Defending the Arctic Refuge

A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice

Finis Dunaway

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469661117
• Categoría: Ciencias biológicas
• Categoría: Ciencia medioambiental

Tucked away in the northeastern corner of Alaska is one of the most contested landscapes in all of North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Considered sacred by Indigenous peoples in Alaska and Canada and treasured by environmentalists, the refuge provides life-sustaining habitat for caribou, polar bears, migratory birds, and other species. For decades, though, the fossil fuel industry and powerful politicians have sought to turn this unique ecosystem into an oil field. Defending the Arctic Refuge tells the improbable story of how the people fought back. At the center of the story is the unlikely figure of Lenny Kohm (1939–2014), a former jazz drummer and aspiring photographer who passionately committed himself to Arctic Refuge activism. With the aid of a trusty slide show, Kohm and representatives of the Gwich'in Nation traveled across the United States to mobilize grassroots opposition to oil drilling. From Indigenous villages north of the Arctic Circle to Capitol Hill and many places in between, this book shows how Kohm and Gwich'in leaders and environmental activists helped build a political movement that transformed the debate into a struggle for environmental justice. In its final weeks, the Trump administration fulfilled a long-sought dream of drilling proponents: leasing much of the Arctic Refuge coastal plain for fossil fuel development. Yet the fight to protect this place is certainly not over. Defending the Arctic Refuge traces the history of a movement that is alive today—and that will continue to galvanize diverse groups to safeguard this threatened land.

1

On the Road

In September 1991, with a crucial vote on Arctic drilling looming in the Senate, Lenny Kohm drove through Illinois. The back seat was packed with everything he needed for the show: slide projectors and carousel trays; sound system and speakers; and a bevy of cables, wires, and cords. Lenny carried the equipment in two custom-built wooden crates. One was outfitted with wheels, so he could stack the hefty boxes on top of one another and then roll everything to the next show. He was used to life on the road, for he had once been a professional drummer. But Lenny and his companion were not headed to a smoke-filled lounge, concert stage, or other familiar haunt of a jazz musician. Now in his early fifties, with large patches of gray in his beard, he frequently gigged at colleges, churches, and Sierra Club meetings. The bumper stickers plastered on the back of his aging automobile announced the tour’s purpose, the cause that had become his overriding passion: “Help Preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: America’s Last Great Wilderness.”¹

Lenny’s car had become somewhat well-known in its own right. The metallic green Chevy Malibu Classic, with dented hood, cracked windshield, and peeling vinyl roof, was the subject of gentle ribbing by his environmentalist friends. A few months earlier, they had held a fundraiser for him on Capitol Hill. In their invitation, the Sierra Club staffers and other event organizers praised him as a “roving advocate” who demonstrated “paramount commitment” to the cause. “For two whole years he has traipsed around the country delivering his presentation and educating the masses, … and doing a bang-up job of it, too. Speaking of bang-up jobs, have … you seen Lenny’s car? … If it were a horse, we’d have to shoot it lest the ASPCA catch sight of it. … [His car] serves as a (barely) living testimony to the level of impoverishment we have been subjecting Lenny for far too long.” Lenny had been touring seemingly nonstop since 1989, visiting thirty-nine different states and presenting the Last Great Wilderness show “more than 450 times.” “Folks,” the invitation implored, “Lenny needs your pennies. This man is an Arctic god. He is an absolutely essential element of the campaign, and anything we can do to further the spread of his word is critical.”²

As he drove his Malibu Classic through the Midwest, Lenny got to know his passenger, Glenna Frost. A thirty-five-year-old Gwich’in woman, Glenna grew up in Old Crow, the northernmost community in Yukon, Canada, and home of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation.* She had moved away to attend high school in Whitehorse and then stayed there to work as a dental therapist. In the spring of 1991, Glenna began to feel a “deep pull to move home,” an intense longing to reconnect with her culture, community, and family. She soon embarked on what she described to me as a “spiritual journey.” After resigning from her job, she moved back to Old Crow and spent several weeks living on the land with her mother. They went to Crow Flats, a massive wetland complex north of the village, where they camped and hunted and trapped. As Glenna engaged in these activities and rekindled bonds with her family, she knew that this was where she belonged.³

That summer, Glenna received an unexpected invitation. The Porcupine Caribou Management Board, a Canadian organization led by Indigenous representatives and government scientists, had recently partnered with Lenny on his Last Great Wilderness project. Now Doug Urquhart, the board’s secretary, asked if she would be interested in going on a slide show tour. Glenna wondered whether she would be able to travel around the United States with someone whom she had never met, speaking before audiences who knew nothing about her culture. “I couldn’t decide right away,” she recalled. “The idea of speaking in front of crowds terrified me, as I didn’t have much previous experience doing that.” But Glenna’s family encouraged her and gave her confidence that she could do this. Her mother vouched for Lenny, saying that she had gotten to know him during his visits to the community. The elders believed in Glenna and told her that by going on the road she could help the Gwich’in people.⁴

In early August, Glenna flew from Old Crow, making a few stops along the way before arriving in DC more than two days after leaving her home. When she got off the plane, “the first thing [Lenny] said was, ‘You’re going to be a star.’” He “believed in me right off the bat,” she said. “That seems to have been an important part of his strategy—to encourage and build the confidence of the Gwich’in who was traveling with him.”⁵

Their first show was in Roanoke, Virginia, a four-hour drive. They rode in Lenny’s car—“not the greatest transportation,” Glenna joked to me—and then presented in the planetarium at the Science Museum of Western Virginia. When asked by a Roanoke Times reporter why she decided to go on tour, Glenna replied, “I feel so strongly about what is happening. And I feel that I have to do what I can to save the region for our children.” She explained, “[My] people have survived off the caribou for some 20,000 to 30,000 years, and we know that [oil drilling] will have an effect, and it will destroy the caribou—which means our lives will be destroyed as well.” After leaving Roanoke, they headed northeast to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where they spoke in a Victorian-era mansion at an event sponsored by local Sierra Club and Audubon Society chapters. From there, they traveled west, giving several presentations across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. By early September, they were driving through southern Illinois.⁶

When they got to Carbondale, they were hosted by local Sierra Club volunteers Laurel Toussaint and Tom Bik. Tom recalled that Glenna seemed “very reticent” at first. When she spoke at the shows, Glenna sometimes confessed her nervousness. “I had never spoken in front of people before, so it was a really scary thing to do,” she told an audience at the University of Michigan. “However, the way I felt is that we don’t really have a choice. I chose to come down here on behalf of my people, the Gwich’in people, to talk to people like yourselves … about our culture—just to let people know that we are there.” After Glenna finished speaking at Southern Illinois University, Tom remembered seeing tears on the faces of many audience members. “It was an amazing thing,” he explained. “You invite people to a show, and they’re sitting there in a chair weeping. There was a kind of transformative nature to the night. Some close emotional connections get made.”⁷

From Carbondale, they traveled north to Chicago, then back east, finally returning to DC, where Glenna joined Lenny and other activists to advocate on Capitol Hill. Glenna found it difficult to be on the road for so long—almost fifty days in total—and often felt exhausted and homesick. “It was lonely. It was hard to eat fast food all the time, every day; it was terrible.” But she also found that the tour became an important part of her spiritual journey. The longer she was on the road, the more she felt connected with the “infinite Creator” and with “our ancestors that have passed on.” “It’s not about me,” she explained. “It’s about our life. It’s about … [our] culture and the caribou that we relied on for thousands of years.”⁸

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As Lenny and Glenna wound their way through the Midwest, the Johnston-Wallop bill wound its way through the US Senate. Introduced by J. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana, and Malcolm Wallop, a Republican from Wyoming, the bill included a provision to drill the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. Proponents insisted that this measure would reduce the nation’s dependence upon oil imported from the volatile Middle East. President George H. W. Bush adamantly promoted this message, saying that he would veto any energy bill that did not allow for Arctic development. In late May, the Johnston-Wallop bill sailed through the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee by a vote of 17 to 3. With the bipartisan sanction of the committee and the presidential veto threat looming over Congress, refuge defenders faced what may have seemed an insurmountable challenge: a battle to garner public support and sway elected officials, a campaign to wallop Johnston-Wallop.⁹

A few months later, many observers were surprised by the outcome: the Senate voted to scuttle the bill. “It was the most exciting time in my life,” Lenny recalled. “Up until the last minute no one knew how the vote would go.” As news reached Old Crow, village leaders closed down the school for a day and held a community feast to celebrate the vote. Far outside the Beltway, in an Indigenous community nestled above the Arctic Circle in Canada, they rejoiced in what one leader described as a “very sweet” win over a “destructive energy bill.”¹⁰

Back on Capitol Hill, Senator Johnston said, “While I lose, and I hope lose graciously, I certainly have great admiration for those who fought the fight. The environmental groups, I must say, wrote the textbook on how to defeat a bill such as this, and my admiration is to them for the political skill they exhibited.” The Washington Post noted, as a prime example of this political skill, that environmental groups had “mobilized letter-writing and telephone campaigns that overcame the bill’s support from the oil industry.”¹¹

The Washington Post and other major dailies centered their coverage on DC, but that focus disregarded what happened in the rest of the country—as well as in Old Crow and other northern Canadian communities. It failed to explain how refuge defenders mobilized public support, how they encouraged Americans to see this place as a unique, vibrant ecosystem that needed to be protected. Such coverage made the process sound mechanical; it did not convey the level of passion and moral commitment behind the grassroots opposition to drilling. These accounts also overlooked the involvement of Gwich’in communities and ignored the Arctic campaign’s emphasis on combining wilderness preservation with Indigenous human rights.

It all looked very different from the grassroots, from places as disparate as Old Crow and Carbondale, where ordinary people joined the struggle. After Lenny and Glenna came to Carbondale, Laurel Toussaint thought about the profound impact of their visit. “Glenna Frost’s message moved hundreds of Southern Illinoisans,” she explained in a letter to the local newspaper. “For many of us, hearing her speak expanded the Arctic issue to include the native people of the region. Saving the Arctic from oil drilling is a human rights issue.”¹²

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Twenty-five years after Glenna went on the road with Lenny, we sat together on the banks of the Yukon River. As the water rushed by, she reflected on her tour experience. She explained to me that Lenny was one of the first environmentalists “to see that this was not just an environmental issue. The caribou, this is a human issue. What would happen to us if they ever develop, and we have no caribou to survive?” She described his role in bringing Gwich’in representatives to speak to ordinary Americans. “He knew that we were the most powerful resource—or, what he sometimes called, the ammunition. We were the most powerful resource in this whole fight for protection of the Arctic Refuge. And,” she emphasized, “we still are.” She wanted me to understand the enormous odds they were up against. We faced “the most powerful government in the world.” And yet, a “few Gwich’in,” along “with our friends, the environmentalists,” were able to keep the oil companies out of the refuge “these many years later.”¹³

By the time Glenna stepped into Lenny’s car in 1991, his tours were considered a crucial part of the Arctic campaign. Retracing the journeys of Lenny, Glenna, and many other Gwich’in spokespeople reveals what remains invisible in the national media: the patient, long-term work of building a political movement.¹⁴

Until 1987 the man driving Glenna Frost through the Midwest had never heard of the Arctic Refuge, let alone the Gwich’in people. He also had never been an activist before. That summer, while traveling through the Arctic, Lenny Kohm had a life-changing experience. “When I came back at the end of the summer,” he would tell audiences years later, “I found myself to be a much different person. Suddenly I couldn’t concentrate on my clients or my business. All I could think about was I couldn’t stand the thought of that place being destroyed. So I decided that I was going to do something about it.”¹⁵

Notes

* “Vuntut Gwitchin” is the name of this First Nation, which is located in Yukon, Canada. “Gwich’in” is the spelling generally used by other Gwich’in First Nations in Canada, by Gwich’in tribal governments in Alaska, and by the transnational Gwich’in Steering Committee. In this book, I spell the word as “Gwich’in” except when I am specifically referring to the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation.

2

The Last Great Wilderness

Before there was an Arctic Refuge, there was an idea, a proposal for land preservation outlined by two National Park Service staffers in the pages of the Sierra Club Bulletin. Published in 1953, this article by George L. Collins and Lowell Sumner launched the Arctic campaign. They recommended that the northeastern corner of Alaska, along with contiguous land in the Yukon, be protected as the Arctic Wilderness International Park. In their piece, Collins and Sumner also hit upon an evocative phrase to describe this area. They christened it “the last great wilderness.”¹

Collins and Sumner promoted a transnational vision of conservation, but they also cast their proposal within the familiar American myth of the frontier. Northeast Alaska, they commented, “offers what is virtually America’s last chance to preserve an adequate sample of the pioneer frontier, the Stateside counterpart of which has vanished.” “This wilderness,” Sumner further explained, “is big enough and wild enough to make you feel like one of the old-time explorers, knowing that each camp you place, each mountain climbed, … is in untouched country.” Going to northeast Alaska was like going back in time and seeing “the world unspoiled.”²

Collins and Sumner cataloged what would be lost if this land were ever developed: “impressively colorful” scenery, “breeding grounds for many species” of migratory birds, and critical habitat areas for large mammals. Sumner drew particular attention to the spectacular sight of massive herds of caribou. “We came upon whole valleys, hill slopes, ravines and tundra flats crawling with caribou,” he wrote. “They flowed up and down the slopes in all directions.” To Sumner, caribou migrating in the contemporary Arctic conjured up visions of buffalo roaming the Great Plains a century before: “Now we knew what it must have been like to see the buffalo herds in the old days; we knew more vividly than ever what we have lost forever in the States.”³

Decades later, many activists would break from the frontier mythology Collins and Sumner evoked. Rather than glorifying wilderness as a crucible of white American identity, they emphasized how the loss of caribou could mean cultural genocide for Indigenous peoples. While touring with Glenna Frost in 1991, Lenny Kohm argued that Americans are “doing the same thing to the Arctic Indians in the name of fuel that we did 100 years ago to the bison and the Plains Indian.” Instead of trying to salvage a “sample of the pioneer frontier,” a central myth of settler colonialism, Lenny and Gwich’in spokespeople framed refuge protection in terms of Indigenous cultur...