The U.S. government just scheduled another oil and gas lease sale for Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, setting the stage for a fresh battle over a region that’s home to wildlife like grizzly bears, polar bears, gray wolves, caribou, muskoxen and migratory birds and land sacred to the Gwich’in Indigenous people. The Bureau of Land Management announced the sale will take place June 5.
This marks the third attempt to auction off drilling rights in the refuge’s coastal plain, and the first under a law passed last year that mandates four lease sales over the next decade. This latest auction comes after two previous sales fell flat. According to AP, the first, held near the end of the last administration’s first term, has been tied up in litigation ever since.
