Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR or Arctic Refuge) is a national wildlife refuge in northeastern Alaska, United States. It consists of 19,286,722 acres (78,050.59 km²) in the Alaska North Slope region. It is the largest National Wildlife Refuge in the country, slightly larger than the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is administered from offices in Fairbanks.

Just across the border in Yukon, Canada, is two Canadian National Parks, Ivvavik and Vuntut.

History

The move to protect this corner of Alaska began in the early 1950s, with an article published in the journal of the Sierra Club by then National Park Service planner George Collins and biologist Lowell Sumner entitled "Northeast Alaska: The Last Great Wilderness" in 1953. Collins and Sumner then recruited Wilderness Society President Olaus Murie and his wife Margaret Murie into an effort to permanently protect the area. In 1956, Olaus and Mardy Murie led an expedition to the Brooks Range in northeast Alaska, where they dedicated an entire summer to studying the land and wildlife ecosystems of the Upper Sheenjek Valley. The conclusion resulting from these studies was an ever deeper sense of the importance of preserving the area intact, a determination that would play an instrumental part in the decision to designate the area as Wilderness in 1960. As Olaus would later say in a 1963 speech to a meeting of the Wildlife Management Association of New Mexico State University, "On our trips to the Arctic Wildlife Range we saw clearly that it was not a place for mass recreation... It takes a lot of territory to keep this alive, a living wilderness, for scientific observation and for esthetic inspiration. The Far North is a fragile place."