The Anchorage Daily News
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Clinton rejects status change for ANWR TUNDRA:
Wilderness label is protection enough, president says

By Lawrence M. O'rourke
January 11, 2001

President Clinton has rejected a proposal that he make the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a national monument, the White House announced Wednesday.

Environmentalists said they were disappointed but still hoped Clinton would change his mind before he leaves office in nine days. Proponents of exploring the refuge for oil called Clinton's decision good news but said opening ANWR won't be easy, even with a new president who is friendlier to the oil industry.

An act of Congress is required to open the refuge to drilling. An area of the refuge underlying its coastal plain is considered a good prospect for a significant oil discovery. The same area is also the prime calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd. The refuge has become a national battleground between environmental and development interests.

The White House said Clinton concluded that creating monument status wouldn't add more protection for the refuge.

"We believe after consulting with our environmental team that ANWR has something that some of the other areas we looked at do not have, which is legislative protected status," said White House spokesman Jake Siewert. "That is actually higher than that conferred by the monument."

Legislation passed at the end of the Carter administration two decades ago "confers a wilderness status to the Arctic refuge and specifically prevents oil drilling there," Siewert said.

As recently as last weekend, former President Carter urged Clinton to designate the refuge a national monument.

Siewert said Clinton carefully examined the arguments put forth by Carter and other monument advocates. "We take that argument seriously. But we've taken a close look at it and decided that the wilderness status that's conferred by the legislation that was passed in the '80s, the Alaska Lands Act, actually confers a higher level of status," he said.

It would be "very hard to open ANWR up to drilling," given the 50-50 Republican-Democrat split in the Senate and the narrow Republican majority in the House, Siewert said.

Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness league, said in a telephone interview from her Washington office that she still remains "optimistic that the president will designate ANWR a national monument before he leaves office."

Allen Smith, Alaska regional director of the Wilderness Society, said there will be "a battle on ANWR, whether the president makes it a national monument or not. Designation as a national monument would give it added protection. A presidential act would have made it harder politically to drill."

But it is also significant, said Cam Toohey of Arctic Power, an Alaska-based pro-development group, that Clinton will be succeeded by a pro-development Republican, President-elect George W. Bush. Clinton's veto scuttled a congressional vote to open ANWR in 1995.

"Having a president that's supportive is going to be a big deal," Toohey said.

"The prospects are clearly better than under the Clinton administration, because you knew you were going to get a veto," said Robert Stiles, who serves on the executive committee of Arctic Power and as president of the Resource Development Council. "But it's a tough row to hoe."

Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, said making the refuge a national monument would have been wrong "when we are 57 percent dependent on foreign oil and when natural gas supplies are tightening and prices skyrocketing."

Clinton has pointed out that he has protected more land as national monuments than any president since Theodore Roosevelt nearly a century ago.