Alaska loses fight over Arctic National Wildlife Refuge border
Monique Merrill
(CN) — A dispute between the state of Alaska and the federal government over who has the rights to 20,000 acres of land in the northwest corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been decided, after a federal judge ruled in favor of the feds on Wednesday.
“The state’s proposed boundary is more likely to sever geographic features in the area,” wrote U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason, a Barack Obama appointee.
The land dispute has taken on new significance over the year, as President Donald Trump has called for resource extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In a separate March ruling, Gleason ordered the reinstatement of an Alaskan agency’s oil and gas leases there.
A spokesperson for the state said Alaska is disappointed by the ruling.
“This land may hold significant resource potential for the future of energy for Alaska and the United States and would likely be thoroughly explored and developed under state management,” Alaska Department of Law Communications Director Patty Sullivan said in a statement.
Sullivan added that the state is evaluating its options and is “glad to, at least, have a federal administration currently in place that recognizes the importance of responsible resource development in this area.”
Much of the arguments centered on the meaning of “extreme west bank of the Canning River” — a phrase used by former Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton in a 1960 public land order describing the boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Range, the former name of the refuge.
Seaton described the boundary of the refuge as moving in a southwesterly direction from Brownlow Point approximately three miles to the “mean high water mark of the extreme west bank of the Canning River.”
Located in the far northeast of the state, the Canning River flows north from the Franklin Mountains to Camden Bay in the Arctic Ocean.
The Bureau of Land Management published survey results in 2016, drawing the boundary of the refuge along the Staines River, a more westerly channel of the Canning River, rather than the Canning River itself. The Interior Board of Land Appeals affirmed that designation in 2020.
Alaska sued both agencies in 2022, along with the Department of the Interior and several of the agencies’ directors, challenging that border and claiming Seaton intended for the Canning River to mark the boundary.
But the court determined the northwest boundary of the refuge is “genuinely ambiguous,” that the land appeal board is likely entitled to deference and that, even if it wasn’t entitled to deference, the board’s decision is supported by substantial evidence.
For instance, relying on the dictionary definition of “extreme” as meaning the “outermost” supports the board’s finding that the drafters of the 1960 public land order “intended for the reference to refer to the bank of the outermost or furthest west channel of the Canning, namely, the Staines distributary,” Gleason determined.
Much of the dispute centered on construing the precise language used in the decades-old order. The state argued that interpreting “extreme west bank” as following the Staines improperly conflates “bank” with “channel,” but the court rejected that notion.
“As federal defendants rightly state, however, a reference to the ‘extreme’ west bank ‘implies multiple west banks,’” Gleason wrote. “The phrase ‘extreme west bank’ must necessarily refer to the western-most bank of the western-most channel; otherwise, the ‘extreme’ modifier would be superfluous, because a single river channel has only one west bank and one east bank.”
Plus, reviewing historical maps from the years directly preceding the 1960 order supported the board’s decision, Gleason found. One such map, from 1957, and found within a box entitled “Arctic Wildlife Refuge Correspondence” and obtained from a collection of Interior Department documents stored at the National Archives in Seattle.
“That the 1957 Metes and Bounds Map shows the [Arctic National Wildlife Range] boundary following the Staines River, therefore, is compelling and relevant evidence that the drafters intended for the boundary to do so,” Gleason wrote.
Similarly, a public land order directly following the 1960 order at the center of the case provided further evidence in support of the federal defendants’ interpretation of the border, as did other maps drafted before the order that depict the Staines as the westernmost distributary of the Canning.
Plus, the state’s proposed boundary would split the Canning River system.
“The court further agrees with the [Interior Board of Land Appeals] that federal defendants’ boundary is more in line with the original purpose of the Refuge, which was to ‘preserv[e] unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values,’” Gleason wrote.
The Department of the Interior declined to comment.