Conservationists Face Once-Remote Prospect in Arctic Drilling Fight: Defeat<br />Twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter expanded the refuge and set aside 1.5 million acres between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea — known as the 1002 area, after the provision<br />that created it — to be set aside for the possible study of oil and gas development.<br />The things she seems to want most is opening the Arctic refuge,” said Niel Lawrence,<br />Alaska program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.<br />“It is critically important and I don’t think anybody knows it is stuck in a tax bill,” said Senator<br />Maria Cantwell, the Washington Democrat who led the 2005 fight against drilling in the refuge.<br />WASHINGTON — Carl Portman remembers watching, heartbroken, from Anchorage in 2005 as a Senate<br />effort to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge lost by two votes.<br />For environmental activists, protecting the refuge is about preserving the fragile beauty of the Arctic wilderness — where caribou herds calve, polar bears den<br />and millions of migratory birds gather — just as the effects of global warming are becoming more pronounced in the far north than almost anywhere else on earth.
