The mommy porcupine caribou spend the summers getting fat and having babies on the coastal plain. They then, unaccountably, go to Canada for the winter. Environmental groups claim that oil development in ANWR will hurt the baby caribou by frightening away their mommies, forcing them to less desirable locations when their time of confinement comes. And the enviros have enlisted a very convenient tribe of Alaskan Indians called the Gwich'in in their cause. During their many visits to Washington to lobby against ANWR development, the Gwich'in usually avoid mentioning that they previously authorized oil development on their land, only to find nothing but dry wells.
Nobody wants to hurt baby caribou, of course.
And proof that ANWR can be developed without doing so can be found 60 miles to the west, at Prudhoe Bay, the giant oil field that is the starting point of the trans-Alaska pipeline. Prudhoe Bay has been in operation for 20 years, pumping out 20 percent of U.S. domestic production. When the field was being considered for development in the late Sixties, local Eskimos and environmentalists were concerned about the nearby Central Arctic caribou herd. But instead of declining, the herd has thrived alongside oil production on the North Slope, growing from 3,000 head in the Seventies to almost 20,000 today. The caribou, it is said, rub up against the warm pipeline to stave off the cold of the long Arctic winter.