Nuiqsut needs a strong voice in oil development

On Wednesday, the federal Bureau of Land Management held a sale intended to more than double the amount of active oil and gas leases in the Western Arctic, leaving my village of Nuiqsut surrounded by land that has been auctioned off for industrial development. Enough is enough.

How can a rural Alaska village survive if the land where its people hunt, fish and gather food becomes filled with drilling rigs, industrial roads and traffic, and pollution? We sincerely need to know this for the future of our children and our community, because when it makes decisions, the BLM always takes the side of the oil industry at the expense of our village.

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For the first time ever, oil will soon be commercially produced in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska from lands on which my people depend to maintain our subsistence way of life and sustain our culture.

ConocoPhillips has been granted permits to drill at its Greater Mooses Tooth Unit 1 site, which is also known as GMT-1. The company is building a road to the area this winter and expects to drill soon thereafter. And ConocoPhillips and BLM are making plans for the GMT-2 development nine miles away.

To ensure abundant subsistence resources for our people, such as migratory caribou and fish, we need a healthy, functioning ecosystem. One of the ways we can protect the land and water, and the future of our children, is the work we have been doing with the BLM — the agency responsible for managing the NPR-A — and other stakeholders to create a regional mitigation strategy that will effectively offset the negative effects of development.

Requiring the oil industry to do mitigation work will help ensure that natural processes continue while allowing for development in appropriate places and in the right way.

The idea is simple: When a company damages wildlife habitat and our access to it by drilling wells, building roads and pipelines, and producing oil, that company should compensate affected communities, like Nuiqsut, and protect other lands to offset unavoidable negative impacts and ensure that important places and resources are maintained for future generations.

Over the past couple of years, the Native Village of Nuiqsut has worked with the BLM, the City of Nuiqsut, Kuukpik Village Corp., the state, the oil industry and others to develop such a mitigation strategy for the NPR-A. The latest lease sale makes it even more urgent that we finalize this work and implement it.

For its Greater Mooses Tooth Unit 1 project, ConocoPhillips fought for — and obtained — approval to use an area close to Fish Creek that was specifically set aside for protection under the NPR-A's long-term management plan. This is an important subsistence-use area for our village, and it has been compromised for the benefit of the oil company. Therefore, ConocoPhillips and the BLM are responsible for offsetting the loss of this subsistence-use area and the resources that were taken from us. The resulting $8 million mitigation fee is less than 1 percent of the project's estimated $900 million cost.

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Mitigation is not a heavy burden for the industry. It is simply what is fair. Not just for Nuiqsut, but for all public lands and communities affected by oil development. Enough is enough. We must protect our subsistence resources for future generations.

In Nuiqsut, we depend on caribou, fish, whales and migratory birds for our survival. It is essential that development proceed with great caution, and that negative, unavoidable impacts be mitigated. Once lost, our subsistence resources and our way of life will never be the same.

As Alaska moves forward with new development, we hope that federal land managers will proceed thoughtfully and carefully, and that the voices of our people, who are those most directly affected, will be heard.

Martha Itta has been the tribal administrator for the Native Village of Nuiqsut since 2012.

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