Exploring Arctic Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve with Debbie Miller

Debbie Miller is on a mission. 

Having spent considerable time in the far reaches of Arctic Alaska, she’s found a wilderness wonderland that most of us have never heard of. It is a landscape of superlative natural riches — the largest herd of caribou in America, the highest concentration of grizzly bears in the Arctic, millions of nesting migratory birds, beluga whales, polar bears, walruses, salmon, spotted seals, the list goes on and on. It is, like most untouched places, under threat of resource extraction and industrialization, and that is where Miller’s mission comes in to focus: spreading the gospel about this unspoiled terrain that belongs to each and every American.

So, why haven’t most of us heard about this special place? Call it bad branding.

“The National Petroleum Reserve” is not a name that inspires wonder and awe. It sounds like the place you’d stop to fill up the gas tank on your way to the much more famous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which lies to the east.

And yet, this reserve — larger than the state of Maine, ten times as big as Yellowstone National Park — is the largest unit of public lands in the US. Its 23 million acres are home to the largest river (Colville) and lake (Teshekpuk) in Arctic Alaska, the aforementioned riches of wildlife and migratory bird habitat, the most prolific site of dinosaur fossils of any polar region on earth and more than 10,000 years of native inhabitation and history.

It also, not surprisingly, holds oil and natural gas resources, and neighbors the 1000-square-mile industrial oil-field development of Prudhoe Bay and other North Slope complexes.

While there are designated “special areas” within the Reserve  — denoting exceptional wildlife, recreational, subsistence, historical and scenic values — not a single acre has permanent protection.

Miller’s new book On Arctic Ground: Tracking Time Through Alaska’s National PetroleumReserve aims to change that. She is traveling around the country giving multimedia presentations that combine photography, soundscapes, scientific findings and storytelling, bringing her journeys through the Reserve to life.

She hopes to win over the hearts and minds of Americans, introduce them to this hidden gem and inspire actions towards protecting the best, most profound places within the Reserve.

And it seems like Miller has the wind at her back. Her mission was boosted by late summer political developments, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announcing the first comprehensive management plan for the Reserve that put approximately half of it off-limits to oil and gas drilling.

Still of concern is the future possibility of a new pipeline crossing the Reserve, moving oil and gas from the remote Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, where Royal Dutch Shell is attempting the first offshore drilling in the American Arctic in 15 years.

“If we listen closely, if we observe the fullness of life in this vast, wild Reserve, if we exercise restraint as consumers” Miller writes hopefully, “this great northern landscape may have a chance. When we begin to understand this big blank spot on the map, and love it, perhaps we’ll gain the wisdom to protect it.”

Tony Angell is For the Birds

Artist, educator, writer and conservationalist celebrates life of the Puget Sound

Watchful ravens standing sentinel at the entrance to the Mt. Baker Ski Area. A soaring bald eagle and playful river otters at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake.  A parliament of owls gathered on the Whatcom Community College campus.

Whatcom County is fortunate to have Tony Angell’s inspired avian sculptures adding beauty and grace to our local land- and cityscapes. These iconic pieces join noetworthy installations at the Seattle Aquarium, Woodland Park Zoo, Tacoma Art Museum, The Sleeping Lady resort and countless public libraries and schools throughout Washington, not to mention Cornell University and the renowned Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.

Under the influence of his powerful hands – Angell is a former University of Washington shot-putter, discuss-thrower and arm-wrestling champ – blocks of granite, onyx, marble, chlorite, limestone and serpentine reveal sinuous shapes of Pacific Northwest wildlife, often birds, but also orcas, turtles, salmon, salamanders and other denizens of our region.

“(While) I do address matters of detail and I am generally sensitive to accuracy of my detail, I don’t put a lot of it into my work,” Angell once explained in a radio interview. “What I am trying to do is emphasize the spiritual side of the subject.”

 

Angell is also a gifted wildlife illustrator, and has just published Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion,and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, a follow-up to 2005’s In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Both volumes are a collaboration with John Marzluff, Professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the UW, bringing together the artistry and field naturalist skills of Angell with the scientific expertise of Marzluff to examine the fascinating, uncanny world of corvid behavior, the bird family that includes ravens, crows, jays, magpies and nutcrackers

Raised in the dry topography of Southern California, Angell fell in love with the natural world at a young age while hiking the Santa Monica Mountains, birdwatching, keeping snakes and reptiles in his room, even studying taxidermy so he could learn the inner workings of animals. Moving to Washington as a teenager, his intimate relationship with wildlife continued as he rehabilitated owls, trained falcons and hawks and built a rustic cabin on Lopez Island where he observed the marine mammals and migratory birds of the Salish Sea.

Alongside his prolific career as an artist, Angell is an elected Fellow of the National Sculpture Society and an active board member of Washington's chapter of The Nature Conservancy and he served as Director of Environmental Education for the state of Washington for 30 years.

“Angell's work is known for how it combines elegance and strength,” an art critic for The Seattle Times wrote, “but it is most remarkable in how it represents the convergence of his personality, passion and life…. Seattle novelist Ivan Doig describes him as ‘a rushing river threatening to break its banks.’”

A generous selection of his sculptural and illustrative work was collected alongside essays and commentary in PugetSound Through An Artist’s Eye, published in 2009 by University of Washington Press. He described the book as “an invitation to enjoy the world artistically, and in a way, inspire other people to be artists. Because there are plenty of people out there who can use art as their avenue of discovery and action and commitment and enjoyment of living here. Once you do that, you’ve invested in what’s here.”

But why is Angell so invested in corvids?

“When a raven was given to me many years ago, it soon became my most important emissary from the larger world of nature,” he explains. “My friend the raven “gifted” me a richer understanding of Nature in general and animal behavior in particular. They have given us fuel for our myths, song, literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture over tens of thousands of years -- gifts beyond measure.  Now science is just beginning to discover other gifts they have to offer us.

“Sometimes we hear people say, there are only two ways of looking at a crow, “you either love them or hate them,” he continues. “From our book I would hope that these two attitudinal poles might be replaced with a more middle ground of admiration for these special birds. I would hope that the readers, while seeing these species as a revealing subject for scientific discovery, would also consider them to be exceptional sources of subtle beauty and provocative emotional possibilities.  Should one apply his or her artistic mind to the corvids, the aesthetic gifts will be great.”