Last week’s Senate vote to allow oil drilling and industrial development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has refueled a 25-year struggle between environmentalists and pro-industry interests. Both opponents and advocates of drilling on the 1.5 million-acre swath of Alaskan wilderness believe the 51to 49 Senate vote to permit drilling in the 2006 budget bill suggests a congressional shift in favor of "developing" the refuge. Yet with months to go before the budget is finalized, both sides are pushing their agendas to legislators and the public.

Denouncing the March 16 vote, environmental groups reiterated concerns that oil drilling in the refuge -- home to large populations of Caribou and other endangered species -- would be both economically ineffective and environmentally devastating. They also stressed that the budget process is an inappropriate forum for such a controversial issue. Geoff Suttle, a lobbyist with the environmental organization Sierra Club, called the Senate’s actions "fiscally irresponsible" and an "abuse of the process."

Environmentalists estimate that in recent months, hundreds of thousands of messages supporting their cause have reached legislators.

Environmentalists and opponents agree that the fight is just heating up.

"The budget process is still very complicated," said Athan Manuel, director of the Arctic Wilderness Campaign of the United States Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), "and we hope to use that to our advantage to get ‘Arctic’ out of there." The initial House and Senate budgets both passed by extremely close votes, he noted, due to a slew of other funding controversies, such as the tension over Medicaid’s finances. Seeking "to muddy those waters even more," his group will continue lobbying members of Congress still undecided on the ANWR issue, including key Republicans who have expressed ambivalence.

As Congress breaks until April 4, environmental groups are mobilizing supporters to pressure their representatives through letters and phone calls. Lydia Weiss, a lobbyist with the national organization Defenders of Wildlife, said that during the recess, "We imagine a lot of senators are going home to very, very angry constituents."

Environmentalists estimate that in recent months, hundreds of thousands of messages supporting their cause have reached legislators. They are meanwhile rallying behind recently introduced bills that would enact permanent federal protection for the area.

Tim Bristol, program director of the Alaska Coalition, said that as "the fate of the Arctic refuge hangs in the balance," the only option for activists is "to work as hard as we can, for as long as we can." The Alaska Coalition is a national alliance of over 700 organizations working to conserve the state’s wilderness.

Both sides of the debate anticipate further rounds of fractious partisan voting.

The ANWR provision currently under consideration does not actually authorize drilling, but rather incorporates into the budget scheme $2.4 billion in anticipated federal revenues from ANWR land leases. Each year since 2000, President Bush has attempted to pin an ANWR provision onto the budget, but none of the initiatives has made it through all of the negotiation and approval phases.

Though the budget process precludes a filibuster blockage of the ANWR proposal, the provision will still face a number of hurdles. Roadblocks could emerge in contentious House and Senate conference negotiations or the unpredictable budget reconciliation phase, in which lawmakers establish specific funding directives. Both sides of the debate anticipate further rounds of fractious partisan voting as Congress moves toward finalizing a dual-chamber budget resolution.

Proponents of drilling -- including the president, Republican lawmakers, and industry groups -- cheered the vote as a major, if inconclusive, step toward finally breaking open ANWR’s oil prospects.

Chuck Kleeschulte, aide to Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), one of the leading drilling advocates, said the Senate’s action was a promising sign, considering that in 2003 a similar vote turned out in favor of drilling opponents. Claiming that most Alaskans support "careful oil development," he added, "It is a fight right now basically between environmentalists and Alaskans."

Yet environmentalists claim that the broader public has consistently sided with them. Manuel said that in similar political clashes over ANWR in past years, the environmentalist community has seen "a phenomenal outpouring of support" from people across the country. He observed, "They understand that it’s a one-of-a-kind place."

Opening Act or Last Stand?

For detractors as well as supporters of drilling, the Senate vote was just the latest episode in a generation-long struggle over whether the pristine Alaskan Coastal Plain is better off utilized for human industrialization or sheltered from it. Environmentalists do not foresee a clean resolution of the issue in the near future, however the budget deliberations play out.

Even if this budget passes with the drilling provision, the environmental movement will resort to other channels to thwart the initiative, they say.

The debate could eventually move into the courts, said Chad Kisten, coordinator of the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign, a group that has made hundreds of presentations on the ANWR issue throughout North America. He is confident that the law is on their side, and he predicts that environmentalists would launch "a totally unprecedented number of legal court challenges" based on human rights protocols and environmental regulations.

Some environmentalists believe that ultimately, grassroots activism, not political or legal maneuvers, will prevail as the foundation of the anti-drilling movement. Carol Gregory, spokesperson for the environmental activist group Greenpeace, said that while it is too early to make predictions about more radical action against drilling, if the struggle escalates, people frustrated with "representatives that are not representing their wishes" would "in a peaceful manner, do what they can to protect [the refuge]."

Some environmentalists believe that ultimately, grassroots activism, not political or legal maneuvers, will prevail as the foundation of the anti-drilling movement.

For now, most environmental organizations are tightly focusing their energies on Capitol Hill. Bristol remarked, "It’s such a Herculean task just to protect the refuge from the Congress and the hostility of the administration."

With an even more heavily Republican legislature than last year’s, Manuel sees this congressional showdown with drilling proponents as the climax of a protracted battle. "If we beat them back this year," he said, "I hope that they will finally get the message that this is a losing proposition, that the American people don’t want it, and that they should spend their time and energy working on real energy policy," such as regulations to promote more efficient, sustainable energy systems.

"It’s just obscene that we would rather drill in places like the Arctic Refuge than require car companies to make cleaner and more fuel-efficient automobiles," he argued.

Spotlight shifts from profit to ideology

Environmentalists have in the past accused the oil industry lobby of influencing the drilling debate through a well-greased campaign-finance system. In the 2004 election cycle, the oil and gas industries funneled almost $15.6 billion into congressional campaigns, 80 percent of which went to Republican candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the impact of money in politics.

Yet observers on both sides of the issue have noticed that lately, the oil industry has distanced itself from the public debate. Under the Clinton administration, four major oil companies -- British Petroleum, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips -- helped form the pro-industry lobbying group Arctic Power. But in recent years, all but ExxonMobil have abandoned the self-proclaimed "non-profit citizen’s organization." Activists speculate that pressure from consumers and shareholders, combined with more immediate investment interests elsewhere, have deterred corporations from openly advocating drilling in the refuge.

In campaigning for drilling, the Bush Administration and allies have eclipsed the industry lobby, promoting access to the wilderness reserve largely as a national security issue. The administration’s energy plan, in which the Refuge features prominently, purports to increase the country’s "energy independence" by reducing oil imports, particularly from places like the Persian Gulf, which in 2003 supplied 22 percent of net US oil imports. The Department of Energy estimated that if drilling began in 2013, ANWR would by 2025 yield enough oil to reduce by 3 to 6 percentage points the imported portion of the country’s annual oil supply, projected to reach 70 percent that year. But the department projects that, after reaching "peak production" around 2024, within three to four years, reserves would begin to "decline until they are no longer profitable."

At a press conference preceding last week’s vote, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) stated, "[O]ur dependence on foreign oil is a direct threat to our national security," suggesting that relying on "rogue states and militant nations" to meet energy needs increases US vulnerability.

But Manuel of US PIRG countered that no matter how much oil is eventually recovered from the Alaskan wilderness, the country could never produce enough fossil fuels to eliminate dependence on foreign resources, adding that this is "a fact of geology, not politics."

Activists say that as the debate has intensified, it has become more ideologically tinted, extending past the borders of the federally designated part of the refuge that could be opened to drilling, the so-called "1002 area," to the broader question of extracting fossil fuels from federally protected lands.

Adrian Herrera, spokesperson for Arctic Power, said that the organization's strategy was confined to the 1002 area and "will have no impact on other attempts to develop energy resources on federal lands."

In contrast, the industry association American Petroleum Institute has advocated more oil exploration on government lands, arguing that government controls on drilling in federal areas are excessively restrictive.

Critics suspect that officials involved in the drilling proposal have bigger designs as well.

Drilling in the ANWR is one of several projects proposed by the Bush administration for facilitating oil and gas extraction on federal lands, including wildlife regions in the Midwest and marine sites off the country’s coasts.

According to Bristol of the Alaska Coalition, the conflict over ANWR "is just the opening salvo." If the Bush administration succeeds in penetrating an area widely regarded as a natural treasure, he warned, "there aren’t a whole lot of places in the United States that are safe."

Economic and scientific realities color symbolic debate

Since Congress carved out the Coastal Plain from the 19.6 million-acre refuge in 1980 specifically for oil production research, environmentalists have held that the potential ecological damage from oil extraction would far outweigh the possible profits. But drilling proponents claim the environmental impact of the "development" process would be negligible compared to the economic gain.

Based on a hypothetical price of $40 per barrel of oil, the US Geological Survey’s estimates for the amount of oil that companies could profitably extract from the federal area, along with adjacent territories subsequently available for drilling, range from 4.7 to 14.8 billion barrels, the two extremes reflecting scenarios with high and low probabilities, respectively. By way of comparison, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the country in 2003 produced approximately two billion barrels of crude oil and consumed about 7.3 billion barrels of petroleum in total.

Critics have dismissed economic arguments for oil drilling with counter-analyses that cast doubt on the region’s profit-generating potential.

Watchdog groups have taken issue with Arctic Power’s well-publicized projection of 736,000 new jobs resulting from arctic drilling. The DC-based think tank Center for Economic Policy Research calculated that the venture would produce fewer than 50,000 jobs, and that this growth would evaporate once the area’s oil reserves were fully plundered.

While some large unions like the Teamsters have endorsed arctic drilling, others, including the Service Employees International Union and the Federation of Independent Unions, have voiced opposition, calling instead for an energy policy with more sustainable benefits for consumers, labor and the environment.

Environmental groups have furthermore questioned the fiscal accuracy of the ANWR budget provision. One economic analysis, commissioned by the Alaska Wilderness League, an environmentalist coalition, found that in the past two decades, leases for the exploitation of oil resources in Alaska’s North Slope region, which borders the Refuge, have averaged about $50 per acre. Yet analysts surmised that to reach the amount provided for in the current budget, each of the 400,000 to 600,000 acres to be leased would have to be priced at $4,000 to $6,000. Although historically, there have been spikes in land prices for highly valued oil reserves, the League’s legislative director, Brian Moore, called the $2.4 billion figure touted by the pro-drilling faction "an invisible number."

In response to industry-backed claims that advanced technologies can minimize the environmental "footprint" of drilling, the environmentalist community protests that any degree of oil exploitation would violate a natural sanctuary on which unique wildlife and communities depend for survival.

In February, a group of 1,000 scientists wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to drop plans for giving corporations access to the Wildlife Refuge, citing evidence that other oil extraction projects in Alaska have polluted and depleted the natural habitat and harmed wildlife populations.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation analyzed industrial spill data from 1996 to 2002 in the North Slope and found that the region averaged 395 spills per year. Those incidents released an annual average of over 59,000 gallons of chemicals, mostly petroleum and other hazardous substances. The department registered nearly 2,000 spills in the region from January 2001 through February 2005.

Environmental groups have warned of deep social costs to indigenous groups whose traditional ways of life may be disrupted by oil drilling activity. The Gwich’in Nation, comprised of several thousand natives whose subsistence and culture are based on the local Caribou migration route, protest the drilling initiative as a human rights issue.

Luci Beach, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said the plans to develop the refuge, pushed by politicians and established native corporations that control the land, reveal "total disregard for the First People of this country." Beach said, "Unfortunately, in Alaska, a lot of folks have made it to positions of power and maintained positions of power because of oil development."

Beach believes more is at stake in the ANWR debate than the integrity of the environment; allowing oil interests to gain control of the Coastal Plain could be a spiritual loss for indigenous communities everywhere. "Sacred lands," she predicted, "will be up for grabs across the nation."