An Alaskan Community Opposes Expanded Oil Drilling (2023)

ConocoPhillips is the largest producer of oil in Alaska. In 2020, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved the company’s Willow project, allowing ConocoPhillips to drill on public land on the North Slope for three decades and to extract up to 600 million barrels of oil. Leaders of the city of Nuiqsut and the Native Village of Nuiqsut, located on the ‘fenceline’ near the drilling fields, protested the harm the project would cause to the health of the community and the land. In April 2023, they sent a public letter to Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, the government department which oversees the BLM. A member of the Pueblo of Laguna, Haaland was the first Indigenous person to be appointed to a president’s cabinet. In this excerpt of their letter, the representatives from Nuiqsut criticized the BLM’s environmental impact study [a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, or SEIS]. They also objected to the inadequate steps ConocoPhillips must take to lessen, or mitigate, harm to the community. This excerpt of the letter details their perspective on the Willow project and its expected impact on the community's quality of life, health and safety, animals and environmental habitat, and Indigenous culture.

The long list of mitigation might look impressive to politicians and government decision­makers. To us, it is an attempt to break the importance of our life and culture into fragments that are each a mere technical problem to be solved so the project can go forward. BLM does not look at the harm this project would cause from the perspective of how to let us be us – how to ensure that we can maintain our culture, traditions, and our ability to keep going out on the land and the waters….

Make no mistake. Our community needs financial support, scientific studies and monitoring, and economic development. We face dire threats to our lives daily, including epileptic seizures by children at school and no trained staff to respond, cancer diagnoses, food insecurity, respiratory failure, suicides, drug and alcohol abuse, and accidents that occur when we travel out on the land or on the sea. Many of these problems are caused by oil development, but these social impacts are not captured or adequately disclosed by the SEIS’s technocratic monetization of the social costs of carbon nor BLM’s brief description of health impacts….

We have expressed our concern for decades, but it has not made any difference. Many of us get discouraged and give up. We have gone through process after process, and the agency is always designing new mitigation, but the facts about what has happened to us and our land over this period are indisputable: the infrastructure has surrounded us, the caribou have left our traditional hunting grounds, and our mental and physical health has deteriorated. We have fought to protect our life, health, and safety every step of the way, yet this is where we are. The government acknowledges there are problems, but industrial development is always allowed to continue. Providing us with a process to explain to BLM how this development is harming us, without ever making any real decisions to prevent this harm, demoralizes and depresses us. The processes do not even maintain the pretense of addressing our concerns. They are only defenses of why the project should continue….

The environmental racism and injustice of oil development on the North Slope must stop. Oil development paid for our utilities, our schools, and so many other advancements we have benefitted from. But providing these services is the responsibility of our governments, not private corporations. And we have a right to these services whether we agree to hosting an industrial wasteland in our backyard or not. The municipal, state, and federal government must stop insisting otherwise by delegating this responsibility to the oil industry.

The government also has an obligation to protect us from the harms of the oil industry and must stop expecting us to sacrifice our own lives “in the national interest.” Fenceline communities have been asked to do so for too long, and environmental justice requires a new approach.