Chill the Drills: Protect America's Arctic!

We don't need to spoil America's last great wilderness in the pursuit of oil and other fossil fuels. Take Action! Tell the Obama administration to protect America's Arctic.

Arctic Ecoregion Map | Arctic Factsheet

America Arctic is our nation's final conservation frontier. The coastal waters, rolling tundra, wild rivers, and precious wetlands, ponds, and deep lakes of the Arctic support a stunning array of wildlife. Nearly 200 bird species nest on the tundra and wetlands, while caribou, musk oxen, wolverines, and grizzly roam the vast expanses of wild lands.

Of all the Arctic's denizens, perhaps none is more emblematic-or imperiled-than the polar bear, the world's largest land carnivore. They are considered marine animals because they spend so much of their life at sea, on the pack ice. Excellent swimmers, they are sometimes sighted in open waters more than 200 miles from land.

Polar bears feed almost exclusively on seals, and their survival depends on sea ice as a platform for hunting. Individuals can travel thousands of miles in a year, following the seasonal advance and retreat of sea ice, where they do most of their mating and denning.

But global warming is wiping out sea ice habitat, vastly decreasing successful hunts. Declining snowfall and thinning or disappearing pack ice are forcing the bear to spend more time and energy hunting, and difficulty in locating prey has been linked to cub mortality and reduced weight in adults. Only about 20,000 polar bears remain in the wild, and the animal could be extinct by 2050 if their habitat melts away due to climate change.

Average temperatures are rising twice as fast in the Arctic as elsewhere the world, with devastating effects not only on sea ice, but on tundra, permafrost, and forests. Melting sea ice makes coastal areas more vulnerable to storm surges. Thawing permafrost accelerates erosion. Rising temperatures increase the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires, and are already causing insect outbreaks in the tundra and forests.

With so much of Alaska's wilderness already feeling the heat of global warming impacts it is irresponsible to create additional sources of global warming pollution—from oil development in the Arctic Ocean to coal mining in the foothills of the Brooks Range Mountains—in these wild places. To understand what's at stake, one need only look as far as the Prudhoe Bay oil fields—one of the world's largest industrial complexes. Hundreds of spills involving tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil and other toxic products occur annually. A similar fate awaits the coastal plain and the special areas of the Western Arctic if oil companies and their allies have their way.

The best defense against climate change is to protect large areas of wildlands and surrounding buffer areas which are linked to other core areas by protected corridors. The wildlands in America's Arctic are critical caribou calving grounds and core migration routes, key grizzly bear and wolverine habitat, and the most important waterfowl and shorebird habitat in North America. This connected wildlands network will allow species to move to more hospitable habitats as the climate changes, thereby increasing their chances of survival. Habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, and other human-induced stressors on an ecosystem act in synergy with climate change to increase the threat of species extinction. Ill-conceived energy development is the primary non-climate stressor that needs to be controlled to build resilient habitats and give species the fighting chance they deserve.

The Sierra Club is working with the Obama administration and Congress to permanently protect America's Arctic from additional threats posed by drilling and mining that could push wildlife over the brink. Among the Club's specific objectives:

Expand core areas, and create important buffer zones and migration corridors in the region by ensuring long-term protection of wild lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve Alaska (NPRA), including a Wilderness recommendation for coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge as part of the USFWS Comprehensive Conservation Plan;

Secure action from President Obama to protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by declaring it a National Monument
Reduce non-climate stressors by shielding more than 60 million acres of America's Arctic from oil and gas exploration, including the Utukok Uplands, Teshekpuk Lake, Deese Inlet, the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge, and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas;
Work with Alaska Native communities to prevent resource development harmful to subsistence; and
Ensure that resilient habitats principles are incorporated into new resource management plans for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, NPRA, and Gates of the Arctic National Park, as well as offshore in Bristol Bay and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.