Dear NRDC Activist,

This is a critical moment in our decades-long fight to protect Arctic wildlands:

President Biden’s Interior Department is now accepting comments on its historic proposal that would protect 10 million acres of wildlands in the Western Arctic Reserve from oil and gas drilling.

But the fossil fuel industry has launched an intense campaign to kill these vital protections, and we urgently need your help to fight back.

Urge Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to protect wildlands in the Western Arctic Reserve from the oil industry’s unrelenting push to drill.

As soon as the Interior Department announced its plan to protect the Western Arctic, Big Oil went into full-on attack mode, decrying the protections as “misguided” and denouncing them as “a step in the wrong direction.”

But the only wrong direction would be to allow oil companies to plunder our last remaining wild places for profit… shackle us to a future of dirty fossil fuels… and drive us further and faster toward climate chaos — especially in a region that is warming four times faster than the rest of the world.

Tell the Biden-Harris administration to protect America’s Arctic from dirty fossil fuel development before it’s too late.

For centuries, wildlife and Indigenous communities have relied upon the ecological treasures of the Western Arctic Reserve, including places like:

• Utukok River Uplands, where calving grounds support the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, vital for 40 Indigenous communities
• Teshekpuk Lake that is where millions of migratory birds from all seven continents use these wetlands for nesting habitat
• Colville River, where you’ll find the densest population of wolves on Alaska’s northern coastal plain
• Kasegaluk Lagoon, where endangered beluga whales calve offshore in one of the largest unspoiled lagoon systems in the world

These irreplaceable wonders may not survive the industrialization that comes from drilling. Decades after the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, some species still have not recovered.

But that doesn’t seem to matter to the fossil fuel industry. As we speak, oil giants like ConocoPhillips are barreling ahead with massive new drilling projects in the Arctic — but you can help stop them.

This is a rare chance to break the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on America’s Arctic and put an end to its century-long exploitation of these magnificent public lands.

Thanks for submitting your comment today.

Bobby McEnaney
Director, Land Conservation, NRDC