![]() To the south, snow-topped mountains sit mirage-like against the gray sky, across grassland that looks spongy and brown. It’s June and, offshore, tumbled ice is visible in water black as coal. Residents in pickup trucks or four-wheelers wait to unload supplies, or collect relatives coming home from downstate. We bounce, landing on the short runway in Kaktovik, a dot on Alaska’s Arctic coast and the only village located in ANWR. He’s pledged that America will achieve “energy dominance.” And his administration has identified ANWR as a top priority in the hunt for new sources of U.S. ![]() In April, President Trump signed an executive order to expand offshore drilling, including in the Arctic, and open up protected federal land. That changed in January with the inauguration of Donald Trump, who promised during his presidential campaign to pull back restrictions on the oil and gas industry and encourage exploration. Lisa Murkowski, (R-Alaska) Energy and Natural Resources Committee chair, during a news conference opposing the Obama administration’s plans to protect a big swath of the state’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas drilling, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. No compromise,” says Robert Mrazek, a former New York congressman and chair emeritus of the Alaska Wilderness League. That’s why environmentalists have fought so fiercely over the years to protect it. It’s also one of the rare pieces of unspoiled wilderness left in the world-home to polar bear dens and caribou calving grounds-and remains much the same as it was 10,000 years ago. Energy Information Administration reported in 2000. (The devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound on the southern coast of Alaska in 1989 was a major setback.) There’s a simple reason for their persistence: ANWR is “the largest unexplored, potentially productive geologic onshore basin in the United States,” the U.S. And more than once they’ve almost succeeded. But it’s not what’s on top of the ground that Big Oil covets-it’s the billions of barrels of crude oil that may lie below.įor more than four decades, Alaska’s congressional delegation and their oil and gas allies have been pushing to drill here in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. At first glance, you’d never think that the Eskimo village and brown tundra below would represent the “longest running, most acrimonious environmental battle in American history,” as naturalist Peter Matthiessen once called it. While at the University of Washington, Hunter spent a summer internship in the US Embassy in Myanmar as a Harold Rosenthal Fellow in International Relations.As the 19-seat Beechcraft breaks from the clouds over the northeastern coast of Alaska, the oil industry’s long-cherished prize comes into view. Hunter completed his Masters in Public Policy at the University of Washington (2013) and his MA in Southeast Asia Studies, also at the University of Washington (2012). He also recently completed field research on social media and violence in Myanmar as a Robert Myers Fellow with a grant from the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. ![]() The chapter was published in Jeff Smith’s edited volume, Asia’s Quest for Balance: China’s Rise and Balancing in the Indo-Pacific (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018). Rajaratnam School of International Studies on Singapore’s balancing tactics vis-a-vis China and the United States. While at Brookings, he co-authored a chapter with Joseph Liow of the S. He also supported research and events for The India Project at Brookings. Prior to joining the ANU, Hunter worked as a Senior Research Assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. His main research interests include state-society relations and political change in Southeast Asia, US foreign policy, and US-China competition. In particular, he explores how small states in Southeast Asia form hedging strategies to manage their relations with the United States and China, with particular focus on Singapore, Vietnam, and Myanmar. ![]() His research is focused on great power competition in Southeast Asia. Hunter Marston commenced his PhD at the ANU in July 2019. ![]()
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