The Trump administration finalized a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, putting it on track to issue decades-long leases in the pristine wilderness area before a potential change in U.S. leadership.

Presidential hopeful Joe Biden and green groups criticized the move as a giveaway to Big Oil that would harm the Arctic’s unique ecosystem and native people.

The Interior Department could hold a sale of oil and gas leases in ANWR by the end of the year, Secretary David Bernhardt said.

A Republican-passed tax bill in 2017 opened the area to oil and gas leasing, a key pillar of U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda to expand fossil fuel production. However, lease sales in the state have been weak for most of the last decade, and statewide production has dropped steadily for the past 30 years.

If found, oil production could begin in ANWR in about eight years, Bernhardt said, with activity lasting about 50 years.

The 19 million acre refuge is home to wildlife populations including Porcupine caribou and polar bears and has been off-limits to drilling for decades. In recent months, several big U.S. banks have said recently they will not finance oil and gas projects in the Arctic region.

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An Italian man suffering from frostbite and four other tourists were rescued in the Alaska wilderness after visiting an abandoned bus that has become a lure for adventurers since it was featured in the “Into the Wild” book and movie.

Alaska State Troopers say the five Italians were rescued from a camp they set up after visiting the dilapidated bus on the Stampede Trail near the interior town of Healy.

The hikers were found 13 miles from the trailhead, Trooper spokesman Tim DeSpain said. He didn’t know how far they were from the bus.

One of the hikers had frostbite to his feet and was transported to Fairbanks for treatment, DeSpain said. The hiker’s injuries are not considered life-threatening. The other four hikers were picked up by friends in Healy.

Rescuers were alerted by the hikers with a satellite-based emergency device that notified the International Emergency Response Coordination Center of a medical emergency, troopers said. That international group then notified rescuers, who reached the site by snowmobile.

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By Chia-Chia Lin for the New York Times

To say that Alaska is what you make of it suggests unconstrained entitlement; it’s something the colonizers could have said. At the same time, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Alaska is one of the last places in this country where you can wander millions of acres of land, doing whatever and sleeping wherever you please. If someone might have objected to your actions elsewhere, here he would simply never know.

All that summer, I thought I had ventured to Alaska to try on a different way of life, one that tested my self-reliance and competence. I wondered if I’d failed. Now, years later, I believe I was simply searching for a place I’ll clumsily call an anti-home. I mean an antithesis to my own childhood home — for in the backcountry I’d found quiet and stillness and the edge of happiness — but I also mean a place at odds with all notions of home. A place with no safety net, no walls, no sense of enclosure or intimacy or kinship. A place of exposure. It was not so much that I wanted to prove something to others, but that I had a question for myself: Who was I, in a place like that?

With trail hiking, the questions are limited: Is that the path? Which fork should we take? But in the backcountry, the questions are so numerous, so overwhelming, as to achieve a nearly rhetorical pitch. Forward or backward or right or left or any of the degrees in between? Where did that mountain come from? Will we ever see another human being?

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For three days in March 1989, the oil — at least 11 million gallons of it, though some say much more — had lain like a still pool around the ship, virtually untouched by cleanup efforts. Now the storm clawed the oil across the sound’s tracery of rocky islands, into their infinite crevices, and ultimately over more than 1,000 miles of rich coastal wilderness.

The story isn’t over. Indeed, the tragedy of that coastal Alaska paradise is only deepening as it enters another, even darker act.

Experts at the time said a comeback would take decades, but that the spectacular biological wealth of these waters would return if given the chance, without another oil spill to knock it down. What they didn’t anticipate was a much larger, more diffuse threat. Changes brought by human emissions of carbon dioxide — warming and acidifying ocean waters — have proved as destructive as the spill, and they will not disperse, as the oil eventually did.

Hundreds of thousands of seabirds died following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, whole flocks of them rolled up into windrows on remote beaches by the sticky, emulsified oil.

Now that has happened again, this time without the oil, as long, stinking piles of dead seabirds wash ashore, apparently starved in anomalously warm Northern waters that no longer produce abundant food. But this time, on winter days at remote beaches, visitors are scarce and news coverage has been local and scant.

The climate crisis is too large, too diffuse, and is hitting too many places at once — everywhere, really — to produce the outrage that exploded when lovely animals choked on Exxon’s oil.

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Heading up the trail, relics from the mine began to appear. Rusted-out pipes and cast-off chunks of steel, their purpose left to the imagination, lined the stream bed like a trail of bread crumbs to the mine proper.

The rusted hulks of engines, crushers, corrugated metal and sluice boxes stood like ancient sentries to the entrance of a tunnel into the side of the mountain.

The entrance was bridged by snow and partially caved in. A narrow set of iron tracks, used to ferry material from the depths of the mountain in ore carts, emerged from the tunnel. They lay on the ground, twisted and upheaved, perhaps from the constant weather changes in the high country, or maybe earthquakes.

To the north, on a steep slope of granite, there was weathered chunks of lumber scattered about and a faint trail that zig-zagged to the top of the ridgeline — as good a way as any to climb higher and deeper into the mountains.

There were signs of ptarmigan throughout the area. The hatch wouldn’t have been more than a week old, and the hens stay tucked in in those early days. But the area did show promise.

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This rescue dog is making it his life’s work to rescue others. Nanook, an Alaskan husky, has been known to scout the trailhead of the 24-mile long Crow Pass Trail, about half a mile from Girdwood, Alaska, looking for hikers to assist on their journey.

Nanook’s heroics were on full display when he rescued deaf Rochester Institute of Technology student Amelia Milling. She had lost her footing and plummeted 600 feet down the mountain, when Nanook appeared and guided her back to the path. But his work wasn’t done yet. He stayed with her as she tried fording a frozen river. When she slipped and fell in, he was there to paddle her to safety. As she attempted to lay in her sleeping bag to warm up, Nanook stayed by her side, licking her to help expedite her recovery. Thanks to the husky’s efforts, Amelia was well taken care of until the rescue helicopter arrived.

Nanook completes the trail with strangers so often that he engraved his collar with the title, “Crow Pass Guide Dog.” Through Facebook, Swift has learned of at least a dozen instances where Nanook has saved hikers’ lives.

While he wasn’t trained specifically to be a rescue dog, Nanook seems to have carved out quite the humanitarian career for himself in the woods of Alaska.

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At the end of last year, President Trump and Congress officially gave the green light to oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). For Alaskan lawmakers, the inclusion of a drilling provision in the GOP tax bill was a victorious end to a nearly 40-year struggle to develop parts of the resource-rich refuge.

But lifting the decades-old ban on fossil-fuel development in the refuge, it turns out, is just the start of a scramble to actually erect rigs into the air and get drills into the ground.

With control of the executive and legislative branches, Republicans are eager to get through the environmental review process before a Democrat has a chance to regain the White House in 2020.

Officials are racing to auction off drilling rights — because once they do that, it makes the job of again closing ANWR to drilling that much harder in the future.

Today, the Interior Department will kickstart the lengthy environmental review process, allowing members of the public to weigh in on developing the pristine coastal plain. During the 60-day comment period, citizens can write to the agency’s Bureau of Land Management to identify potential environmental issues. The BLM will also hold public hearings in Anchorage, Fairbanks and three Arctic communities in the state.

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Like a giant dragonfly, the chopper skims over undulating swaths of tussocky tundra, then touches down at Wolverine Lake, one of a swarm of kettle lakes near the Toolik Field Station on Alaska’s North Slope. Even before the blades stop spinning, Rose Cory, an aquatic geochemist from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, gracefully swings to the ground and beelines to the spot where, four years ago, a subterranean block of ice began to melt, causing the steep, sloping bank to slump into the water. The lake throws back a somber reflection of the clouds swirling above, its surface riffled by the wind.

Cory is here because the slump provides a vivid example of the ordinarily inaccessible stuff she studies. Slick with meltwater, the chocolaty goop brims with microscopic bits of once-living things that have not touched sunlight or air or flowing water for centuries, perhaps millennia. Deeper still lie plant and animal remains that could be tens of thousands of years old, dating back to the Pleistocene, when steppe bison and woolly mammoths wandered a treeless region that extended from here across the Bering Land Bridge, all the way to Siberia.

To those like Cory who know how to parse it, this slump is a source of wonder. It offers a tantalizing portal into the hidden world of permafrost, the broad band of perpetually frozen soils that undergirds a circumpolar region more than twice the size of the continental U.S. This region is now warming at twice the rate of the global average, with grave implications for the stability of permafrost and all it holds. Both small and large things are poised to emerge from this gelid domain, from common soil-dwelling bacteria, to the nearly intact carcasses of Ice Age megafauna. The most important, however, is the carbon stored in the frozen layers of leaves, stems and roots that lie beneath our feet.

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  A decades-long fight over a landmark rule protecting wild forests nationwide took another successful–and possibly final–turn after a U.S. district court threw out a last-ditch attack by the state of Alaska against the Roadless Rule.

Adopted in the closing days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Rule prohibits most logging and road construction in roadless areas of national forests. These lands, today equaling about 50 million acres or about the size of Nebraska, are some of the wildest places left in America.

Upon its passage, the rule was overwhelmingly popular with the American people, including those who like to hike, camp, fish and recreate among the trees in wild, unmarred areas. The Forest Service also liked the rule, since, at the time, the agency had a multibillion-dollar backlog on maintenance for more than 400,000 miles of existing roads, and it wasn’t eager to add even more to its workload.

Yet, despite its popularity, state political leaders with ties to the logging and timber industries hated the new rule. Even before President Clinton left office, they began their attack. The Bush administration, which took office just eight days later, failed to come to the rule’s defense.

What followed was a 16-year legal battle involving a number of Earthjustice attorneys from the Denver, Bozeman, Seattle and Juneau offices, dozens of courtrooms and judges, and thousands of hours of legal wrangling.

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Kodiak Island, the second largest in the United States, is best known for the main quarry of this trip, the oversized subspecies of brown bear, the Kodiak bear, that is unique to its mountains and shorelines. This journey goes 130 miles along the notoriously rough shoreline of Shelikof Strait, across river drainages and bays, paddling packrafts through a series of lakes that end at Karluk Lake, which flows into its namesake river and the point of the start of the journey.

The Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge shares many characteristics with other wilderness areas in the United States in that it is largely untrammeled. Despite the occasional indication of human presence, the hinterlands remain much as they did when the glaciers from the last ice age began their inexorable retreat into the mountains, and the ancestors of the Alutiiq people settled the island some 7,000 years ago.

These places are best experienced one step, or paddle, at a time. Capturing the wilderness connects the present with a past beyond our own. It connects us all to the earth and our collective past.

Sitka black-tailed deer, a nonnative mammal to Kodiak Island, were first successfully introduced to the island in 1924 as were other nonnative species including reindeer, mountain goats, Roosevelt elk, beaver, red squirrel, snowshoe hare, and pine marten, between the 1920s and 1960s. They landed on Kodiak in an effort to increase subsistence and recreational hunting opportunities. The Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge estimates that 30,000 to 50,000 Sitka black-tailed deer live on the islands of the archipelago. And so do some predators.

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