurities." alt="Satellite images of the dark zone of Greenland ice sheet clearly show the impure ice in remarkable contrast to the pristine snow. Satellites however miss out on details in the composition of the impurities." src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/535076/large/180404114735_1_900x600.jpg?1524495379"> <figcaption>Satellite images of the dark zone of Greenland ice sheet clearly show the impure ice in remarkable contrast to the pristine snow. The dark ice increases melting Satellites however miss out on details in the composition of the impurities. . In western Greenland, the dark zone (a loss of solar reflectivity causing which increases ice and snow melt as a dark surface absorbs more heat) is about the size of West Virginia. It grew by 12 percent between 2000 and 2012, and new research suggests it's likely to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03353-2">continue to expand</a>, according to climate researcher Jason Box, who travels wide swaths of the ice sheet each summer to collect samples for the <a href="http://www.geus.dk/uk/Pages/default.aspx">Geological Survey of Denmark</a> and the <a href="https://www.darksnow.org/">Dark Snow project</a>. The new research, published in the journal <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03353-2">Nature Communications</a>, describes a geological feedback loop on the ice that's expanding the dark zone: Warming melts the western edge of the ice sheet, releasing mineral dust from rock crushed by the ice sheet thousands of years ago. That dust blows to the surface of the ice, nurturing the microbes and algae living there. Those organisms produce colored pigments as sunscreen, which contribute to the darkening of the surface, reducing reflectivity and increasing melting.</figcaption> </figure> </div> So far, the month of May is alarming sea ice scientists, as it is much warmer than normal for the month and portends an even warmer summer. The sea ice is already worrisome, because it is younger and thinner which makes it more susceptible to breakup and melting. In areas of Greenland and Alaska <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540414" target="_blank">permafrost</a> has begun to thaw, freeing tons of mercury and releasing methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content"><a class="new_iframe_placeholder" href="#">x</a></div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=Rhr0ZWGa6sI" data-width="500" data-height="281" data-src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Rhr0ZWGa6sI" data-frameborder="0">YouTube Video</a></div> </div> <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arctic-sea-ice-is-getting-younger-here-is-why-that-is-a-problem/" target="_blank">E&E News writes:</a> <blockquote> When it comes to sea ice, old age can be a good thing. So it’s troubling to researchers that older layers of Arctic sea ice—which have persisted for multiple years in a row—are increasingly melting away. Since 1984, the percentage of multiyear ice cover has declined from 61 percent to just 34 percent, according to a new <a href="http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2018/05/arctic-winter-warms-up-to-a-low-summer-ice-season/" target="_blank">report</a> from the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC). And the oldest sea ice—ice that’s been frozen for at least five years—now accounts for just 2 percent of the ice cover. That means more and more of the total ice cover consists of “first-year” ice, or ice that’s only been frozen for one season. These trends are not to be taken lightly, experts warn. When it comes to sea ice, age is far more than just a number—it’s an indicator of the ice thickness, its likelihood of melting away in warm weather, the amount of light it lets through to the ocean below, and other factors that affect the Arctic ecosystem and its resilience to climate change. </blockquote> <div class="dk-editor-embed center-block" data-twitter-content='&lt;blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"&gt;&lt;p lang="en" dir="ltr"&gt;.&lt;a href="https://twitter.com/NASANPP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"&gt;@NASANPP&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/VIIRS?src=hash&amp;amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"&gt;#VIIRS&lt;/a&gt; nighttime imagery show the North Greenland sea ice breakup in nice spatial detail and simultaneously show sea ice export into Nares Strait &lt;a href="https://t.co/3slHwqT8ZW"&gt;pic.twitter.com/3slHwqT8ZW&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;— Stef Lhermitte (@StefLhermitte) &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/StefLhermitte/status/968234316735111171?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"&gt;February 26, 2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;'><div class="remove-embed-content">x</div><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">.<a href="https://twitter.com/NASANPP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NASANPP</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/VIIRS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#VIIRS</a> nighttime imagery show the North Greenland sea ice breakup in nice spatial detail and simultaneously show sea ice export into Nares Strait <a href="https://t.co/3slHwqT8ZW">pic.twitter.com/3slHwqT8ZW</a>Ã¢Â€Â” Stef Lhermitte (@StefLhermitte) <a href="https://twitter.com/StefLhermitte/status/968234316735111171?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 26, 2018</a></blockquote></div> <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17339046/arctic-sea-ice-decline-albedo-effect-climate-change-global-warming" target="_blank">Here’s what vanishing sea ice in the Arctic means for you</a> <blockquote> “The Arctic is a natural freezer,” says <a href="http://www.met.psu.edu/people/mem45">Michael Mann</a>, a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, in an email to The Verge. “Just like you’d be concerned if all of the ice in your freezer melted, so should you be concerned about the loss of Arctic sea ice.” The changes that are happening in the Arctic don’t just affect the Arctic. Our planet is an interconnected system, and the vanishing ice is already having ripple effects down south. Among them: faster global warming, rising sea levels, and possibly more extreme natural disasters. (<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16959250/polar-bears-metabolism-seals-arctic-ice-climate-change">Plus, the polar bears will suffer</a>.) Scientists are still trying to figure many things out, but pretty much everyone agrees that a melting Arctic isn’t a good thing. “This whole climate change is a big can of worms,” says <a href="http://apl.uw.edu/people/profile.php?last_name=Rigor&first_name=Ignatius">Ignatius Rigor</a>, coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program at the University of Washington. “It’s pretty scary because we’re starting to realize more and more how big of an impact we’re having on the planet.” </blockquote> rss@dailykos.com (Pakalolo) ArcticNationalWildlifeRefuge caribou ClimateChange Resistance SeaIce _1763804 Tue, 15 May 2018 19:32:30 +0000 Drilling the American Serengeti https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/11/17/1716619/-Drilling-the-American-Serengeti OIL AND ENDGAME IN THE AMERICAN SERENGETI Drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge <h2>By Doug Lee</h2> NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED HERE on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska’s Far North—for about the past ten thousand years. Wolves knew this view in the Pleistocene. From where we sit, halfway up a mountainside looking due north, rolling foothills and the flat coastal fringe below us are alive with summer's nesting birds and grazing herds of large mammals, caribou and musk ox, Ice Age survivors improbably still at large in our manmade Anthropocene Epoch. The musk ox move like flouncing sable haystacks, coats flashing in the arctic sun. Caribou gather in brown pods and drift like cloud shadows over greening tundra. The hills and the narrow plain lie between the Brooks Mountain Range and the frozen coast of the Arctic Ocean, perhaps fifteen miles north of us, looking near in the diamond air and light. Pack ice covers the sea to the horizon, where pressure ridges stand tiny and sharp as knives. We are two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle at the moment of the summer solstice. Here the sun last set in May, and won't set again until August. Nothing moves between us and the North Pole except wind. The silence, when the wind lies down, is as enormous as the cavernous gulfs of distance sculpted by the mountains, plain, and frozen sea. This is the top of the crown of North America, where the spine of the continental cordillera comes within sight of the polar ocean. We are gazing out over a literal, true end of the earth, where one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on the planet is taking place at our feet. Across the tundra a great burst of life is occurring, a flash of animal and vegetable procreation repeated each year since the continental ice sheets melted, so vivid you could probably watch its greening from the Moon. The Porcupine Caribou Herd, 170,000 strong, has arrived from its winter range south of the mountains to feed and give birth on the tundra of the coastal plain and foothills at the moment of its blossoming. I'm with a friend from Canada's Yukon Territory, Ron Chambers, camping in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the northeast corner of Alaska. We've flown here by bush plane from Prudhoe Bay some 100 miles to the west, the oil field complex that lies at the top of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, after driving 400 miles north from Fairbanks up the pipeline’s accompanying road. Now we've set up camp in a north-facing valley on the northern flank of the continent's northernmost mountains, the Sadlerochit spur of Alaska's Brooks Range. The wilderness before us stretches eastward down the coast into Canada, whose front-range peaks are just visible, impossibly far away. The whole coast for 200 miles constitutes the calving ground of the Porcupine Herd, where its cows give birth over a two-week span in May and June. Biologists label this phenomenon `predator swamping', a practice shared by a variety of species from African wildebeests to arctic seals to myriad insects. Wolves, grizzlies, wolverines, foxes, hawks, owls and eagles all come for a carnival of the flesh to fatten on newborn calves and afterbirth and weakened mothers. But the sheer prodigality of protein outpaces their appetites. Most calves survive the crucial first few minutes before they totter up to stand on wet spindly legs. Within minutes they can run at their mothers' sides, and have a sporting chance of growing up and returning the next year to carry on the ancient dance of new life and stalking death. The range in front of us is the most consistently used part of the calving grounds, for reasons still not wholly understood despite decades of study. Female polar bears come here as winter sets in to den and give birth in snow banks on land where the plains and hills meet. In summer, the thawed tundra becomes a nesting ground for birds in their hundreds of thousands, from tundra swans that winter outside the window of my old home on Chesapeake Bay, to petite little Arctic terns that fly every year from here to Antarctica and back again. At summer’s end, snow geese in their tens of thousands stage on the plain before starting their long flight south, to fatten on the reddening autumnal flora and build up energy supplies without which they couldn’t make the flight over the North’s vast taiga forests, where nothing that they eat grows, until they can feed again upon reaching cultivated croplands in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is also, quite likely, an untapped oil field, possibly the biggest and last of its kind to be found on the North American mainland. The question of whether or not it should be fully explored and developed is one of the most profound environmental decisions to challenge the American conscience. Reasoned debate on the issue was long ago lost to polemics and ideology in a battle that has pitted the joint powers of the oil industry, Congress’s powerful Alaskan members and the Republican Party against a coalition of environmental and Indigenous People’s groups and their political allies. Native American opinion split on ethnic and economic lines. Science was run over roughshod in 1987, when negative or unquantifiable consequences predicted in a voluminous, multi-year and multi-faceted U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study of an oil field's possible impacts on the plain’s flora and fauna, painstakingly assembled from dedicated scientists’ years in the field and rare firsthand expertise in their subjects, were rewritten on orders from Washington to make the prospect more palatable to the American public through substituting weasel words and outright falsities. In spring of 1989 an effort to open the area came within hours of passing Congress. On the Friday before a Congressional vote was expected to approve it on Saturday, the Exxon Valdez ran onto rocks at the south end of the pipeline in Prince William Sound and began spilling oil. The advocates of developing the coastal plain quietly shelved the idea, but have never given it up. The fact is that no one can say with certainty what effects major development would have on the Porcupine Herd's calving success rate, or on snow geese migration, or on polar bear denning and birthing. This is among the most untouched parts of North America, rightly called America's Serengeti for its untrammeled wilderness and great migrating herds and the free-roaming predators who follow them. Precedents set elsewhere may not hold in a system never before affected with drilling pads, pipelines, the busy activity of exploration and development, and above all roads—roads that change a place from wilderness into something else forever. Not that this coast is a total innocent to outside influence, some arctic virgin unwary of smiling strangers from the south. One thing the Pleistocene wolves didn't see here is the Eskimo village of Kaktovik, within our view on the coast. Through binoculars we can make out microwave receivers that electronically link this outpost of about three hundred souls to the rest of the world. They and the village’s airstrip are the only links. There’s no road to it. Basically, outside of flying in—and out—you literally can’t get there from here. The musk ox marching along the hills are not native to this coast, genetically speaking. The original tribe of musk ox that lived here was decimated in the 1890s when an international whaling fleet gathered in the western Arctic Ocean to hunt the world's last plentiful stocks of bowhead whales. For a decade the fleet overwintered on Herschel Island, 115 miles east of us across the Canadian border, and paid local Inuit hunters to provide them with meat, while fraternizing with their women. When the whales were all but gone the whalers sailed away for the last time, leaving behind disease and alcoholism. At a point not precisely determined, the local musk ox population went extinct. These animals are descended from 53 from Greenland stock transplanted here in 1969. They did well, and grew to number in the low hundreds, but have more recently suffered a decline. Some years ago a senior hunter from Arctic Village, the United States’ most isolated Indian community, home to some 200 members of the Gwich’in people, Native Alaskans and among Canada’s First Nations, which lies nearly 150 miles almost due south of Kaktovik on the other side of the Brooks Range, spotted a large, shaggy creature that he took to be a grizzly bear. He shot it, but when he approached, something about it didn’t look right. It appeared to him as though the creature had no head! The familiar mountains seemed suddenly stranger than he had known in a lifetime spent among them, and he lost no time getting to his boat and speeding downriver to Arctic Village. At the government school, teachers Dennis and Debbie Miller took out a picture book of arctic animals, and the hunter recognized his beast. A pioneer bull musk ox had crossed the continental divide of the Brooks Range, a high, hidden, windswept world of snowy passes and hanging glaciers rarely seen by human eyes, to reclaim ancestral grounds in Alaska's interior. There another of the Arctic's elders took its life without knowing what it was. It seems the musk ox had been gone too long. ******* AFTER BREAKFAST ON OUR FIRST MORNING of camping, while Ron squared away the campsite and I readied gear for a day's hike, he said casually, "Look through your binoculars and see if that's a caribou down there." "No, that's a bear," I replied. "No, that's two bears." They were a pair of straw-colored grizzlies, probably siblings, fat with spring and baby caribou, still several hundred yards away, sniffing and digging their way toward us up the broad, dry creek bottom in which we’d pitched our tent. They moved in the easily distracted manner of undisturbed animals, engrossed in whatever lay next directly before them. In 1984, when Ron and I first became friends in Kluane, the Canadian Yukon wilderness park where he worked as a Parks Canada warden, he told me the sum of a lifetime's experience with grizzlies. "Bears can hardly see. They can hear like you wouldn't believe. But mostly, a bear is one big nose connected to a stomach. The stomach goes wherever the nose tells it there's somethin' good." A sharp up-valley breeze blew from the bears toward us, keeping from them any lingering breakfast smells we might have emitted. Our camp was clean, the only way to be in bear country, foods sealed and packed in airtight containers. But the sight of the two animals ambling toward us, disappearing and reappearing around bushes, getting closer each time, seemed to call for some action. "What should we do?" I asked Ron, not taking my eyes off the bears. "Well, if you want to take pictures of bears, now is probably a good time," Ron said, still wiping dishes. Looking around, I saw no alternatives. We were miles north of tree line. The low-growth willows and open tundra offered no refuge. I set up my tripod and commenced taking photos. My heartbeat speeded up and time slowed down. Early in my acquaintance with Ron, we came across a hiker on a wilderness trail in Kluane who had crept too close to a bear while snapping its picture, only spotting its cub at the moment the mother bear spotted him and a companion. She put a fang through his boot and foot when she pulled him down out of a tree. Then she went after his partner, and nearly pulled him down too, though he was ten or twelve feet up. The first hiker escaped and ran into us on the trail. We found the second one high in a treetop and had to throw him a rope from an adjacent tree Ron had climbed to belay him safely down. I could still picture the round-eyed and faraway looks of fear in their faces, and how the tree-climber's knees sagged in the aftermath of an extended adrenaline rush. But grizzlies in open country, when not surprised or disturbed with cubs or guarding a kill, are usually best dealt with face-on. The wind flapped our tent like a sail and shook my camera. The bears gamboled out of the creek bed and partway up the bowl-sided valley, drawing nearer. I thought they might pass above us. Instead, when perhaps 200 yards away and parallel to camp, they sat down and seemed to contemplate distances and think of private things, not once looking our way. Ron was holding the little launcher of skyrocket-like cracker-shells that was our grizzly deterrent, meant to discourage bears with a loud whiz-bang. The grizzlies rolled on their backs, stood and shook like dogs, showering the air with a corona of sunlit golden hairs. Then they turned and walked back the way they had come, more purposeful in their strides as they grew smaller and left over the lip of the valley without a backward glance. "Those are wild bears," Ron said. "They don't know what we are." "I don't think they saw us," I said, finding my voice. "They knew we were here," Ron said. "They couldn't make us out very well, but they could see the tent flapping for sure—a big noisy thing. They knew it was something that didn't belong here. So they decided to go somewhere else." "They never looked at us," I said. "Oh, they looked at us," Ron replied. "They never stood up and looked at us. If they'd done that, then I would have known they were really interested, and we might have had to try a cracker shell on them." In Ron's company, I feel as secure as a man in grizzly bear country armed only with little skyrockets can. Of equal parts Native American and European heritage and with dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship, Ron has a foot in more worlds than one. He’s a member of both Canada’s Southern Tutchone and Alaska’s Tlingit Tribes, and his earliest memories are of dogsled travel through the woods in deep Yukon winter, wrapped in furs on his mother's sled with a sister on either side of him as they made her rounds among trapping campsites and cabins in what is now Kluane National Park, before it became a park. He has lived around bears all his life, not to mention wolves, wolverines, ornery bull moose and even more fractious moose cows, and he has an acute understanding of animals’ psychology, motives and reactions, combined with a keen instinct for survival. Over the 20 years he was a Parks Canada warden, a ranger by the nomenclature of U.S. parks, Ron served on Kluane's Alpine Rescue Team, frequently finding himself dangling from the end of a cable beneath a helicopter hovering as close as possible to cliff-sides to pluck stranded, sick or wounded climbers off the highest mountain range in North America, the Yukon’s St. Elias Mountains, which continues uninterruptedly into Alaska as the Wrangell Range. Ron's chief rules when in the wilderness are to keep perspective, keep active and keep laughing, and he is grinning now in appreciation of what we've just seen, and even more at the earnest look on my face as I strive to understand bears' thinking—among the most critical of wilderness subjects, and, in bear country, a pet preoccupation of mine. "They were checking us out the whole time,” he told me. “That might be why they walked up here. But you could tell, they aren't used to camps. They weren't looking at this camp and thinking, Hey, there's a meal. "Bears are dumb, but they're not stupid. They're sly. I watched a mother Dall sheep with a little lamb, probably a couple of days old, near a grizzly who was grazing. The bear's eating grass, eh? Not looking up. The lamb kept running out farther from its mother towards the bear. It wanted to play, right?" Ron demonstrated the lamb with running fingers. "The grizzly didn't pay any attention, just kept eating grass. The mother kept calling, saying `Get the hell back here,' but the lamb kept running a little closer. Until the bear went...." Ron snapped his chops with a sideways bite. Weeks later, when my slides were developed, the bears looked small in the frames, some blurred by windshake. But in person, their round, sunlit shapes became the riveting features in the landscape, the walking essence of wild country. Their presence defines wilderness, arbitrates it for lesser mortals such as ourselves, and nothing concentrates the powers of the wild and tunes our emotions about them quite so finely as an approaching grizzly. ******** THE ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE is enormous, one 20th of the entire area of the refuge system nationwide. Of its 19,286,722 acres (78,050.59 sq. km., more than 30,000 sq. mi.), 8.1 million are classified as wilderness, permanently barring mineral exploitation or any other development. Another 10.1 million are designated for “minimal management”, where limited uses such as recreation and hunting are allowed, but the overarching principle remains the maintenance of existing natural conditions and wild values. The 1.5-million-acre coastal section of the Porcupine Herd’s calving and summer feeding grounds we’re looking at, generally referred to by its legislative designation as the 1002 area, enjoys no such protection. Limited exploratory drilling took place here in the 1980s, with results not made public, but thought to be promising. The area's permanent status has never been decided by Congress, and a bi-partisan moratorium on further drilling has been in place, threatened now by shifting national politics. Wilderness designation would remove it by law from any contemplation of further exploration or development for good. A vote to open it to exploration and development would connect it with the North American energy and road grid, which would proceed to expand across it. Two or three times during the week Ron and I camped there, we heard and glimpsed airplanes flying patterns over the plain, carrying researchers counting the caribou herd. Censuses have watched the Porcupine Herd fluctuate from a low of 123,000 in 2001 up to nearly 200,000 counted in 2013, the most recent tabulated data. The Central Arctic Herd, which centers its range in the vicinity of Prudhoe Bay's oil fields, grew from 16,000 to a peak of 70,000 by 2010, but since then has seen numbers drop to 22,000 in 2016, for reasons biologists blame partly on a disastrously late spring in 2013 causing a low calf survival rate, but admit they cannot fully explain. For many drilling proponents, the herd’s increase (until recently), seemed to clinch their argument that development—pipelines, roads, residential and industrial centers, land and aerial traffic—can be good for caribou, by keeping predators at a wary distance from humans’ unnatural installations. Under most, though not all, circumstances the Central Arctic Herd shows little concern for scattered installations. But the conclusion overlooks key differences between the two herds. The much smaller Central Arctic Herd enjoys a vastly wider coastal plain—almost 100 miles, 160 km., between the coast and the Brooks Range, compared to the Refuge's ten to fifteen miles (16 to 24 km.)—and moves around it seasonally but does not migrate over the mountains. Still, and crucially, its cows avoid oil field activity during certain critical times of their yearly schedules, most importantly when calving, an option cows in the Porcupine Herd might not have on their narrow calving grounds should they become an oil field. In addition, the Porcupine Herd’s caribou have special needs to build up maximum energy reserves before their long migration over the Brooks Range, in the form of fat laid on by summer grazing along the lush coastal plain. Most critically, the cows must be able to trek hundreds of miles and survive on the lichen forage of winter with enough energy left to nurture a fetus through the months of darkness, carry it back over the mountains, and deliver it into the world on the coastal foothills and plain. Their circular migration is the longest made by any land animal in the world. Any serious disruption of this cycle could endanger the herd’s breeding success, huge and healthy though it may currently be. Another key and often overlooked factor is that during the peak summer months, mosquitoes, the universal curse of the arctic summer, plague every warm-blooded creature. Caribou receive the additional attentions of egg-laying bot flies whose offspring mature in the animals' throats or under their hides with hideous and dehabilitating results. The caribous' only defense when insects swarm on warm summer days is to form into massive aggregations, sometimes 10,000 animals or more packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and together, en masse, walk into the wind. Since mosquito densities remain constant within a given area, the ratio of insects per animal is greatly lowered when the animals crowd together and seek breezes to ease their torment. Caribou around Prudhoe Bay pay little attention to pipelines, where they can commonly be seen walking and lying beneath them…except when giving birth, and when forming the great aggregations, in which cases they avoid them. The cows of the Porcupine Herd could fail to acquire much-needed fat due to increased insect stress should infrastructure pop up to disrupt their way, and no matter what’s been claimed or will be said about it, neither science nor the oil companies can in any verifiable way project what development of the 1002 calving and feeding grounds would do to the herd’s health and calving rate. It’s true, as the oil industry argues, that present-day techniques of “small footprint” development of an oilfield impose a much smaller direct presence on the ground than in earlier days. Many fewer drilling pads are required to tap an oilfield today through directional drilling by which a well can bend, and reach oil that’s miles away. And that’s to be commended. But claims of only a 2,000-acre total footprint put forward by leading advocates of development are disingenuous. That might be so of actual drill-pad areas, buildings and direct lengths of pipelines, but purposefully overlooks the overall extent that the infrastructure web would reach, and the even greater areas affected by noise and other disturbances. And oil spillage, as we all know, and other forms of accidental or negligent pollution inevitably occur, at one level or another, within the best-run operations. In the broadest global picture, caribou and reindeer herds all around the Arctic Circle increase or crash in poorly understood cycles, and the factors that might trigger a future crash are not clear to science. But a herd weakened in its reproductive success by the intrusion of the industrial world might not come back from a natural cyclical low point. The experiment hasn’t been done yet, and we must hope that it never will be. The political pressures to open the coast are enormous. Prudhoe Bay and the fields adjoining it form the largest energy complex in North America. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) pumps North Slope crude oil to the port of Valdez on the Pacific Ocean for shipment out in tankers. Opened in 1975, TAPS is one of the great engineering feats of all time, running 800 miles over mountains and river valleys, through earthquake country and some of Earth's harshest climate. In the 1990s, the oil fields and pipeline were supplying 40 percent of the nation's domestically produced oil, 25 percent of its total daily consumption. (Ron and I made this trip together in 1994, and though I haven’t been back since, I use up-to-date animal numbers in this article, and the basic facts of wilderness and development haven’t changed, nor has the nature of the experiences with true wild that we had. So I feel this story remains pertinent and worth telling today.) But oil fields have lifetimes, and Prudhoe and its sister fields’ production has been dwindling for a long time, kept up only by the opening of newer adjacent fields. The prospect of a major find in the Refuge's coastal plain has been tantalizing beyond measure to companies and interests who have invested billions in Prudhoe Bay-centered facilities that would become useless liabilities should the currently developed fields ever actually run dry, or production run too low to be economically feasible. The fracking boom in natural gas has lowered crude prices, for now, making the investment required to explore and then develop the 1002 area less glittering in its bottom line. But proponents of doing so would very much like to have the option open, and now, in 2017, they may be able to. Not only industry but the state of Alaska and its Eskimos, too, from whose political jurisdiction the oil flows, depend heavily on North Slope oil revenues. For the state, it comes in royalties on barrels of oil pumped. For the Eskimos’ North Slope Borough, which spans Alaska’s entire Arctic Ocean Coast, income is generated from taxes on the industry’s infrastructure. And in the long view, there are other energy resources north of the Arctic Circle yet untapped. Offshore geology under the Arctic Ocean promises oil and gas deposits of unmapped extent, and the green light has recently been given by the current Administration to explore them, despite near-disastrous recent false starts at getting an exploratory offshore rig there. Onshore on the North Slope but out of reach of present-day technology and economics are also tar sands and frozen oil fields. Fields in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve adjacent to development were once sacrosanct, but no longer. A fact little noted in public forums is the massive coal deposits that underlie much of the North Slope. Energy companies would prefer to make all forms of North Slope energy sources open to exploitation, and decisions and rulings about expanding areas open to oil drilling could have little-publicized ramifications for future mining—although the coal industry’s long-term decline makes that nightmare increasingly unlikely viewed at present. Boosting the pipeline’s flow with oil from the Refuge would be a short-term bonanza for the companies involved, with long-term implications in keeping future forms of North Slope development on the table. As for what the Refuge's potential reserves mean to the nation as a whole, it depends who you’re asking. Estimates of the 1002 area’s yet-undiscovered deposits first ranged around 3.2 billion barrels, though they could be three or four times that, and figures of around ten billion recoverable barrels are popular in current pro-development arguments. To proponents, these figures signify hundreds of billions of dollars going into domestic coffers rather than spent on foreign oil. Yet they do not mention that the oil itself might go overseas; Congress removed requirements that Alaskan oil could be sold only in the U.S. and shipped by American-flagged tankers that were laid down as part of its original approval of the pipeline in the 1970s, to the dismay and detriment of American shippers and independent refiners. And, of course, the elephant in the room, the ascendance of natural gas, has changed the whole picture of America’s energy consumption, with crude oil prices dropping below what might be profitable, considering the investment that would be required to open up and start pumping from the 1002 area, through another pipeline connecting it to Prudhoe and TAPS. While the global energy picture will continue to evolve in ways near-impossible to predict, to opponents of drilling the 1002 area, any amount of profit is too small to justify invading one of the nation’s—one of the world's—last great bastions of nature working by its own rules. ******* A HIKE ACROSS TUNDRA in the greening of the year is an adventure one can have and truly not know what might happen next, or what might be found. On the coastal plain below us, polygon pools across the melted tundra are aflutter with more than a hundred species of birds, nesting, breeding, feeding or passing through. In the drier hills where we hike, bird life is less obvious, but still abundant and unafraid. The first creature we meet is a mother sandpiper who hops up like a jack-in-the-box when I walk within a yard or so of her nest without spotting her camouflage. Two cream-and-chocolate eggs nestle in a pouch, tucked into the tundra in a multi-colored sac woven of tundra plants. It's set between the slightest of mounds, fashioned so that the eggs and the mother's body sit below the wind. She plays the broken-wing ploy, cheeping and fluttering frantically for my attention, until I back off and she settles back on her eggs, fussing a bit. And here she will sit, watching the sun circle the sky, for her time of incubation, vulnerable to any fox or other egg-and-mother eater who comes along, with only camouflage and her wits to save herself and her young. She lets us come close so long as we move slowly. I can only wonder at the survival of any wild animal in the face of the predators and natural forces arrayed about us. It must be that only in the vastness of the tundra lies the salvation of its tiniest citizens. Fog and low clouds roll in off the pack-ice when the wind blows from the north. On a south wind, when the sun shines, the tundra shines too, a lustrous pelt in the pure arctic light. A butterfly, one of the Arctic's 29 species, flutters between tundra flowers. Translucent yellow arctic poppies turn perfect, four-petaled faces toward the sun's orb, tracking it, cloud or shine, like light-seeking radars as they follow its ellipse around the sky. It rises high in the south, dips low in the north in the wee hours, and slips sometimes behind mountains' heads, but never below true horizon. The flowers’ faces follow the sun with precision, even when a mountain is in the way. "Notice something about the sun?" Ron asks as we look due north at midnight. It hangs low over the North Pole, a pale round mirror of itself reflecting on the ice. "It's white. Anyplace else, the sun that low would be orange or red." There are virtually no particulates suspended in the atmosphere on a line between us and the sun. One of my most vivid and haunting impressions of the Arctic Coast, where I spent nearly six months traveling and researching an article on ANWR for National Geographic Magazine in 1987, witnessing an entire spring, summer and fall, comes from a similar midnight on those travels, eastward down the coast in Canada, on the calving grounds at the height of the birthing frenzy. Caribou cows and newborns trotted hither and yon across the mountains' knees. The tundra was streaked with unmelted snowbanks glowing rose in the low light. Ptarmigan startled me and my two companions, another writer and a photographer, both Yukon residents, when the birds exploded into the air all around us in mating displays, launching themselves twenty feet skyward in a heart-stopping explosion of wings, like a whole covey of quail erupting unexpectedly out of the briers, then falling like feather dusters back into the low willow bushes. Every puddle held a breeding pair of ducks, every pool a pair of tundra swans (birds I could look out the windows of the home where I lived for many years on a bank of Chesapeake Bay, and watch, come winter, after they'd flown diagonally clear across the content on a bisect from the Arctic Ocean to America’s mid-Atlantic). Bushes were hung with songbirds’ nests. Piratical jaeger gulls bullied the little residents of the tundra, especially the ubiquitous lemmings, plucking them up while on the wing. Ghostly snowy owls of silent flight stalked and murdered them. Grizzly bears tromped along the ridges, blood-lusty with a stiff-legged gait and rolling with fat. Four golden eagles sat on the tundra facing each other in the twilight like a convocation of undertakers, momentarily sated with death. For the first time, in the presence of caribou, I felt something I've only known since when hiking alone and unarmed in bear country. It was a kinship with the caribou, a commonality and equal footing as large mammals in the presence of larger predators who may or may not mean us harm, at their whim and inclination. Caribou change the landscape in the opposite way from grizzlies. They take the tension from it, soothe it, at least until a fright seizes them up in mad dashes from dangers we can only strain to spot. Yet they are so completely a part of this country that when the panic flight stops, heads drop to graze and calves scamper like children, then the calm is contagious. I sat with my human companions through the hours of low light, watching the drama of life and death unfold around us. A calf not half a day in this world walked up to the photographer’s tripod, sniffed his camera, and decided the apparatus must be its mother. It was cute, following us like a puppy, but soon became a problem as its real mother rushed back and forth across the tundra, honking for her calf, circling outside a certain perimeter of distance, unwilling to come any closer. We finally had to run across the tundra to leave the puzzled calf behind. Later, we saw a lone pair that we hoped was the stray calf and mother reunited. Our simple presence was an intrusion, a potentially fatal disruption in the lives of at least one cow and her calf. That is wilderness. A caribou cow lay down on her side on a hill above us, nearly the same color as its dun vegetation. When none of us were looking, she gave birth. We watched as the calf struggled to its feet. A pale sun and paler moon stood opposite each other in the sky like gladiators circling an arena of titanic events. We seemed to have slipped into another time, on a geological and mythological stage for events witnessed only by the stark mountains and the frozen sea; a secret imparted to us alone of the world's incredible fecundity and ferocity, glimpsed like life on another planet, briefly visited in this Neverland of springtime beyond the northernmost mountains. ******* RON AND I FELL UNDER THE SPELL of the constant daylight, sometimes hiking for eighteen hours straight, or bunkering down in our tent during 24 hours of wet, horizontally driven June snow. Evidence of the land's predatory energy lay strewn all about the valley and mountainsides: bones and skulls, horns and antlers, tufts of fur and hide. Silky black strands of musk ox hairs clung to bushes. We picked up clumps of caribou fur and Dall’s sheep’s hair to carry as hand warmers. My own heat sprang back at my palms when I clasped them in my pocket. Warmest of all, when we came across it, was the tail, snow white and a foot in length, of an arctic fox that something had scattered in bits and pieces for a half a mile up and down the valley. "What do you suppose would do that?" I asked Ron, partly from curiosity, partly in awe at the thoroughness with which one toothed creature had eradicated another. Could it have been wolves, being playful? A wolverine, feeling malicious? "Something that doesn't like foxes," Ron said. "I like to take my time when I'm hiking," he has often told me. "Some people get all excited about how many miles they hike. I like to slow down and see what's around me." On a hillside of stratified outcroppings, Ron picked at fossils on a boulder. The fractured surfaces over most of the slope's face were decorated with spirals and whorls, cones and tiny needles and snails' coils, like fine bas-relief. We were walking on old ocean floor, and its inhabitants. It’s likely that some of their juices, in the unthinkable oceans of time that have passed since the seashells turned to stone, cooked down through the soil of ancient sea beds to add to the hydrocarbon deposits that may very well lie under our feet. These stones spring from the same fossilized reefs that run beneath the oil fields around Prudhoe. In the foothills near us stands an outcropping of brown, sandy rock that will burn if touched by a flame. Geologists have searched all along the coast, seismically probing it. From the air, light and dark stripes of tundra vegetation traveled over by seismic exploration crews’ heavy equipment calibrate the entire 60 miles between Prudhoe and the Arctic Refuge's border—currently the only part of the entire Alaskan Arctic Coast off limits to drilling, 110 miles out of 1,200. Westward from Prudhoe, near Point Barrow, oil literally oozes out of the ground in seeps, or used to, according to Eskimo memories and early explorers’ accounts. Eskimos there lived through the darkness of arctic winters by the light of petroleum lamps before the rest of the world arrived with other uses for it. Where our valley opened down onto the plain, we found circles of rock marking old tent rings left by Eskimos from Kaktovik, who have come for generations to the mountains' edges to fish and hunt caribou and sheep. Tundra grew in odd-colored patches over long-abandoned hearths, marked by standing stones that once threw heat like ovens. Legally, the surface of the coastal area in question belongs to the Eskimos of Kaktovik, whose leaders have declared in favor of development, anticipating a share of the return from what lies underneath. The larger native community of the Far North is divided. The Gwich'in, south of the mountains in Arctic Village and its related, scattered settlements in both Alaska and Canada, are fearful that changes in the Porcupine Caribou Herd's numbers or migration patterns could mean the loss of hunting as a major element of village life, and force them more completely into the cash economy. One of the few alcohol-free northern communities, Arctic Village relies on the herd for meat that accounts for as much as 80% of their diet, and, perhaps even more importantly, for the cultural functions and continuity, demands and satisfactions of hunting as a way of life. Eskimos, their neighbors to the north across the Brooks Range, have done well by North Slope development. Tax revenues have modernized lonely villages, brought satellite-age communications, schools, health and elderly care, plumbing, gravel roads, streetlights and pre-fab houses. The Eskimo’s North Slope Borough’s capital of Barrow has taken on the fast-food trappings of more mainstream American communities, where you can eat enchiladas or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Caribou form only a minor part of the hunting diet in most Eskimo communities; for them, whales are the keystone of traditional diet and culture, and Eskimos’ concerns about expanding development are focused primarily on their fears of offshore operations hurting the marine environment. "I don't see what's to be afraid of," Ron told me. "You saw the pipeline. Caribou were sleeping under it. We saw sheep, moose, caribou near the pipeline in the mountains, just from the road. It doesn't look like it's bothering them. "If I hadn't gotten the Parks Canada job, I probably would have gone to work on the pipeline. My cousins from Alaska all worked on it. One guy's job was to sit on a tractor for eight hours and keep it running, in case they needed it. It was so cold that if they turned it off, they couldn't start it again." But what about the road that will come with the pipeline that will go with the oil field, I asked? In 1987 I had spent two late-autumn weeks in Kaktovik during whaling season, waiting for its hunters to catch a whale, which didn’t happen while I was there. But I did what I could to get to know people in the community, and found them somewhat torn, and of two minds. They felt helpless in the face of the enormous powers summoning them to open the plain, but desperate at the thought of despoiling the wilderness at their back door, perhaps affecting their hunting grounds, and opening their village to the outside. "People told me they'd like to be able to get in their pickup truck and drive to Fairbanks to buy furniture, or groceries, for that matter,” I said to Ron. “But they don't want all the rest that comes with it." "It's their land," he replied. "They should decide what to do with it. How can anybody else tell them what to do with it?" "What about the Gwich'in?" I asked. "They've got legitimate worries." "If they were doing it the traditional tribal way," Ron said,” the Eskimos and the Indians would have met and parleyed. They would have worked it out. Before the boundary-makers. That's a native name for white people. They drew lines on maps and called them boundaries." "I've got an interest, too," I postulated. "I'm a U.S. citizen. So are you. You've got an interest too." "Why should you have anything to do with it? Or me?" Ron asked. "It's part of being a nation. We're all Americans, and certain things go with that. Public lands are assets that belong to everybody." "Yeah," Ron said. "You tell that to the guys in the village down there, and they'll tell you to fuck off." The residents of Kaktovik, in my days there, were polite with flashes of warmth. But they were worn out by media exposure and political pressures, and wished for nothing so much than that I and all other media reps—of whom I was the last lingering presence of that summer, when the issue had gained a certain amount of national limelight—would take a permanent trip back south whence we came. Ron has his own viewpoint. "When I was a kid I used to run all over Kluane on my snowmobile. That was my mother's tribal trapping ground, our hunting ground. Me and my cousins used to run around on glaciers, jumping crevasses. When I think of it now, it makes me shiver. I'm lucky to be alive. “Then they came and said, ‘No, Kluane isn't yours anymore, it's a national park. You can't trap there, or hunt, or run snowmobiles.’ “I've always wondered…who gave it to them? “That's why Indians call white people boundary-makers." So who decides this land's future, and for what purposes? ******* MORE RAIN, MORE TENT TIME, in sleeping bags a little damp now, in clothes ripening after a week without running water. In a lull, I peered out the flap to see other humans—a sight my brain didn't instantly comprehend. They were a wet bunch of campers who had hiked up from an airdrop on the coast, and would be picked up in a few days at the angled piece of nearby hillside that passed for a bush airstrip, where we'd been dropped off. They had cached food in bear-proof cylinders there, and seemed relieved to find them. I couldn’t help but notice certain tensions over supplies that may have been exacerbated by several days in wet leather boots while hiking in wetland tundra—rubber boot country. We told them what we knew of the area, they told us where they had seen peregrine falcons nesting, and moved down the valley to camp. Ron and I ducked out of the wet to cook beans and pasta—a far cry from the rack of ribs we had put on the fire our first night camping. "They never would have camped like this in the old days." Ron said, stirring beans. "Indians are meat-eaters." Ron's father was a well-known Yukon Territory big-game guide, Shorty Chambers, like Ron of bi-ethnic heritage, who brought the flower of society from Toronto and Montreal, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and London on hunts in the rugged St. Elias Mountains. In the off-season, he was a well-liked fixture of the Yukon’s bars, and when he died, Ron was proud to tell me, a line of mourners formed that ran around the bock from the Whitehorse saloon where his open coffin had been lain atop the mahogany bar, and hundreds of Yukoners filed by to shake Shorty’s hand one more time, and toss back a last shot of liquor with him. Shorty also joined his Indian relatives on annual mountain sheep hunts, and brought young Ron along. "When I went with my dad on Indian hunts, they wouldn't bring anything with them except maybe a little pemmican, a little rum. No other food, and we didn't eat until somebody shot a sheep. Sometimes that would be two or three days. Then they'd build a big fire, skin out half the sheep and throw it on the coals. After you'd been out there climbing around with nothing to eat, you didn't wait too long. And it tasted good." Ron chortled. "Take those campers. What do you suppose we could have charged them for shots of rum?" Ron had spent many more months than I on this coast as the first warden of a Canadian national park declared in the 1980s as the Northern Yukon National Park, renamed Ivvavik in 1992, which borders the Arctic Refuge and extends the Porcupine Herd’s total protected area greatly. An even newer one, Vuntut, established to its south in 1995, borders both Ivvavik and ANWR. We had planned this trip to waste a minimum of energy on logistics. Ron drove on the Alaska Highway from his home in the southern Canadian Yukon to Fairbanks, where we rendezvoused. After a day of outfitting, we drove north 400 miles along the pipeline highway to Prudhoe Bay. The drive up took us through snow, rain and fog, but our return trip would prove glorious. The gravel road, round-shouldered and traversed by enormous trucks servicing the oil fields, crosses the Brooks Range and the far northern Continental Divide between Arctic and North Pacific Ocean drainages at Atigun Pass. Hanging cornices of snow overshadowed the approach to the Divide when we drove it in late June, and road signs warned of avalanches that had, indeed, very recently spilled partly across the road. We hurried under, staring upward. The summit of the pass was cold and windy, but not enough to discourage an urge to contribute to the flow of waters toward two oceans on the crest of the Great Divide. South of the pass the trees began, stunted survivors that quickly gave way to full-grown firs and aspens. Two marble mountains rose above them like a stage set from "Close Encounters", shining half-domes of rock cloven by ancient cataclysm, by tradition the boundary markers between Indian and Eskimo lands. The road crosses the Yukon River on a wood-planked bridge that angles sharply downward from its southern bank to the northern. The Yukon is immense in its flow at this point, fully realized in its destiny as one of the world's great rivers, muscular in a brown flow that sweeps along whole trees, tumbling them in its current far below our feet. It is one of the world's great drives, and one as yet little sung to the North American motorist, save for fans of cable TV’s ‘Ice Truckers’ reality show. Yet it’s a fact that anyone anywhere on the continent can back out of their driveway and drive to the Arctic Ocean. The problem is, it wasn't supposed to be this way. When the environmental battles of the 1970s were fought to make the pipeline as safe and ultimately environmentally innocuous as it could be made, an agreement was reached that this road would not be opened to the public. Predictably, however, pressure soon developed to open it, the argument being that state funds went to its upkeep, and therefore Alaskans should be able to drive it. Today a permit from the Alaska Department of Public Safety is recommended, because it enables company and state employees to render aid, in case of trouble, on a pay-later basis, and we had one. But it wasn’t necessary, legally, and the original premise of protecting game from poaching or over-hunting is largely forgotten. Such is the history of roads and wilderness. Times change. Neither Natives nor visitors do things the old ways, close to the face of the land. We drive up the Pipeline road burning petroleum, glad to be able to, then fly here burning aviation fuel, while Natives hunt and play on gasoline-powered snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicles that can tackle almost any tundra mountain slope. Yet the past is still with us here. Over the border in Canada I saw stumps of fir trees, still standing after however many decades, that had been cut with stone axes. The stumps themselves are wonders of the arctic life-drive, a hundred or more years of microscopic yearly rings packed into a stem no wider than two fingers, so slowly does growth proceed here at the limits of the Earth. So untouched is this land that on Herschel Island off the Yukon's Arctic Ocean Coast, I visited a skull lying atop the tundra from a driftwood burial of centuries ago, eye sockets staring at the circling arctic sun. Most of the Canadian coast is administered by its Inuit Native Nation, even within national and territorial parks, the latter of which Herschel became one in 1987, where I had the honor of signing into its guest book as its first visitor after arriving by helicopter. Canada's government has backed Canadian natives' opposition to U.S. development that might affect the Porcupine Herd, which the two countries share. It is unlikely that a road will ever snake along the Canadian portion of the coastal calving grounds. Here in Alaska, it seems that everything may one day be changed forever. But it was still possible, when Ron and I walked wide-eyed through an arctic kaleidoscope of encounters with animals and elements, to forget the rest of the world and its concerns, unfathomably far, far to the south of these mountains’ bulwark, and as different as a different planet. Our last day was fair and calm, shirtsleeve weather for once. We hiked down-valley and around the corner of the mountains to seats with a panoramic view. Kaktovik was insignificant in the vast sweep of plain and coastline, in the eternity of ice, sky and horizon. We could see the hikers' camp below us, bright modern backpacking tents pitched across a patch of creekside. Over the banks of the creek’s floodplain, in a low spot a scant couple of hundred yards away, two grizzly bears were engaged in play-wrestling. Batting each other with huge paws, they snapped and champed and sent massive divots of tundra flying as they scrabbled and shoved for purchase. It was a nice day in the Arctic. The tired campers came winding down a side-valley from a hike, some straggling, one or two chatting, oblivious to the bears just over a rise from them. We watched them reach camp and strip off hiking boots and windbreakers, rub feet and spread parkas and sleeping bags on bushes to air. A short sprint away, the two bears jousted and snarled, tearing up the tundra in their mock rage. Who knows what may have been watching us? No human being has the ultimate vantage in this wilderness. And no one has a crystal ball to peer into its future. The only thing clear, it seemed to me, was that questions about its fate would be decided far from here, by people who have never been here, for reasons having little to do with Eskimos or Indians, caribou, musk ox, polar bears, snow geese or any other native of the North. Caribou winked as little points of yellow light, their coats catching the sunshine as they turned their flanks on hills so far away it seemed impossible that we could see them. It occurred to me that we were looking out at one of our nation's and our civilization's greatest achievements—that such wild country can still exist, a fortress of nature we have not yet stormed, and that, having it at our mercy, we have not yet followed our all-too-rarely curbed urges as Western Homo sapiens sapiens to finish it off. But at this moment of highest summer, all was still, unmoving, untouched. What we do with it now is a test of our true natures. <h3>END</h3> *********************************************************************** rss@dailykos.com (Douglas Lee) ANWR ArcticNationalWildlifeRefuge ArcticVillage caribou Kaktokiv Oil PorcupineCaribouHerd _1716619 Fri, 17 Nov 2017 21:10:45 +0000 Canadian artist tells Rush Limbaugh to 'F*ck Off ...Stop using my music on your show' https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/27/1587490/-Canadian-musician-Caribou-tells-Rush-Limbaugh-to-F-ck-Off-Stop-using-my-music-on-your-show Hate Radio’s “shock jock” and/or Donald Trump’s “Mini Me” Rush Limbaugh just got flipped off by the internationally music entity and Grammy nominee Caribou. Apparently, Rush has a teenage crush on Caribou’s music, telling his dwindling Conservative audience how smitten he is. But playing Caribou’s “Can’t Do Without You” on the Rush Limbaugh Show is just not cool with Caribou composer Dan Snaith. <a href="http://www.deephouseamsterdam.com/caribou-tells-us-conservative-rush-limbaugh-fuck-off/#prettyPhoto" target="_blank">DeephouseAmsterdam.com</a> reports: <blockquote> Rush Limbaugh joins Donald Trump at the table of the rejected by the music world. On a recent episode of his radio show a conservative political commentator, Rush Limbaugh, known for his sexist and misogynistic comments, stated he is “obsessed” with Caribou’s ( a.k.a. Dan Snaith) “Can’t Do Without You”, Rush said “This is my new favorite song of all time right now, folks. I’ve been grooving to it in every free moment that I have.”. Poor Rush liked the song so much he wanted to get it in regular rotation as a bumper on the show when he was greeted by an answer by the Canadian musician to fuck off. </blockquote> Caribou sent out a tweet last week telling Limbaugh to fuck off, and either stop using his band’s music on the show—or stop being a bigot. Here is the tweet: <div class="dk-editor-embed center-block" data-twitter-content='&lt;blockquote class="twitter-tweet"&gt;&lt;p lang="en" dir="ltr"&gt;Dear &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/rushlimbaugh"&gt;@rushlimbaugh&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;br&gt;Fuck off.&lt;br&gt;Please either:&lt;br&gt;a) stop using my music on your show&lt;br&gt;or&lt;br&gt;b) stop being a bigot.&lt;/p&gt;&amp;mdash; Caribou (@caribouband) &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/caribouband/status/789194882086645761"&gt;October 20, 2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; '><div class="remove-embed-content">x</div><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Dear <a href="https://twitter.com/rushlimbaugh">@rushlimbaugh</a>, Fuck off. Please either: a) stop using my music on your show or b) stop being a bigot.— Caribou (@caribouband) <a href="https://twitter.com/caribouband/status/789194882086645761">October 20, 2016</a></blockquote> </div> Ha! Well, looks like it’s going to have to be door #1, because Limbaugh’s bigotry seems ingrained and, well, there’s that an old saying about old dogs... Mind you, I’m not calling Rush Limbaugh an “old dog.” Wait — yes, I am. <div> Cheers to Dan Snaith for calling out bigotry on a show where he could have picked up 20 or 30 new fans. Oh, well. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="Canadian musician Caribou (L) performs on stage during the Solidays music festival in Paris on June 27, 2015. AFP PHOTO / THOMAS SAMSON (Photo credit should read THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images)" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/318292/large/GettyImages-478809564.jpg?1477586064" title="Canadian musician Caribou (L) performs on stage during the Solidays music festival in Paris on June 27, 2015. AFP PHOTO / THOMAS SAMSON (Photo credit should read THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images)"> <figcaption>Caribou</figcaption> </figure> </div> </div> rss@dailykos.com (Leslie Salzillo) Bigotry caribou ConservativeTalkRadio DailyKos DanSnaith DonaldTrump Facebook-BoycottRushLimbaughSponsorsToShutHimDown hateparade HateRadio iHeart Racism RushLimbaugh shockjock StopRush _1587490 Thu, 27 Oct 2016 16:44:52 +0000 Canada Begins Effort To Save Most Endangered Mammal in Contiguous US https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1/31/1361058/-Canada-Begins-Effort-To-Save-Most-Endangered-Mammal-in-Contiguous-US The Selkirk Caribou herd has lost 2/3 of it's already critical population in the past five years bringing the total number of individuals down to 18. It's thought that without assistance the caribou would be extirpated. <a href="http://i1302.photobucket.com/albums/ag136/hmongamongus/640px-Caribou_zpsdb801539.jpg"><img src="http://i1302.photobucket.com/albums/ag136/hmongamongus/640px-Caribou_zpsdb801539.jpg" /></a> "<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caribou.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Caribou.jpg">Caribou</a>" by Dean Biggins (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) - US FWS, DIVISION OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, WO3772-023. Licensed under Public Domain via <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/">Wikimedia Commons</a>. You're probably wondering why Canada is saving US species. Me too. Probably because the Selkirk herd wanders back and forth across the international border between our two countries and the Selkirk herd is part of the efforts in the South Peace to reverse the decline of caribou herds. rss@dailykos.com (ban nock) caribou EndangeredSpecies Wildlife _1361058 Sat, 31 Jan 2015 13:56:20 +0000 Why you are here. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/3/10/1283719/-Why-you-are-here You are here so that I can confront you with unpleasant truths that you would prefer to avoid, that you will struggle to deny, that you do not want to acknowledge and accept. Such as: Episode IV is excruciatingly bad, at a level that not even Leonard Pinth Garnell could love. Most of the original run of Star Trek also sucks. And cats are stupid. No, seriously, they are. Also, they do not have ESP -- because ESP does not exist. Get a grip. Mary Ann. Sorry Gingerists, but for God's sake, you lost this battle 50 fricking years ago. Deal. Money doesn't grow on trees, but so what? Oranges grow on trees, and have you seen the price of orange juice? If money grew on trees, who the hell would you pay to pick it? Had enough yet? No? Well, then over the vulva we go ... rss@dailykos.com (UntimelyRippd) Beaver caribou Fish Recommended Truth Wolf _1283719 Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:29:08 +0000 Displaced Caribou and the Loneliness of Believing https://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/12/1262131/-Displaced-Caribou-and-the-Loneliness-of-Believing <div class="dkimg-c"><img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/61317/large/Garden_Roof.jpg?1386839564" alt="" width="550" height="309" /></div> I was in the middle of my political awakening, pissed about the wars and worried about the fate of the planet, when I started writing letters to my congressman, representative Howard “Buck” McKeon, the ten-term Republican who has represented the 25th district of California since it was created. I wasn’t old enough to vote, and a lot of important issues weren’t even on my radar, but as far as I was concerned, I was an informed American and I was ready to prove it. rss@dailykos.com (Jet23) ArcticNationalWildlifeRefuge BuckMcKeon CA-25 California caribou Community Congress CountrywideFinancial Environment House LeeRogers Rescued SantaClarita SouthernCalifornia suburbs _1262131 Thu, 12 Dec 2013 17:00:15 +0000 Rep. Louie Gohmert: Republican congressman and noted caribou sex expert https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/2/9/1063179/-Louie-Gohmert-expert-on-caribou-sex <div class="dkimg-c"><img src="http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/6685/caribou.jpg" alt="" height="300" width="550" /> <div class="dkimg-cap">Must be on his way to the nearest pipeline.</div> </div> House Republicans are obviously obsessed with sexytime. For most of them, it's about making sure women are duly punished for it <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/08/1062937/-Pro-choice-Republicans-warn-against-making-birth-control-the-next-battleground-?via=blog_595751">by making birth control harder to get</a>. But for the <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/louie-gohmert-and-deer-humping-6653400">"dumbest man in the history of Texas politics,"</a> it's about caribou. <blockquote>Rep. Louie Gohmert, patron saint of amorous wildlife? The Texas Republican, who’s not exactly known as a champion of animal rights, said his primary concern in the development of a massive Alaskan oil pipeline is the love life of the caribous surrounding the project. [...] Here’s his theory: The caribou very much enjoy the warmth the pipeline radiates. “So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline,” he informed his colleagues. It’s apparently the equivalent of being wined and dined. And that has resulted in a tenfold caribou population boom, he concluded. “So my real concern now ...if oil stops running through the pipeline...do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?” he asked. </blockquote> Get on that claim, PolitiFact! So while Gohmert and the GOP will do their damnedest to make sure women can't get birth control, he wants to make sure animals get laid. Priorities. rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter) Birth Control BirthControl caribou Energy Environment environmentLouieGohmert House LouieOhmert Republicans _1063179 Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:59:09 +0000 View From Beside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/3/19/957958/-View-From-Beside-the-Arctic-National-Wildlife-Refuge I first noticed the wind because I realized I was turning my head to the side to walk into it. I’d peak around the hood of my parka to see what was in front of me every few feet. When someone walked past they too would walk with their head turned to the side. At thirty below zero a ten mile an hour breeze feels cold. Soon we were walking foreword but facing more backwards, the wind was picking up. I glanced into the wind and saw the snow was being blown across the ground in long twisting swirls only a few inches above the surface. Hadn’t seen that before. I remarked on it to the young guy from Montana, I forget his name, he said, “we’re in for a blow and we should stop stomping jugs”. My eyes followed his glance a mile out in front of us where I could see Stevie and his helper headed back our way pulling the cable back into the Nodwell and picking up the jug sets they’d just put down. <a href="http://i56.tinypic.com/2laqzh1.jpg"><img src="http://i56.tinypic.com/2laqzh1.jpg" /></a> Hang loose libs, and while looking below the fold think back to the days of color print film. rss@dailykos.com (ban nock) Alaska ANWR ArcticNationalWildlifeRefuge caribou EndangeredSpecies Environment Global Warming GlobalWarming Oil Petroleum PolarBears Rescued _957958 Sat, 19 Mar 2011 14:20:16 +0000 Sarah Palin: How do you feed your family when you shoot like that? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/12/6/925833/-Sarah-Palin-How-do-you-feed-your-family-when-you-shoot-like-that Posted on behalf of @Symbolman On the 50th Anniversary of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge Sarah Palin kills a docile caribou, while TLC advertises for Oil Companies. Coincidence? In "Sarah Palin's Alaska" on TLC Sarah shows the public exactly how to be an Irresponsible Hunter. An Alaskan Native jokingly asked me once, "How do you feed your family when you shoot like that?" I'd like to ask Sarah Palin that question. I know more about Alaska than she does. In the 70's, for two summers, I worked for an exploration company hired by Los Alamos and the Department of Energy to prospect for uranium - all over the face of Alaska - 18 hours a day in helicopters piloted by Vietnam veterans. I literally saw all of the state north, east and west of Fairbanks via those choppers and our mobile camp. I crashed with my crew in ANWR in a blaze of fire, and it took them nearly a week to find us in endless tundra, even when they knew basically where we were. Was once chase out of a village naked while Native folks waved shotguns and axes, as the Vietnam veterans unsheathed their guns back at the camp where we fled. rss@dailykos.com (TBTM Julie) Alaska caribou Discovery Hunting Sarah Palin SarahPalin TheLearningChannel TLC _925833 Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:50:01 +0000 Will Obama/Harper discuss caribou/salmon? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/2/19/699396/-Will-Obama-Harper-discuss-caribou-salmon The Epoch Times has a great story at this link: <a href="http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/12254/">http://www.theepochtimes.com/...</a> It may be wishful thinking, but there is hope that Obama and Harper will discuss the plight of caribou and salmon in Far North, as well as other issues. As an Alaksan, I love my Canadian neighbors.  The concept of Obama and Harper actually discussing the importance of healthy caribou herds and healthy salmon populations is about as endearing as any concept I've heard discussed lately. Follow the link above to the Epoch Times story for a terrific read.   rss@dailykos.com (akmk) caribou EpochTimes FarNorth Harper Obama Salmon Yukon _699396 Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:46:34 +0000 Donner, Tastes Just Like Chicken, Yum Yummy https://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/22/667654/-Donner-Tastes-Just-Like-Chicken-Yum-Yummy The Donner Party were the unfortunate souls trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountians, that may have dabbled in cannibalism to survive.  Hey, you do what you have to.  I don't judge.   Donder is a reindeer, aka Caribou.  Donder did not get eaten by the Donner party, or Sarah Palin (yet).   rss@dailykos.com (winter outhouse) caribou ClementClarkeMoore DonnerParty MountainPasses NightBeforeChristmas NorthPole reindeer Sarah Palin SarahPalin _667654 Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:36:52 +0000 Viagra, Caribou, and Steve LaTourette (OH-14) https://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/9/592068/-Viagra-Caribou-and-Steve-LaTourette-OH-14 Recently, while addressing the Twinsburg and Hudson Chambers of Commerce, Big Oil’s Best Friend Steve LaTourette was asked a question about drilling in Alaska.  His answer drifted to the Caribou population, and somehow ended with the following quote: "The warmth of the pipeline makes them (caribou) frisky, and the pipeline is actually like Viagra for caribou." rss@dailykos.com (Bill ONeill For Congress) BillONeill caribou Snark SteveLaTourette viagra weirdjokesbymembersofCongresswhohavebeeninCongressfortoolong _592068 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:25:31 +0000 No, the caribou don't like the pipeline - debunking a Bush (Sr.) lie https://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/20/571427/-No-the-caribou-don-t-like-the-pipeline-debunking-a-Bush-Sr-lie <blockquote>    Dole said she also supports drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, where drilling would have a small footprint that wouldn’t harm much wildlife.    "Even the caribou like to snuggle up to the pipeline," she said. </blockquote> I first came upon that claim about the caribou years ago when I was working as a fact checker for a science magazine. A reader had written in about a story we had run about the Alaska pipeline and made the claim that the pipeline really wasn't a problem for the Alaskan wildlife, that the caribou liked to snuggle up against it. It was left to me to track down whether or not this was true. rss@dailykos.com (sciencewriter) Alaskapipeline caribou Drilling GeorgeHWBush Oil oilpipeline snuggle _571427 Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:38:31 +0000 The Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is Lost https://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/19/172821/-The-Alaskan-National-Wildlife-Refuge-is-Lost I'm heartbroken... More below rss@dailykos.com (Patriot for Al Gore) ANWR caribou Environment Greed IndigenousPeoples Oil Pollution profit _172821 Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:04:47 +0000