The Specter Haunting Alaska

By Peter Canby

BOOKS AND REPORTS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

by Paul Roberts

Mariner, 399 pp., $14.00 (paper)

Where Mountains Are Nameless: Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

by Jonathan Waterman

Norton, 280 pp., $24.95

Cumulative Environmental Effects of Oil and Gas Activities on Alaska's North Slope

by the National Research Council

National Academies Press, 304 pp., $69.00

Impacts of a Warming Arctic

by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

Cambridge University Press, 139 pp., $29.99 (paper)

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska: Coastal Plain Resource Assessment

Department of the Interior, April 1987

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Petroleum Assessment, 1998, Including Economic Analysis

United States Geological Survey, USGS Fact Sheet FS-028-01, April 2001

National Energy Policy: Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group, May 2001

Superintendent of Documents, US Government Printing Office

Economics of Undiscovered Oil in the Federal Lands of the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska

by Emil D. Attanasi

United States Geological Survey, Open-File Report 03-044, 2003

1.

By most definitions, the word "Arctic" refers to the region near the North Pole. Only one section of it lies within the United States: the part of Alaska north of the Brooks mountain range known as the North Slope (see the map above). The North Slope is huge— 89,000 square miles, slightly larger than the state of Minnesota—but in many ways it's a world apart, even from the rest of Alaska. The Brooks Range effectively forms Alaska's tree line—the latitude beyond which trees do not grow—and its rivers drain northward down onto a vast tundra plain dominated by a cotton grass that is the favorite food of the millions of caribou that migrate to the region during the summer months.