Wildcatting v. Wildlife

In the hotels and barrooms of Anchorage, Alaska, oilmen from 25 U.S. companies waited anxiously last week for word from Washington, D.C. that would start the greatest northern land rush since the Klondike gold strike. They had swarmed to Anchorage by the score this fall after Richfield Oil Corp. made Alaska's first big oil find in the nearby Kenai national game preserve (see map). So promising was the well (900 bbl. a day) that the companies are prepared to sink $100 million into the search for more. If they are just moderately successful, they will invest another $200 million in production, refining, transport and storage facilities. This would bring in still other industries, open a bright new era for Alaska that might well make the territory selfsupporting. But last week the best-laid plans of the oilmen were held up by a single, formidable obstacle: the big (7 ft. tall, 10 ft. long), shaggy Alaskan moose.

Conflict. When the Government in "1941 set aside 2,000,000 marshy acres of the Kenai Peninsula as a preserve for moose and other animals, no one cared because the land had no commercial value. But after Richfield's discovery, oilmen quickly filed for leases on nearly 12 million acres in and around Kenai, and close, to 5,000,000 acres farther north.

This oil rush stirred up powerful conservationist lobbies in far-off Washington. To stop the drilling, they lined up for battle against the oilmen, and even against Alaska conservationists who wanted to throw open all Kenai for exploration. The Interior Department moved to pacify the lobbyists. It proposed stiffer rules for granting oil leases on all U.S. gameland, suggested that the pro-moose Fish and Wildlife Service get veto power over gameland leases. And until the rules were formally adopted, the department suspended all leasing.

To get it started again, Alaskans set up a bipartisan committee, headed by onetime Democratic Governor Ernest Gruening, to argue the case for unlimited exploration. Said Gruening, himself a vociferous conservationist: "The conservation lobbyists who get most upset are those who live in big-city apartments and have not the faintest practical notion of, where the moose like to live."

Actually, the moose like to live where men and machines do, and frequently nuzzle up to Alaskan oil derricks to sidewalk-superintend the drilling. Instead of being driven out of the civilized areas, they are rapidly multiplying. Their greatest enemy is not the oilmen, but the Alaska Railroad--a creature of the conservationist Interior Department--which last winter killed 366 moose on the tracks. For those moose who prefer desolation to civilization, there are vast areas of ideal scrub brush and timberland outside Kenai untouched by man or derrick. In fact, only 10% of Alaska's moose live in the preserve.

The oilmen have some other potent arguments. Kenai oil is urgently needed for Alaska's three U.S. Air Force bases, two Army bases and countless Distant Early Warning (DEW line) stations. These outposts now get their oil products from Southern California over a long and vulnerable seaborne supply line.

Compromise. This week the moose-v.-man issue gets even hotter as the Interior Department opens public hearings in Washington to hear the objections to its new leasing rules. Chances are that the oilmen and conservationists will work out a compromise because there is believed to be just too much oil in Kenai to let it lie there. The Fish and Wildlife Service will demand guarantees that the oilmen protect the moose by routing their roads around rather than through the moose land, by keeping oil from wells from polluting the marshes. Oilmen are expected to accept these conditions, and the stiffer leasing rules. For one reason, they are anxious to get along with the Fish and Wildlife Service in case huge reserves of crude are discovered under other gamelands.

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