REPORTER: Craig McMurtrie
PORCUPINE RIVER
Winter has been slow to loosen its grip on the Porcupine River.
At last, the caribou are coming.
RANDALL: Grandfather, he lives in the mountain north of here, and what he's doing is he's telling the caribou to go feed the people, and go clothe the people. Give the people shelter, give the people life.
Waiting has been hard, but the Vuntut Gwitchin people of Old Crow Village have been patient.
REPORTER: So you think you'll have some success today. You think today's a good day?
JOE: Oh yeah, we're going to get caribou. Caribou's going to come.
The pull of the Porcupine River is strong. It's where the massive here gets its name. And as they've done for generations, the Porcupine caribou -- more than a hundred thousand of them -- are making the long migration from their winter feeding range in Canada, to carving grounds on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, deep inside America's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR.
JOE: We call it the womb of the, because it's where they have their young, and it's the only sensitive place and the most environmentally friendly place that the caribou can actually have their young and the mortality rate won't be so high.
For the Gwitchin, who call themselves the caribou people, the coastal plain in the high Arctic, beyond Alaska's Brooks Range, is sacred.
But it's also central to the U.S. President's plans for increased energy production. George Bush wants to allow oil companies to explore the calving grounds.
If the industry and its supporters have their way, the caribou will have to share.
LOWELL: ANWR and the coastal plain, in the wintertime it's a frozen wasteland, in the summertime it's a mosquito infested bog, and to go in there and to allow exploration to determine if there's oil or not is not going to damage the coastal plain at all.
For one Old Crow family, prayer opens a celebration.
Seven year old, Jay Charlie, has shot his first caribou. It's one of 300 animals likely to be taken this spring harvest.
The meat will be prepared in the time honoured way, in his grandmother's smokehouse.
FANNY CHARLIE (Vuntut Gwitchin Elder): I don't know, this year we never see caribou for long time. We're just hungry for meat, but no caribou came.
REPORTER: What do you eat if there's no caribou?
FANNY: Store meat. [laughs]
REPORTER: It's not as good?
FANNY: It's good, but it costs so much.
On the Porcupine River, it seems every boat in the village is out.
JOE: I'm just going to ride up this way, just to see what we've got up there.
One of Old Crow's senior hunters, Joe Tetlichi, is looking for a bull. The cows, many pregnant, always cross first. The bulls follow. In the swift flowing current, the caribou are helpless.
JOE: We're just going to land down here where it's a nice rocky beach, rather than on the mud, a nice place to skin the caribou.
For Joe and his five year old son, Jamie, the hunt isn't a weekend pastime, it's a way of life. Change has always come slowly here. Tradition matters.
JOE: Usually what we try and do when we skin the caribou is make sure that the -- we try not to make too much holes in the skin, because we might use the skin for tanning.
The harvest will provide meat for the summer -- from the head to the hooves, nothing is wasted.
JOE: This is not only an environmental issue. This is a human rights issue. And we want these caribou here, protected, for our future generations. So people can -- my children, my great grandchildren -- can experience what I had when I was young. And the only way to do that is to educate people so that they can understand what it's important that we're trying to save the Arctic refuge.
The future of the Porcupine caribou is shaping as a key issue in whether to allow oil exploration.
At Old Crow airstrip, a research team has arrived to begin an aerial survey of the herd. They'll trace up to a hundred cows. The animals wearing collars that send out tracking signals.
DENNIS: We had some signals at Timber Creek, which is -- that's across the hill from Babich River.
PATTY: So there's still radios south of the river?
DENNIS: Yeah. There were two days ago.
In their tiny super cub made of stretched canvas and aluminium, pilot Dennis Miller and researcher, Patty Delvecchio, will spend hours searching. Looking for the collared cows and any newborn calves on the herd's 600 kilometre trek.
DENNIS: All right, well I'll start descending, see if we can see it. Looks pretty mottled up there.
PATTY: Look, there's caribou everywhere, look.
For those lucky enough to witness this unique natural wonder, there's a clear message.
MIKE KROMPAK (BT worker): If every citizen in our country could experience and see what I've been fortunate enough to see and experience, there would be a very strong message sent to protect this place and keep it. It's too valuable.
DENNIS: Here it comes.
PATTY: Two antlers.
DENNIS: No calf that I saw. I'll swing around and make another pass.
Since a peak 12 years ago of nearly 180,000, the herd has been in steady decline. Three years ago it had shrunk to 130,000 animals. And that was before two back to back late springs, when calves born outside the coastal plain have to struggle through deep snow.
KROMPAK: In these lakes, down in Old Crow flats, too much water, too much snow still.
Later, after eight hours flying, the team is comparing notes back at base. The news is gloomy.
MILLER (pilot): There's a fair amount of random calves out there. They're not showing up so much with all the collared animals, but they're not infrequent. And they're walking, they're dropping them and getting in line, which is tough on the calves.
For the caribou biologists, the fragility of the Porcupine herd makes the prospect of oil development all the more worrying.
KROMPACK: The United States Geological Survey, in the most recent assessment of petroleum potential in the coastal plain of the Arctic refuge is that there are many scattered small deposits that would need to be developed. And that means a proliferation of infrastructure on the surface, which causes more potential problem for caribou, because of the several sites developed with roads and pipes connecting them, that may contribute to more of a problem for the caribou.
BILL VAN DYKE (Alaska State Oil and Gas Division): I personally don't believe that the caribou will be impacted if there's development on the coastal plain. It's been done here, and it's been done correctly and there's really no impact to the caribou.
North-west of Old Crow, centred on Prudhoe Bay, America's giant North Slope oil fields already stretch across much of the coastal plain, stopping short of the calving ground inside ANWR.
For 20 years, as the North Slope fields have grown, the refuge has been off limits. But for conservationists, the deal to preserve the Arctic wilderness came with a sting in the tail -- in fashioning a compromise in 1980, the U.S. Congress left open the possibility of oil exploration on the last five percent of the coastal plain that wasn't already subject to development. It was called the 1002 area, a tiny fragment of the whole wilderness, its ambiguous status guaranteed the bitter and emotional debate that's followed ever since.
Eager to show the advances in technology, and how safe oil production can be, we've been invited to in
KROMPAK: The field has 1.2 million total, in the field, and as technology grows, this will becoming online sometime in the fall.
Across the North Slope a frenzied search is under way for more oil. Production peaked back in the eighties, and has been falling ever since.
Though the figures are disputed, geologists believe that underneath the tundra, at the 1002 area, the oil companies could find another three to sixteen billion barrels of oil. The U.S. consumes about seven billion each year.
And by using new techniques, smaller pads and advances in directional drilling, the industry says it would leave only a small footprint on the calving ground.
VAN DYKE: It's a technique where you first drill down in a vertical direction and then you turn the drill bit and you actually drill out in a horizontal direction, so you can reach away from your drilling island or your platform.
REPORTER: And what's the advantage of that?
VAN DYKE: Well, certainly you don't have to build as many drill sites. You can build one central drill site and then develop the reservoir in all directions from that drill site.
With gravel roads and hundreds of pipelines, the industrial sprawl of the North Slope fields now reaches over some two thousand square kilometres. And though we stop for what our guides describe as wildlife opportunities, there's no denying the impact on the Arctic landscape.
REPORTER: The oil companies here on the North Slope already have access to 95 percent of the coastal plain. Why do they need the last five percent?
VAN DYKE: I think the question to ask is why not. You know, the area was set aside, it wasn't made a wilderness, it's part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it was set aside specifically so Congress could decide in due time whether it should be open for oil and gas development. There's nothing over there now and some people just don't want anything there, regardless of even if you can do it right, they just don't want anything over there.
Bill Van Dyke says the Gwitchin aren't the only indigenous peoples of the Arctic. He suggests we talk to the Inupiat Eskimos, because they've lived with big oil, and know its impact. Thirty minutes out of Prudhoe Bay, under low hanging sea fog, like Nuiqsut.
PILOT: Welcome to Nuiqsut.
A tiny village on the coastal plain, the Inupiat Eskimos who live here find themselves increasingly surrounded by oil activity.
Unlike Old Crow, Nuiqsut is still waiting for the spring hunt, waiting for the ice to release the Nechilik River.
C.J. OYAGAK (Inupiat Eskimo Hunter): We've got almost practically pipeline completely surrounding this whole village, with NPRA on this side and Alpine on this side, and now they've just discovered another oil field over on this side of the river.
The development and the oil money has brought a building boom. The village is about to get natural gas, courtesy of a pipeline from the nearby Phillips oilfield.
And there's a seven million dollar water and sewer system being installed.
At the only gym at the only school, three village basketballers are being sponsored by oil companies to travel to high school tournament in Australia.
COACH: All right, in about six weeks, close to six weeks, we got three guys going to Australia. They'll be a part of the Alaska team. Would the three stand up -- Michael, Vernon and Sam. These three young men are going to represent the State of Alaska and this village at Australia this summer next month.
Down the road, the city hall has been swamped with grants, but all this money hasn't brought universal support.
ROSEMARY AHTUANGARUAK (Nuiqsut Deputy Mayor):Three years in a row now we've had real troubles with caribou harvesting, because of the new pipelines out there. They're so close to the community that they're deflecting the herd, plus the activity of the choppers bringing equipment back and forth, that's causing us the hardest problem.
The village mayor and deputy mayor are meeting with a scientist from Alaska's Department of Fish & Game.
SVERRE PEDERSON (Alaska Dept of Fish & Game): You know, one crew's flying this way, another crew's flying that way, and it looks like there could be an awful lot of disturbance here.
AHTUANGARUAK: People that are trying to live a subsistence lifestyle are very frustrated, because now the impacts of development has come very close to home, and now our hunting grounds are being developed.
REPORTER: Do you trust the oil companies?
AHTUANGARUAK: I don't trust them at all. They have people who are public relations people that come to the community, they are told to say this and that. They try to decrease conflicts, but they have no power to make it work. And so they come out here with all these things, and -- oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea, let's try that. Oh, I'm sorry, did we cause a problem, well I'll tell them that. But in reality, they don't have the power to stop it.
Concern over their caribou hunting ground is nothing compared to the outright alarm in Nuiqsut over what offshore exploration might do to the annual whale harvest.
Between September hunts, meat and muktuk is stored in ice cellars beneath the permafrost. Whaling is as central to this community as the caribou are to Old Crow.
Mayor and whale captain, Eli Nukapigak proudly talks of catching whales that can be three times as long as his boat. Using a harpoon loaded with a home made bomb of highly unstable black powder.
NUKAPIGAK: This is a bomb, a whale bomb, that we use to hunt this bowhead whale. And the one is the harpoon gun, and it goes in like this.
REPORTER: And that's on the end of the harpoon?
NUKAPIGAK: Yeah, and you just put this one in here like this and there'd be another line.
REPORTER: There are obviously lots of benefits to the town -- buildings and things that you're getting now. Is it worth it? Do most villagers think it's worth it?
NUKAPIGAK: I don't think it's worth it, because even though you say no to the development, they still continue to do it. They say that it benefits the national interests of the United States as a whole. But its destroying our and interfering with our hunting grounds.
RICHARD SEIFERT (University of Alaska): The juggernaut of western civilisation isn't going to slow down for these people. They're the deer in the headlights.
Oil money has flowed freely throughout Alaska.
In Fairbanks, over 500 kilometres south of Nuiqsut, a former senior state government official, Don Lowell, is holding a barbecue, so we can hear the bigger picture.
LOWELL: I'm solidly in support of development on our slope. It means a lot to Alaska, lots of income that could provide public services, public education, improvements in government services.
And it's little wonder. Oil revenues pay for 85 percent of the state budget. Alaskans don't pay state taxes. What's more, everyone gets an annual oil dividend. Last year's was worth nearly two thousand U.S. dollars.
JUANITA HELMS (Former Fairbanks Borough Mayor): I look at Alaska and equate it with the old company town, where you have a single industry that supports the entire community. I think Alaska's like that.
SEIFERT: I think that's a real problem politically in this state. The state is incredibly bizarre in a politically sense, because we all get a great deal of vested interest from the oil development, but we have no way of influencing our legislators in any normal democratic process, because they are not beholden to us.
REPORTER: Is it healthy the oil industry has so much influence over Alaskan politics?
JOHN DAVIES (Alaskan State Representative): Well, I don't think it is. I think that it's the 900 pound gorilla in Alaska, the oil industry, and it clearly has a major influence on the politics of the state legislature. And it's a difficult thing to maintain an independent view when that's the case. I mean certainly they're major contributors to a lot of campaigns and that has it's -- you know -- has its effect.
As the hunters of Old Crow village complete their spring harvest, they know that if it was up to most Alaskans, the oil companies would already be in the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou. But it isn't.
Though they rely on the oil that's pumped along the trans-Alaska pipeline, the lower 48 states of America are more evenly divided. And because of that, the U.S. Congress has shown some reluctance to open up the refuge.
But America has a new president with a new energy policy. It says the country should produce more, rather than consume less. The final decision will be taken far away from this extraordinary place. But with industry reaching ever deeper into the Arctic, there is another question to consider. Can there ever be a place or time to simply stop?
PORCUPINE RIVER
Winter has been slow to loosen its grip on the Porcupine River.
At last, the caribou are coming.
RANDALL: Grandfather, he lives in the mountain north of here, and what he's doing is he's telling the caribou to go feed the people, and go clothe the people. Give the people shelter, give the people life.
Waiting has been hard, but the Vuntut Gwitchin people of Old Crow Village have been patient.
REPORTER: So you think you'll have some success today. You think today's a good day?
JOE: Oh yeah, we're going to get caribou. Caribou's going to come.
The pull of the Porcupine River is strong. It's where the massive here gets its name. And as they've done for generations, the Porcupine caribou -- more than a hundred thousand of them -- are making the long migration from their winter feeding range in Canada, to carving grounds on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, deep inside America's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR.
JOE: We call it the womb of the, because it's where they have their young, and it's the only sensitive place and the most environmentally friendly place that the caribou can actually have their young and the mortality rate won't be so high.
For the Gwitchin, who call themselves the caribou people, the coastal plain in the high Arctic, beyond Alaska's Brooks Range, is sacred.
But it's also central to the U.S. President's plans for increased energy production. George Bush wants to allow oil companies to explore the calving grounds.
If the industry and its supporters have their way, the caribou will have to share.
LOWELL: ANWR and the coastal plain, in the wintertime it's a frozen wasteland, in the summertime it's a mosquito infested bog, and to go in there and to allow exploration to determine if there's oil or not is not going to damage the coastal plain at all.
For one Old Crow family, prayer opens a celebration.
Seven year old, Jay Charlie, has shot his first caribou. It's one of 300 animals likely to be taken this spring harvest.
The meat will be prepared in the time honoured way, in his grandmother's smokehouse.
FANNY CHARLIE (Vuntut Gwitchin Elder): I don't know, this year we never see caribou for long time. We're just hungry for meat, but no caribou came.
REPORTER: What do you eat if there's no caribou?
FANNY: Store meat. [laughs]
REPORTER: It's not as good?
FANNY: It's good, but it costs so much.
On the Porcupine River, it seems every boat in the village is out.
JOE: I'm just going to ride up this way, just to see what we've got up there.
One of Old Crow's senior hunters, Joe Tetlichi, is looking for a bull. The cows, many pregnant, always cross first. The bulls follow. In the swift flowing current, the caribou are helpless.
JOE: We're just going to land down here where it's a nice rocky beach, rather than on the mud, a nice place to skin the caribou.
For Joe and his five year old son, Jamie, the hunt isn't a weekend pastime, it's a way of life. Change has always come slowly here. Tradition matters.
JOE: Usually what we try and do when we skin the caribou is make sure that the -- we try not to make too much holes in the skin, because we might use the skin for tanning.
The harvest will provide meat for the summer -- from the head to the hooves, nothing is wasted.
JOE: This is not only an environmental issue. This is a human rights issue. And we want these caribou here, protected, for our future generations. So people can -- my children, my great grandchildren -- can experience what I had when I was young. And the only way to do that is to educate people so that they can understand what it's important that we're trying to save the Arctic refuge.
The future of the Porcupine caribou is shaping as a key issue in whether to allow oil exploration.
At Old Crow airstrip, a research team has arrived to begin an aerial survey of the herd. They'll trace up to a hundred cows. The animals wearing collars that send out tracking signals.
DENNIS: We had some signals at Timber Creek, which is -- that's across the hill from Babich River.
PATTY: So there's still radios south of the river?
DENNIS: Yeah. There were two days ago.
In their tiny super cub made of stretched canvas and aluminium, pilot Dennis Miller and researcher, Patty Delvecchio, will spend hours searching. Looking for the collared cows and any newborn calves on the herd's 600 kilometre trek.
DENNIS: All right, well I'll start descending, see if we can see it. Looks pretty mottled up there.
PATTY: Look, there's caribou everywhere, look.
For those lucky enough to witness this unique natural wonder, there's a clear message.
MIKE KROMPAK (BT worker): If every citizen in our country could experience and see what I've been fortunate enough to see and experience, there would be a very strong message sent to protect this place and keep it. It's too valuable.
DENNIS: Here it comes.
PATTY: Two antlers.
DENNIS: No calf that I saw. I'll swing around and make another pass.
Since a peak 12 years ago of nearly 180,000, the herd has been in steady decline. Three years ago it had shrunk to 130,000 animals. And that was before two back to back late springs, when calves born outside the coastal plain have to struggle through deep snow.
KROMPAK: In these lakes, down in Old Crow flats, too much water, too much snow still.
Later, after eight hours flying, the team is comparing notes back at base. The news is gloomy.
MILLER (pilot): There's a fair amount of random calves out there. They're not showing up so much with all the collared animals, but they're not infrequent. And they're walking, they're dropping them and getting in line, which is tough on the calves.
For the caribou biologists, the fragility of the Porcupine herd makes the prospect of oil development all the more worrying.
KROMPACK: The United States Geological Survey, in the most recent assessment of petroleum potential in the coastal plain of the Arctic refuge is that there are many scattered small deposits that would need to be developed. And that means a proliferation of infrastructure on the surface, which causes more potential problem for caribou, because of the several sites developed with roads and pipes connecting them, that may contribute to more of a problem for the caribou.
BILL VAN DYKE (Alaska State Oil and Gas Division): I personally don't believe that the caribou will be impacted if there's development on the coastal plain. It's been done here, and it's been done correctly and there's really no impact to the caribou.
North-west of Old Crow, centred on Prudhoe Bay, America's giant North Slope oil fields already stretch across much of the coastal plain, stopping short of the calving ground inside ANWR.
For 20 years, as the North Slope fields have grown, the refuge has been off limits. But for conservationists, the deal to preserve the Arctic wilderness came with a sting in the tail -- in fashioning a compromise in 1980, the U.S. Congress left open the possibility of oil exploration on the last five percent of the coastal plain that wasn't already subject to development. It was called the 1002 area, a tiny fragment of the whole wilderness, its ambiguous status guaranteed the bitter and emotional debate that's followed ever since.
Eager to show the advances in technology, and how safe oil production can be, we've been invited to in
KROMPAK: The field has 1.2 million total, in the field, and as technology grows, this will becoming online sometime in the fall.
Across the North Slope a frenzied search is under way for more oil. Production peaked back in the eighties, and has been falling ever since.
Though the figures are disputed, geologists believe that underneath the tundra, at the 1002 area, the oil companies could find another three to sixteen billion barrels of oil. The U.S. consumes about seven billion each year.
And by using new techniques, smaller pads and advances in directional drilling, the industry says it would leave only a small footprint on the calving ground.
VAN DYKE: It's a technique where you first drill down in a vertical direction and then you turn the drill bit and you actually drill out in a horizontal direction, so you can reach away from your drilling island or your platform.
REPORTER: And what's the advantage of that?
VAN DYKE: Well, certainly you don't have to build as many drill sites. You can build one central drill site and then develop the reservoir in all directions from that drill site.
With gravel roads and hundreds of pipelines, the industrial sprawl of the North Slope fields now reaches over some two thousand square kilometres. And though we stop for what our guides describe as wildlife opportunities, there's no denying the impact on the Arctic landscape.
REPORTER: The oil companies here on the North Slope already have access to 95 percent of the coastal plain. Why do they need the last five percent?
VAN DYKE: I think the question to ask is why not. You know, the area was set aside, it wasn't made a wilderness, it's part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it was set aside specifically so Congress could decide in due time whether it should be open for oil and gas development. There's nothing over there now and some people just don't want anything there, regardless of even if you can do it right, they just don't want anything over there.
Bill Van Dyke says the Gwitchin aren't the only indigenous peoples of the Arctic. He suggests we talk to the Inupiat Eskimos, because they've lived with big oil, and know its impact. Thirty minutes out of Prudhoe Bay, under low hanging sea fog, like Nuiqsut.
PILOT: Welcome to Nuiqsut.
A tiny village on the coastal plain, the Inupiat Eskimos who live here find themselves increasingly surrounded by oil activity.
Unlike Old Crow, Nuiqsut is still waiting for the spring hunt, waiting for the ice to release the Nechilik River.
C.J. OYAGAK (Inupiat Eskimo Hunter): We've got almost practically pipeline completely surrounding this whole village, with NPRA on this side and Alpine on this side, and now they've just discovered another oil field over on this side of the river.
The development and the oil money has brought a building boom. The village is about to get natural gas, courtesy of a pipeline from the nearby Phillips oilfield.
And there's a seven million dollar water and sewer system being installed.
At the only gym at the only school, three village basketballers are being sponsored by oil companies to travel to high school tournament in Australia.
COACH: All right, in about six weeks, close to six weeks, we got three guys going to Australia. They'll be a part of the Alaska team. Would the three stand up -- Michael, Vernon and Sam. These three young men are going to represent the State of Alaska and this village at Australia this summer next month.
Down the road, the city hall has been swamped with grants, but all this money hasn't brought universal support.
ROSEMARY AHTUANGARUAK (Nuiqsut Deputy Mayor):Three years in a row now we've had real troubles with caribou harvesting, because of the new pipelines out there. They're so close to the community that they're deflecting the herd, plus the activity of the choppers bringing equipment back and forth, that's causing us the hardest problem.
The village mayor and deputy mayor are meeting with a scientist from Alaska's Department of Fish & Game.
SVERRE PEDERSON (Alaska Dept of Fish & Game): You know, one crew's flying this way, another crew's flying that way, and it looks like there could be an awful lot of disturbance here.
AHTUANGARUAK: People that are trying to live a subsistence lifestyle are very frustrated, because now the impacts of development has come very close to home, and now our hunting grounds are being developed.
REPORTER: Do you trust the oil companies?
AHTUANGARUAK: I don't trust them at all. They have people who are public relations people that come to the community, they are told to say this and that. They try to decrease conflicts, but they have no power to make it work. And so they come out here with all these things, and -- oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea, let's try that. Oh, I'm sorry, did we cause a problem, well I'll tell them that. But in reality, they don't have the power to stop it.
Concern over their caribou hunting ground is nothing compared to the outright alarm in Nuiqsut over what offshore exploration might do to the annual whale harvest.
Between September hunts, meat and muktuk is stored in ice cellars beneath the permafrost. Whaling is as central to this community as the caribou are to Old Crow.
Mayor and whale captain, Eli Nukapigak proudly talks of catching whales that can be three times as long as his boat. Using a harpoon loaded with a home made bomb of highly unstable black powder.
NUKAPIGAK: This is a bomb, a whale bomb, that we use to hunt this bowhead whale. And the one is the harpoon gun, and it goes in like this.
REPORTER: And that's on the end of the harpoon?
NUKAPIGAK: Yeah, and you just put this one in here like this and there'd be another line.
REPORTER: There are obviously lots of benefits to the town -- buildings and things that you're getting now. Is it worth it? Do most villagers think it's worth it?
NUKAPIGAK: I don't think it's worth it, because even though you say no to the development, they still continue to do it. They say that it benefits the national interests of the United States as a whole. But its destroying our and interfering with our hunting grounds.
RICHARD SEIFERT (University of Alaska): The juggernaut of western civilisation isn't going to slow down for these people. They're the deer in the headlights.
Oil money has flowed freely throughout Alaska.
In Fairbanks, over 500 kilometres south of Nuiqsut, a former senior state government official, Don Lowell, is holding a barbecue, so we can hear the bigger picture.
LOWELL: I'm solidly in support of development on our slope. It means a lot to Alaska, lots of income that could provide public services, public education, improvements in government services.
And it's little wonder. Oil revenues pay for 85 percent of the state budget. Alaskans don't pay state taxes. What's more, everyone gets an annual oil dividend. Last year's was worth nearly two thousand U.S. dollars.
JUANITA HELMS (Former Fairbanks Borough Mayor): I look at Alaska and equate it with the old company town, where you have a single industry that supports the entire community. I think Alaska's like that.
SEIFERT: I think that's a real problem politically in this state. The state is incredibly bizarre in a politically sense, because we all get a great deal of vested interest from the oil development, but we have no way of influencing our legislators in any normal democratic process, because they are not beholden to us.
REPORTER: Is it healthy the oil industry has so much influence over Alaskan politics?
JOHN DAVIES (Alaskan State Representative): Well, I don't think it is. I think that it's the 900 pound gorilla in Alaska, the oil industry, and it clearly has a major influence on the politics of the state legislature. And it's a difficult thing to maintain an independent view when that's the case. I mean certainly they're major contributors to a lot of campaigns and that has it's -- you know -- has its effect.
As the hunters of Old Crow village complete their spring harvest, they know that if it was up to most Alaskans, the oil companies would already be in the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou. But it isn't.
Though they rely on the oil that's pumped along the trans-Alaska pipeline, the lower 48 states of America are more evenly divided. And because of that, the U.S. Congress has shown some reluctance to open up the refuge.
But America has a new president with a new energy policy. It says the country should produce more, rather than consume less. The final decision will be taken far away from this extraordinary place. But with industry reaching ever deeper into the Arctic, there is another question to consider. Can there ever be a place or time to simply stop?