FINDING TRUE NORTH

AS ONE OF THE MOST INTACT ECOSYSTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES, THE REFUGE HOSTS MORE THAN 200 SPECIES OF BIRDS THAT MIGRATE THERE FROM ALL 50 STATES AND SIX CONTINENTS.

“The seasons are in disarray,” Robert Thompson tells us, shrugging apologetically. It’s early July, and Thompson, an Iñupiaq guide and environmentalist, has invited our team of six to use his house in Kaktovik as the staging point for a nine-day canoe expedition into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

We’d planned to launch from Kaktovik, the north-easternmost settlement in Alaska, and paddle along the Beaufort Sea. For decades the warming climate has made these coastal waters increasingly ice-free and navigable from midsummer to early fall. But this year the ice shows no signs of retreating, except on the side of the barrier islands closest to the village.

Ours was a bittersweet assignment: We’d come to see and understand what the country and the world stand to lose if America’s largest and most pristine wildlife refuge is opened to oil drilling. Since the Arctic Refuge was designated in 1980, it has dodged several attempts to remove protections for a 1.5-million-acre swath known as the 1002 Area, which covers most of its coastal plain and has been estimated to contain as much as 11.8 billion barrels of oil. But in December of 2017 Congress approved a tax-overhaul bill that opens the area to drilling, despite opposition from 70 percent of American voters. Federal agencies are rushing through permitting and lease-sale processes, even as scientists warn that oil exploration and extraction will irreparably damage this fragile and critical habitat.

The route we’d planned would take us along the shoreline of a place that is well known to wildlife lovers but rarely visited. As one of the most intact and virtually untouched ecosystems in the United States, the refuge hosts more than 200 species of birds that migrate there from all 50 states and six continents; more than half breed here during the Arctic summer. Among the 47 land and marine mammal species found here are some 200,000 caribou, which can migrate more than 3,000 miles per year—the longest migration of any terrestrial mammal on the planet.

By late afternoon Kaktovik’s harbor is ice-free as far as our eyes can see, so we launch into a low fog with the hope, , the birds cackle, heckling us with the call that serves as their onomatopoeic name in the Iñupiaq language. The ducks breed in wetlands here and then winter along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America.