This national park is so wild, it has no roads. Now some want to mine outside its gates.
AMBLER, Alaska - From the peak of a mountain here, you can see the past and possible future of one of the largest protected parks on Earth.
This is the Brooks Range, roughly 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Sweeping green and golden ridgelines tower over lush valleys, which give way to wide, glacial blue rivers. The landscape is completely undeveloped. There is no road or other infrastructure in sight. Looking east is Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Looking west is Kobuk Valley National Park.
And looking straight down: the site of a potential open-pit mine.
There's roughly $7.5 billion worth of copper under this mountain that the mining venture Ambler Metals wants to extract, which could help build the wind turbines and batteries needed to address climate change. But that bounty - and others like it across the United States - have created a dilemma for Washington. President Biden wants more domestic minerals production to support his climate agenda, but his aides are struggling to find domestic mine sites that don't risk damaging wild lands and sacred natural treasures.
To reach the minerals here would require a 211-mile road through the heart of this Arctic expanse. It would cross 11 major rivers and hundreds of streams, breaking apart unspoiled tundra and the migratory path of tens of thousands of caribou. Twenty-six of those miles would carve through Gates of the Arctic, sending giant haulers and other industrial trucks through one of the country's most remote national parks and preserves. The proposal has led to eight years of bureaucratic wrangling and political pressure from environmentalists to kill it.
Because it crosses federal land, the Biden administration must decide the road's fate.
Dirk Nickisch, a bush pilot who has been flying over the Brooks Range for decades, said it's hard to grasp the region's beauty without seeing it from on high. "You take off and you fly for hours and see mountains extending on and on, and river valleys untouched," he said.
He said it would be "devastating" if a truck route were cut through this landscape, and more could follow. "It's not going to just be this one road," he said. "It's going to be all the spur roads that go off to mines."
For now, this mountaintop is only reachable by helicopter, and it boasts just a small platform the size of an office cubicle. A drill deep in the Earth explores the metals and minerals below. But if the Ambler project becomes operational, much of the mountainside would be shorn and scooped out to reach the minerals underneath to sell on the global market.
Cal Craig, the environmental and permitting manager for the mining company, said he can understand why some might be nervous. He himself decided to take the job after being captivated by the beauty of the landscape, which he first viewed in a photograph. Even so, he added, "the potential of this district is immense."
"It's so easy to just think that all this stuff just sort of exists," said Craig, who works for Ambler Metals, the joint venture of two companies that want to mine the site and others nearby for copper, zinc and lead. "But it comes from somewhere."
Biden administration officials have concluded that "somewhere" has to include places in the United States - not just mines in friendly foreign countries - and that the urgency is building. Biden has pledged that the country will halve its total greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, requiring a speedy build-out of energy infrastructure. The International Energy Agency says that type of pressure could cause copper demand to rise 25 percent between 2020 and 2030; demand for other metals such as lithium is already on pace to double or triple in that span.
At the same time, Biden also has set a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the nation's land and waters by 2030. And industry advocates say such policies keep permits for new mines held up for years.
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, the state's publicly owned development corporation, filed for federal permits to build the road in 2015. It got them under the Trump administration five years later, only for the Biden administration to suspend that approval in 2022 to seek additional environmental analysis.
Despite promises that it would finish the review by year's end, the Interior Department in May abruptly told a federal court it would put off a final decision again - perhaps into mid-2024. Ambler Metals has warned that could compound delays through 2024.
That has frustrated Alaska's three-member congressional delegation, which said that "the continued failure" to develop minerals will be a setback for the country's energy transition and supply chains.
Administration officials have yet to back the Ambler Road, and they have declined to say what they intend to do. Brenda Mallory, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview that the administration supports domestic mining development, backing permits for a cobalt mine in Idaho and a second lithium mine in Nevada, along with billions in government-backed loans, Energy Department grants for battery development and Pentagon funding for materials for the military.
"That doesn't mean that every project is going to be the right project," she said. "We think the important point is that we have to make sure that it's occurring in the right places, that there are some places that are too special to actually conduct mining in. But there are many other places that are not."
This friction goes back to the earliest days of Biden's presidency. In addition to his conservation promises, he pledged to give more weight to the rights and health of low-income, minority and tribal communities near mining sites or affected by their pollution. He also appointed Deb Haaland - a Native American politician who often opposed drilling and mining projects - to head the Interior Department, which oversees many of Washington's biggest decisions on them.
The administration quickly moved to try to permanently kill a contentious gold and copper megaproject, Pebble Mine, proposed for Alaska's southwest. And it put a 20-year ban on mining in a giant watershed near Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a prospect for copper, nickel and other hardrock minerals.
That has not been enough to satisfy many environmental groups and tribes. Native Americans are protesting the opening of construction at Nevada's Thacker Pass, slated to be one of the largest lithium mines in the world. Some advocates for tribes have also faulted the administration for not doing more to undo a plan, backed with congressional authorization, for Resolution Copper, a giant mine in Arizona on the sacred site known as Oak Flat.
In Alaska, Native groups are divided about the Ambler Road proposal. Some are eager for employment opportunities that could come from the mines - and the potential lower cost of goods and services if a road were constructed. Although the proposed road would be a private industrial road to be used only by mining companies, many say they believe that it could ultimately lead to broader access to this remote area. That, in turn, might help stem the out-migration of Alaska Natives from these villages, supporters say. The subsistence lifestyle can also be costly, and bringing economic development into the communities may help them pay for the snowmobiles, rifles and other modern equipment that have become essential to hunts.
"Things are changing anyways," said Fred Sun, an Ambler Metals worker and the tribal president of Shungnak, a Native village close to the potential mining operation. "We don't want to get left behind."
Under a 1971 law, regional for-profit corporations owned by Native shareholders control millions of acres of land in Alaska. NANA, the regional corporation whose territory includes the Ambler Mining District, has partnered with Ambler Metals on the exploratory drilling here. If the mines are built, the region's 15,000 Iñupiat shareholders could get a portion of any profits through the corporation's annual dividends.
Although a NANA spokesman said the corporation is "neutral" on the Ambler Road, it has a three-year agreement with the state for "preconstruction activities."
Other Alaska Natives fear the potential impact on wildlife essential to their culture, and they have filed a lawsuit to stop the road. They and others say the project will disrupt the migration path for one of the world's largest caribou herds and pollute waterways crucial to salmon and sheefish, key to the subsistence diet for several local tribes.
There are thick forests of white spruce and aspen here; soggy tundra of moss and lichen; and an uncounted number of lakes, rivers and streams that form a watery labyrinth as seen from the air.
"We're expecting the worst-case scenario of what you can do to this last great roadless area in America," said Frank Thompson, the tribal president of Evansville, a Native village near the eastern end of the road's proposed path. "There's been people living and walking through this land for generations, thousands of years."
As proposed, the two-lane and 32-foot-wide gravel road would need nearly 50 bridges over wide waterways and nearly 3,000 culverts for smaller water crossings. It would also need accompanying material sites, maintenance camps, airstrips and guard stations. It is estimated trucks hauling ore and equipment would eventually make an estimated 168 round trips on the road per day.
Fighting the Ambler Road is now one of the top priorities for the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. And its leaders see the mining industry potentially threatening other popular parks, including areas in the Mojave National Preserve, east of Death Valley National Park and around the Grand Canyon.
"It does seem as though mining companies are claiming that every mine they propose is necessary and needed for the clean energy revolution. And that's simply not true," said Alex Johnson, the group's Alaska senior program manager, who noted that copper is not on the official federal list of critical minerals. "There are places that remain too precious, too connected, too wild, too important for tribes and people who live in that landscape to be mined."
Alaskan projects often bring the most intense scrutiny. The state is home to some of the country's last intact and undisturbed natural habitats, providing refuge to migratory birds, polar bears and walruses, and full of sensitive lakes and marshes connected by an underground web of freshwater. The administration is still facing intense political blowback from young activists over its March decision to permit a huge oil drilling project, Willow, on the state's North Slope.
And opposition to new mines extends far beyond Alaska, leaving many wondering where and how the Biden administration can achieve its goal of securing a reliable U.S. supply. U.S. automakers and other major industries are scouring the world for minerals, and they are often finding stiff competition from Chinese rivals, or suppliers that endanger local communities or their workers. Fierce geopolitical friction with China and Russia further raises the pressure to fulfill demand from sources at home.
A draft of the Energy Department's annual assessment of critical minerals, released in May, concludes that about half a dozen critical minerals, including nickel and cobalt, already face major supply challenges. Twice as many could face major risks in the next dozen years, with lithium, platinum and magnesium joining the list. Success in the United States and other countries in creating clean-energy programs is likely to lead to a global surge of demand, the report says, while the pandemic's lingering impacts and the conflict in Ukraine has also limited capacity.
And the pressure on demand could grow even larger. To meet the 2015 Paris agreement's goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, the world would need to increase mineral demand as much as fourfold in the next 20 years, according to the estimates from the International Energy Agency.
Congress also has required that, to be eligible for tax breaks, clean technology must use content from the United States or its trade partners, boosting demand for metals from the United States or close allies. Industry lobbyists say they are under constant pressure to show Washington lawmakers and some investors that they are distancing themselves from troubled foreign suppliers, especially China.
And many, especially from the mining industry, have been critical of administration efforts to secure mineral through international trade deals or diplomacy.
"In order to have their cake and eat it too, they're going overseas," said Rich Nolan, president and chief executive of the National Mining Association. "We prefer they start here and try to spur a domestic industry - not try to shut it down."
Mallory and other senior administration officials say that they are pushing Congress to update the nation's 150-year-old mining law to boost domestic mining, and that government research shows incomplete permit applications, staff shortages and after-the-fact changes in permit requests are the biggest sources of delays.
Delays aren't a challenge only in the United States. Social unrest is stalling projects in Peru, and debates over royalties and taxes are causing slowdowns in Chile. People in France are preemptively organizing to keep mining from lithium under a nature reserve. Sweden recently found Europe's largest deposit of so-called rare-earth minerals, but the region's Sami Indigenous population says it threatens their culture of traditional reindeer herding.
"It's a global problem," said Nick Pickens, who oversees global mining research at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. "We want this stuff, but nobody is prepared to do the hard yards."
But those who have a stake in preserving wild lands reject that reasoning.
"The argument that we can mine our way to a greener future is crazy to me," said John Gaedeke, a Brooks Range wilderness guide whose livelihood is tied to the great outdoors and unblemished mountains and streams.
He added: "Every day there isn't a road out there, I feel more hopeful."
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