Lecturer David Hayes discusses the preservation of Arctic lands for The Christian Science Monitor. 

The proposed designation of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness is an important symbolic gesture in a debate over ANWR that has been going on for more than three decades.

On Sunday, the Obama administration announced that it will propose designating more than 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) – including its coastal plain – as wilderness.

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”It’s as huge and wild as anything imaginable,” says David Hayes, a visiting lecturer at Stanford Law School in California and visiting senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as deputy secretary of the Interior under both Presidents Obama and Clinton. “There is not a deficit of opportunity for federal lands and offshore resources in the Arctic. Let’s protect this special place that was set aside as a refuge.”

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”This administration has 30 million acres in [Bureau of Land Management] lands in the Lower 48 open to oil and gas development. They’re doing annual sales in the National Petroleum Reserve just west of Prudhoe Bay,” Mr. Hayes says. “There are a lot of reasons for anxiety in Alaska around oil and gas because the price has gone down so much…. But putting the question of oil development writ large as though it stands and falls on whether there are some wells in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – that’s a bridge too far.”