Jim Kurth with the U.S. Department of the Interior manages the refuge's 19 million acres. The millions and billions of bugs that are harassing caribou herd right now really are a drain on those animals. Oftentimes thousands of them will wade out into those lagoon waters to avoid insects. Although caribou don't know it, those lagoons, barrier islands, and deltas have been some of the most hotly contested real estate in the country. Alaska laid claim to them, nearly 100,000 acres in all, believing they were given the land when Alaska became a state in 1959.
Federal officials say they intended to reserve the lands as part of the refuge.
At stake was not just the sanity of caribou, but potentially billions of barrels of oil thought to lay beneath the Arctic Coastal Plain. Peter Van Tuyn is an attorney with Trustees for Alaska, a nonprofit environmental defense organization that filed a friend of the court brief in defense of federal ownership of the lands. So they were actively planning to hold a lease sale that would be immediately within the refuge in these coastal lagoons and inland waters. Such plans came to an end earlier this summer when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the lands are part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is off limits to oil and gas drilling.