Department Of Interior Erodes More Protections In Alaska

The area, currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management, contains a portion of the proposed Alaska Liquefied Natural Gas pipeline, as well as the proposed Ambler Road—an industrial mining road that would be used to access rich copper, gold, and silver deposits in the region. It’s long been the desire of mining companies like Canada-based Trilogy Metals and Australian giant South32, and already the corporations are rushing to get bulldozers on the ground. Just days before the public announcement, Trilogy Metals announced a slew of new, high-level executive hires dedicated exclusively to permitting and building the Ambler Road.

Meanwhile, conservation and public-land groups are raising the alarm, as the transfer could reduce public hunting opportunities in the area. “These changes raise reasonable questions about the future of hunting and fishing access in this particular region—both subsistence and sport,” MeatEater’s Director of Conservation, Mark Kenyon, said. “But this is also just the latest of many examples in recent months of protections for Alaska’s public lands being removed.”

Specifically, the sport hunt in question is a unique, archery-only caribou hunt immediately adjacent to the Dalton Highway. Per state regulations, a five-mile non-motorized corridor extends to both sides of the highway, making room for a challenging but rewarding hunt—one valued by many Alaskans. Those hunters, however, fear that opening the door to development could increase industrial traffic on the highway (technically a gravel road) and disrupt wildlife with road-building and mining activities.

Additionally, the transfer would inhibit the ability of native and rural Alaskans to subsistence hunt on all but 62,000 acres of land in the Dalton Corridor. In Alaska, subsistence hunts are regulated federally by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as outlined in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Thus, the transfer of ownership from federal to state jurisdiction would eliminate the “priority” subsistence hunt. In a memorandum of agreement between the feds and the state, the state recognizes that they will make “reasonable efforts” to allow harvest in accordance with state hunting regulations, but stops short of grandfathering in subsistence hunting rights.

Jumping out to a larger, more administrative perspective, the Department of Interior is employing a somewhat convoluted mechanism in transferring ownership of the Dalton Corridor to the state of Alaska.

A key component to understanding it is the 1959 Alaska Statehood Act, which authorized the transfer of 105 million acres of federal land to the state of Alaska when the territory became a state. Currently the state only has 5.2 million acres of that entitlement remaining—and they’ve identified a long list of parcels they desire. One of those parcels is the Dalton Utility Corridor. However, the Corridor has been protected (or “withdrawn” in technical lingo) from mining and utility development since the 1970s by Public Land Orders 5150 and 5180. As such, land has been considered “top-filed” and unavailable to state selection—until now.

Public Land Order 7966 in the Federal Register strips the protections afforded by PLOs 5150 and 5180. And when those protections are removed, the top-filed lands automatically transfer to state ownership. That process is currently underway in the Dalton Utility Corridor, and under Doug Burgum’s leadership, the Department of Interior is working with Alaska to pick and choose what land will be available for the taking. That move sets a dangerous precedent, and it’s easy to imagine the BLM working with Alaska to fulfill a substantial portion of their remaining statehood acreage while an extractive-resource-first administration is in place.

Bigger picture, though, it’s a reminder that the erosion of public-land protections happens in bits and pieces. Public Land Order 7966 is not out of the blue. It builds on the revocation of the BLM’s Central Yukon Resource Management Plan by Congress last fall and an executive order signed last January called Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential. Both are cited in a BLM document outlining the decision rationale.

“The frequency and pace of these changes are particularly noteworthy,” Mark said. “If this were an isolated incident, it would be one thing, but the larger trend it illustrates cannot be ignored.”

Taken alone, these types of high-level policy and legislative actions might seem abstract—and they are—but collectively they have real, tangible implications for the wildlife, the landscape, and hunters. In Alaska, sportsmen are about to see the effects of those implications firsthand—and there are likely more to come.