As Climate Warnings Grow Dire, Energy Companies Face A 'New Frontier Of Threats'

Bernadette Demientieff hails from a region marked by pristine panoramas, droves of arctic wildlife and decades of controversy. For millennia, her people, the native Gwich'in Nation, have guarded the precious swath of Alaskan land today known by many as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But in the coming months, the Interior Department will sell leases to companies that intend to drill for oil and gas in the refuge's coastal plain. The sale comes two years after the Trump administration first opened the refuge to energy development, inciting widespread opposition and halting a decades-old struggle over its natural resources.

So this October, as on countless other occasions in recent years, Demientieff was far from home. Instead, she was on her way to Wall Street with one mission in mind: to convince several of the world's most powerful banks to officially — and publicly — say they won't finance oil drilling in her ancestral land.

Through the ages, Demientieff said, Gwich'in livelihood has hinged that each year birth their young on the very slab of land being put up for lease.