In the mid-1970s, a young lawyer named Ian Waddell took a helicopter ride across the Crow Flats, in northern Yukon. He was accompanying Justice Thomas Berger on his visits to community after community — the so-called Berger Inquiry — to gain their input into a proposed gas pipeline from the Beaufort Sea to Alberta.
When they landed, Berger turned to him and, as Waddell recounts it, said, “You know, Ian, do you realize the magnificence of what we saw yesterday? It’s the last of North America — the eighth wonder of the world.”
That landscape the judge so admired is home (Read more…) the Porcupine caribou herd, around 200,000 strong, which roam on the world’s longest land-mammal migration between Alaska, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. On the Canadian side of the border, two national parks, Ivvavik and Vuntut, protect much of the herd’s habitat.
But on the Alaska side of the border, the land and the herd that depends upon it have come under threat from oil and gas drilling after President Trump opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in his recent tax bill.