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The Goddamn Fragile Tundra
Man's impact is worst in the frozen Arctic Circle, where nature's recuperative powers, in effect, go into hibernation. In Barrow, the state's northernmost town, the streets are littered with crippled Volkswagens, discarded tires, bits of lumber and old 50-gallon oil drums. Even on the vast tundra, the tracks of World War II bulldozers are still plainly visible. Scars from 30-year-old seismic tests are unhealed. Debris remains and remains, its decay slowed by the cold. A piece of wood was recently retrieved from a depth of 1,400 feet, where it had been lodged between two coal seams many millions of years old. It looked like a fresh chip. In 1968, a search party dug up the body of Charles Francis Hall, an explorer who was buried in a shallow grave at Greenland in 1871. He was almost recognizable.
In the slow-motion rhythms of Arctic life, a crop of simple lichen may take 100 years to grow to maturity—a few inches high. Arctic char, a staple Eskimo food, keeps on growing for 18 years. Migratory birds—lesser Canada geese, eider ducks, American pintails, whistling swans, Brant geese—must time their breeding to the day. If winter is unusually long, a whole species may achieve zero population growth because it lacks time to hatch and rear its young before the ice begins to return in late August.
The far north is a simple ecosystem with few distinct species. While a lake in California may contain several hundred species of phytoplankton, an Arctic lake has only a dozen. This lack of diversity, in ecological terms, is tantamount to vulnerability. Any species can be wiped out and no other species will take its place. The result is expressed in a word that many Alaskans have come to hate: fragility. Says Walter Hickel: "It used to be the hostile, frozen north; now it's the goddamn fragile tundra."
Into this delicate if hostile world, man has burst as a stranger. "There is a new urgency for knowledge of the tundra," says Zoologist Frank Pitelka of Berkeley. "We now have a Texas-size threat to a land doubtfully able to take it." In the past two years, however, the major oil companies have compiled an excellent record. They have hired Arctic ecologists to help minimize the effects of their presence, even going so far as to develop hardy strains of grass to protect the tundra. Helicopters move whole drilling rigs to avoid ripping up the topsoil. Three companies have built their own highly advanced sewage-disposal units to prevent pollution of the ground water supply. No Alaskan city, in fact, can yet match those units.
But the real test—moving the oil—has not yet been met. TAPS has spent, its officials say, $16.5 million so far on soil tests and aerial photographic surveys of the line's route across Alaska. "If we embarrass the Administration with any sort of ecology problem," says a Humble executive, "we will be crucified." Plans call for the "best pipe ever used by the oil industry," he adds. Electronic monitoring devices and 30-ton safety locks would turn off the pipeline's pressure five minutes after a leak was spotted.
An Uncertain Future
Despite all this, the U.S. Geological Survey has still not approved TAPS' plans. The key issue is how much of the