Interior expected to reject new road through Alaskan wilderness

The Biden administration is expected to deny permission for a mining company to build a 211- mile industrial road through fragile Alaskan wilderness, handing a victory to environmentalists in an election year when the president wants to underscore his credentials as a climate leader and conservationist.

The Interior Department intends to announce as early as this week that there should be “no action” on the federal land where the road known as the Ambler Access Project would be built, according to two people familiar with the decision who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the decision. A formal denial of the project would come later this year, they said.

The road was essential to reach what is estimated to be a $ 7.5 billion copper deposit buried under ecologically sensitive land. There are currently no mines in the area and no requests for permits have been filed with the government; the road was a first step.

Blocking the industrial road would be an enormous victory for opponents who have argued for years that it would threaten wildlife aswell as Alaskanative tribes that rely on hunting and fishing.

Environmentalists, including many young climate activists, were infuriated last year by President Joe Biden’s decision to approve Willow, an $ 8 billion oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska. The proposed road would be several hundred miles south of the Willow project.

Themove comes as the Biden administration tries to find a balance between two different and sometimes opposing goals.

Biden is intent on bolstering clean energy in the United States to fight climate change. Ambler metals, the mining venture behind the proposed road, has said the copper it seeks is critical to make wind turbines, photovoltaic cells and transmission lines needed for wind, solar and other renewable energy. But the president is also determined to conserve environmentally sensitive lands, and has been expanding the footprint of national monuments around the country while also blocking off some public lands from oil and gas drilling.

David krause, the interim executive director of the National Audubon Society’s Alaska office, said protecting the wilderness around the Ambler area is a “huge deal.”

“This is one of the most ecologically intact and functional landscapes on the planet,” Krause said.

As proposed, the Ambler project would consist of a $ 350million two- lane, all- season gravel road that would run through the Brooks Range foothills and the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, crossing 11 rivers and thousands of streams before it reached the site of a future mine.

The Interior Department found that a road would disturb wildlife habitat, pollute spawning grounds for salmon and threaten the hunting and fishing traditions of more than 30 Alaska Native communities. In its final analysis, the agency is expected to say that any version of an industrial road would “significantly and irrevocably” hurt the environment and tribal communities, the two people said.

“The caribou is struggling, the fish are struggling,” Julie Roberts- Hyslop, the first chief of the Tanana Tribe, said last year.