Hunters worry about marine mammals and a way of life, but there are also some mixed feelings as the Trump administration goes full bore on oil and gas drilling.

Sabrina Shankman reports for Inside Climate News

APR 3, 2019

If there is one place that has most felt the Trump administration’s push to rapidly expand fossil fuel development, it might be Nuiqsut, a small village nestled on Alaska’s North Slope.

The village has become almost entirely surrounded by oil and gas drilling over the past three decades, and the Trump administration has been aggressively pushing for more drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, just west of the village, and off the coast to the north.

“It’s really overwhelming to try to keep up with everything that’s going on,” said Martha Itta, tribal administrator to the native village and also its vice mayor. She is one of a handful of people in the community trying to ensure the village has a voice as the federal government works to open offshore areas to drilling, rewrite the management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve and clear the way for companies to expand drilling. “There’s a lot of times when we miss out submitting comments on projects or we didn’t fully get to analyze what’s being said and done in these projects,” she said.

On Friday, a federal judge brought a rare wave of relief for Itta with a rulingthat effectively halted plans for offshore drilling in much of the Arctic Ocean off Alaska.

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