Big Miracle by Tom Rose

productive as Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk have been, the potential of these fields is dwarfed by untapped resources lying below federal land nearby. To the west sits the 23-million-acre Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, established back in the 1920s by President Warren G. Harding, where recent surveys estimate 15 billion barrels of easily recoverable oil. Just east, on only two thousand of the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), lies another 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Look north out to the vast sea and there are another 30 billion barrels of oil equivalent—twice as much oil as forty years worth of oil produced at Prudhoe Bay.
    Yet there the oil sits. Keeping ANWR off limits has been an environmental cause célèbre for decades. While filing suit against every attempt to open up new federal or state lands is the newer tactic, it took almost twenty years until additional lease sales in the Chukchi Sea could even get provisional approval in 2008. But even then, once the rights to nearly three million new acres were auctioned off, environmental groups filed suit to prevent the deal, which a judge halted in July 2010.
    By 2010, it took more than thirty separate permits from various federal and state agencies before one could even start exploratory drilling in Alaska. This caused companies like Shell Oil, that had spent years running the regulatory gauntlet, to close up shop in Alaska altogether. Even President Barack Obama’s approval of new lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve in 2011—proposed in response to record high gas prices—has fallen on deaf ears inside his own Army Corps of Engineers, which denied ConocoPhillips’s request to drill in an area it already owns inside the Petroleum Reserve.
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    Few people in the Lower 48 knew much about their fellow countrymen settling America’s last, harshest, and potentially richest frontier. America’s forty-ninth state was a giant paradox: a land of contrasts, contradictions, and immeasurable beauty. Unlike other Americans, late-twentieth-century Alaskans continued to think of themselves and their great land as a separate, distinct place—almost its own country. Alaskans called people who lived elsewhere “outsiders.” Any place outside the expansive borders of America’s biggest state was referred to as “The Outside.” Separated from the Lower 48 by thousands of miles, Alaskans were also separated by an ethic long lost down south: the ethic of nation building.
    What a place it was. At more than half a million square miles, Alaska was one-fifth the size of the continental United States; nearly as big as Western Europe. Alaska spanned two continents and three distinct climatic zones. Reaching deep into Asia, Alaska held the distinction of being both America’s eastern- and westernmost state. Seventeen of North America’s twenty highest mountains were in Alaska, as were more than 100,000 glaciers. Alaska encompassed an island chain—the Aleutians—that was longer than the continental United States was wide. Despite being America’s least settled territory, Alaska, by virtue of being the first stop off the primordial Asian land-bridge, was also America’s first settled territory.
    By 1988, less than thirty years after its admission as America’s forty-ninth state, Alaska was America’s least densely populated state: less than one person per square mile, one of the world’s lowest man-to-land ratios. In the late 1980s, Alaskan caribou outnumbered Alaskan humans ten to one. By 2010, the ratio jumped to twelve to one.
    While Alaska had the highest per capita income of any state, Alaskans could hardly have been called the richest Americans because Alaska also had the highest cost of living. And then there was the weather. Always the weather. Outsiders weren’t the only ones who considered life in Alaska brutal, backward,