The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at Risk
The battle over anwr (pronounced “an-war”) has been raging pretty much ever since that day. Congress designated most of the 19.6-million-acre refuge as wilderness, with almost no development allowed. But 1.5 million acres along the Arctic Ocean, east of Prudhoe Bay, known as the 10-02 area, were left in bureaucratic limbo, neither open to drilling nor off-limits to it. The 10-02 may or may not contain a lot of oil—estimates range widely—but it is clearly the ecological heart of the refuge, the summer breeding ground for two hundred thousand caribou and millions of...