The Environmental Gamble on Ambler Road
The author is a Junior at Hawken School in Ohio. This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration with Covering Climate Now.
Remember “drill, baby, drill”? This served as one of the most notable phrases during the presidential electoral campaign of the Trump Administration in 2024. It is finally starting to materialize, and by extension, so are the consequences.
On Monday, Oct. 6, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that approved the Ambler Road Project, a 26-mile-long gravel road that cuts into the Arctic National Park in Northwest Alaska. The acceptance of this plan followed the Senate’s approval of Trump’s Budget Bill, which opened up protected lands to mining and drilling, especially in mineral and resource-dense places like Alaska.
What is the Ambler Road Project?
Following a bill Congress passed in 1980, the Ambler Project was originally planned by Alaska’s state government, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which gave companies access to the Alaskan Mining District for leasing and construction. This venture intended to connect the James W. Dalton Highway, a 414-mile road in Alaska, to a mineral-rich region of land in Northwest Alaska, now known as the Ambler Mining District. In 2009, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities started the planning and inspection processes of various potential routes for the road. They settled on a conceptual road that would pass through the Arctic National Preserve, a 19.6 million-acre stretch of land that serves as both a wildlife refuge and an intact ecosystem for thousands of different species.
Later, in 2013, the project was transferred to a public corporation, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. It acted as the main resource in winning the legal guarantees and permissions to begin the construction of the project. Following courtroom triumphs and final issues of the plan in 2020 and 2021, it was making its final strides towards implementation.
The Dalton Highway is a 414-mile road in Alaska that services the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The Ambler Road Project would connect the Dalton Highway to the Ambler Mining District in northwestern Alaska. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
What happened under the Biden Administration?
In 2024, the U.S. The Bureau of Land Management issued the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which examined all of the negative environmental impacts that the construction of this project would entail. They concluded that the largest degree of harm would be to the surrounding Indigenous and tribal groups, impacting up to 117 different communities, by some estimates. By taking away the necessary protections on the National Preserve, construction would most likely harm subsistence hunting and fishing in that area by fragmenting wildlife through pollution and habitat extinction. Following this release, the Department of the Interior released a Record of Decision (ROD) choosing that the No Action Alternative originally introduced in the EIS, officially halting the project. The Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, appointed by Biden in 2020, stated this decision, exclaiming that “[t]he Department of the Interior takes seriously [their] obligations to manage America’s public lands for the benefit of all people.” Haaland added that, “in Alaska, that includes ensuring that [they] consider the impacts of proposed actions on Alaska Native and rural subsistence users.”
What’s happening under the Trump Administration?
In a series of anti-environmental Executive Orders, President Trump issued an order to restore a federal right-of-way grant issued in 2021 to Alaska to begin working on the Ambler Road project, unlocking access to the Alaskan Mining District. By dissolving the legal barriers once established by the Biden Administration, Trump removed red tape that protected the surrounding wildlife and populations that rely on the vegetation, clean water, and plentiful fish and land-animal populations for hunting. In a statement he gave to the White House, Trump emphasized how the decision to re-sign this agreement, after the former disengagement, primed the national economy for “an economic gold mine,” based on all of the resources that mining operations in this district would unlock.
However, people aren’t just remaining stagnant in the face of these reversals. Environmental groups, tribal advocacy coalitions, and local activists and organizations are rising to the stage to urge the administration to reconsider the unqualified support of the project. For them, the concern mainly arises from the risk that building this structure would have on 11 major rivers, 3,000 streams, and 1,400 wetlands. The habitat destruction that could arise as a result of this project would compromise some of the most essential features of Alaska that allow it to support such a wide variety of ecosystems.
Unfortunately, this is one of the many occasions in which the protection of the environment and all of the species and populations it supports is directly pitted against economic policy and competition for resources. Now more than ever, we must defend the rights of the populations directly affected by policies that remove red tape and protections, which will lead to environmental harms being imposed on certain communities.
Addressing issues like these is not only sought after by communities in Alaska fighting against habitat destruction, but also occurs on a global scale. The 89 Percent Project is a global journalistic initiative, under the organization Covering Climate Now, that aims to continue awareness on these issues due to how “between 80 and 89% of the world’s people want their governments to be doing more to address climate change.”
The Environmental Gamble on Ambler Road © 2025 by Youth Environmental Press Team is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
