A U.S. District Court has found the Department of the Interior’s mapping agency should have considered additional mapping that was available in the 1950s when the boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was created. The court has sent the matter back to the agency inside of the Interior Department to reconsider the boundary line.
ANWR was established in 1960 by President Dwight Eisenhower, and was at the time called the Arctic National Wildlife Range. It had an area of 13,900 square miles. The wildlife range was expanded to 19.3 million acres and renamed the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter when he signed Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the largest unit in the National Wildlife Refuge System. ANILCA mandated wildlife studies, as well as an oil and gas assessment of the coastal plain, sometimes called the 10-02 area.
The State of Alaska argued that the Bureau of Land Management incorrectly surveyed the western boundary of ANWR, and erred when it withheld approximately 20,000 acres of land on the eastern North Slope from the State. The mapping agency, called the Board of Land Appeals, set the boundary at the Canning River, but maps created by the BLM put the boundary several miles to the west at the Staines River. The error cost the State of Alaska about 31 square miles of land to which it was entitled. The decision has important implications for oil and gas development on the eastern North Slope.
“It’s about time that the BLM recognized that the Canning and Staines are two different rivers, that don’t even connect to each other,” said Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy. “The ANWR boundary cannot be what the BLM says it is. Their position that the boundary follows the Canning River until an unmarked location, where it hops over a nine-foot riverbank, crosses more than 10 miles of open tundra, and only then joins the Staines is simply preposterous. This is yet another attempt by the federal government to prevent the State from receiving land that it is entitled to under the law, and we’re extremely pleased to be able to take the fight back to the IBLA.”
“We are very pleased with the Court’s order,” said Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor. “Once IBLA considers the proper maps—the maps that actually existed when the boundary of ANWR was being set—we believe that the intended boundary is unquestionably at the Canning River, not the Staines River as IBLA incorrectly found.”
In its order, the Court said a series of USGS maps dating from 1951 should have been considered in determining the United States’ intended boundary for ANWR. The Board of Land Appeals had only looked at later maps published after ANWR’s establishment to find “intent.”
“The State wants the BLM to follow the text of the public land order that created ANWR, which the federal government wrote for itself,” said Department of Natural Resources Commissioner John Boyle. “When it does, it’s clear that the State is entitled to this land by operation of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.”
Alaska administratively appealed to the Interior Board of Land Appeals following the Bureau of Land Management’s initial decision in 2016. The Board of Land Appeals issued a decision in favor of BLM in 2020 and the State sought judicial review of that order in March 2022.
ANILCA has a “no more” clause, stating says there are to be no more lands in Alaska withdrawn to federal control, unless Congress approves it. President Carter had used the Antiquities Act to expand the refuge as a way to protect it as a wilderness.
