Of Subsistence and Survival

ANCHORAGE, Alaska-On 28 April 1986, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco stopped the Bristol Bay oil and gas lease sale, two days before subsurface rights were to be auctioned off for development.

The appellate court upheld an earlier district court opinion that the U.S. government had failed to properly assess the effects of its proposed sale on the Alaskan natives who subsist on the bay's resources.

Former Interior Secretary Kleppe first proposed development of the Northern Aleutian Basin in 1974, but then-Alaska Governor Jay Hammond opposed the move. After repeated stalling by the state, the Department of the Interior decided in October, 1985 to put the 5.6 millionacre site on the block despite the state's opposition. Alaska and eight other coastal states. as ~%,ell as some thirty native, environmental, and fishing groups filed suit to stop the auction.

The lease sale would ha%,e paved the ~N,av for oil exploration alongside the country's largest salmon and herring fisheries and the spa~N~ning ground for dwindling stocks of Alaskan King crab. Bristol Bay is an important habitat for millions of marine animals. The state's salmon and herring fisheries alone support a $1 billion-a-year industry, employing 10,000 people.

The decision by the appellate court is regarded as a major setback for both the oil industry and Interior Secretary Donald Hodel's plans to buck environmental opposition to the federal government's offshore leasing program.

Critics claim Hodel was using the highly-contested Bristol Bay sale to open the door to offshore drilling in environmentally protected areas. Hodel, they said, was counting on Alaska's weak representation in Congress-the state has one representative as compared to 45 from California.

The significance of the case however, spurred seven other coastal states-California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Texas, and North Carolina-to join the suit. In 1983, the federal appeals court in California ruled that the sale of leases on the outer continental shelf must be consistent with approved state coastal zone management programs. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision. Although the coastal states are pushing Congress to give the states power to regulate development beyond their three-mile boundary, oil and gas industries have vigorously opposed such legislation.

In the Bristol Bay case, the state contested the sale on grounds that the right to approve coastal oil development belongs to the state. The appellate court, however, ruled on the issue of the federal government's failure to adequately consider the effects of leases on the subsistence lifestyle of southwestern Alaskan natives.

In October 1985, the appellate court prevented oil companies from drilling in the Navarin Basin, an area of the Bering Sea, stating that the survival of Alaskan natives and their culture should prevail over the nation's energy needs. In 1984, First District judge von der Heydt, and then the appellate court, issued a similar ruling to stop drilling activities in the Norton Sound Lease Area. Although the leases for both projects had already been sold, preliminary exploration has been postponed until a full trial is held. And the court's ruling has slowed the push for oil leases in the area.

"After the industry has spent millions in preparing for a sale, any delay such as this is a disincentive to proceed with development," said O.K. Gilbert of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. "If the government cannot adhere to a leasing schedule, oil companies are prone to pull out resources and put them elsewhere."

"The court cases have put us out of business in the Bering Sea," said one oil executive.

Even if the federal government's Minerals and Management Service in charge of the sales could reschedule the Bristol Bay sale next year, it would still face another round of suits aimed at protecting the nearby fisheries and Alaska's right to delay or stop the sale.

Subsistence and Oil

The significance of the subsistence issue throughout the history of oil development in Alaska illustrates the growing strength of ties between environmental and native groups in Alaska.

But concerns for the environment and a "sentimental" regard for wildlife are often no match for rhetoric concerning "the nation's energy needs." The government's responsibility to protect the subsistence needs and rights of Native Americans, however, is rooted in the relationship between the state and its indigenous peoples.

The passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971 opened up Alaska for industrial development, allowing it to wean itself away from its 100-year wardship under the federal government. It also provided the revenues necessary for the protection of native lands and subsistence resources through the rural distribution of state oil revenues.

When the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 drove up the price of Alaskan crude from $5 to $30 a barrel, the state received millions in windfall profits. The completion of the Trans-Alaskan pipeline brought unexpected billions into state coffers, allowing Alaska to abolish the personal income tax and to set aside a Permanent Fund which generates annual cash payments to each of the state's residents-$404 in 1985.

Much of the state's oil revenue was directed into modernizing rural villages, providing desperately needed facilities for transportation, communication, sanitation, safe water sources, health care, and high schools. The cost of services and facilities provided to villages by state and federal programs in the last ten years has far exceeded the $962.5 million granted under ANCSA. But to many natives, protecting the land is more important than even the lure of oil revenues.

As early as 1972, the 4,000 Inupiat Eskimos of Northern Alaska overcame the opposition of the oil and gas industry and founded the North Slope Borough, a homerule regional government covering 88,000 square miles, including Prudhoe Bay. Although forced to bank and borrow on its $14 billion property-tax base at Prudhoe Bay, the North Slope Borough undertook to modernize its eight villages at a cost of $818 million. The local hiring requirements of the Borough's program achieved a more equitable distribution of oil revenues, avoiding the experience of many reservations in the "Lower 48", where industrial development of tribal lands has brought little benefit to the residents.

After years of negotiation between the Borough, the oil industry, and state and federal agencies, tile Borough's Arctic Coast Management Plan was incorporated into the state's Coastal Management Plan in 1985, making it one of the most important policy statements ever adopted on the industrial development of the Arctic.

The North Slope Borough used for the first time the subsistence argument to oppose an offshore lease sale in Alaska. Joined by several villages and environmental groups, the Borough halted the lease sale until both state and federal governments had devised a plan to protect the annual migration of the bowhead whale, a major subsistence resource for the North Slope Inupiat.

Out of that decision came a state requirement that drilling into oil-bearing strata should be prohibited during periods of broken sea ice until the industry could demonstrate its ability to clean up oil spills in ice infested waters. The state was later successful in inserting this stipulation into the Northern Aleutian Shelf lease sale.

After the Oil Rush

The sudden decline in oil revenues in the state has severely curtailed programs and services to the bush. The state loses $150 million in annual revenue for each one dollar per-barrel decline in the price of oil. While people across the state are tightening their belts, native groups say they will be the least affected by the plunge- in the state's oil profits. Many of their capital improvement programs are already complete or in the final stages. Schools have been built, roads and airstrips improved, and medical facilities opened.

While the decline in state oil revenues will mean a revamping of budgets, Native Alaskans see their security not in cash from oil revenues but in their attachment to the land, their access to subsistence resources, and their protection of the habitat. No resources are considered more precious than the renewable resources of fish and wildlife.

For the oil that remains, the natives say they will allow the offshore hasins to he explored and developed only when a safe technology is developed for drilling in Arctic waters. Until then, they say, "The oil is not going anywhere."

William H. DuBay is a freelance writer living in Anchorage.