Ambler Road Project in Alaska

[Woolly Bugger]

In defiance of Alaska hunters, fishers, outdoor recreationists and 88 Tribal governments that have passed resolutions opposing construction of the controversial Ambler Road, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum today reissued the rights-of-way and Clean Water Act permit needed for the project in a significant step toward bulldozing the industrial road across our national public lands.

The 211-mile road would be built for the benefit of private industry to access the Ambler Mining District, while cutting across some of Alaska's wildest landscapes and part of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. The road project would harm salmon streams and local communities' subsistence resources while also threatening caribou migration patterns.

The Wilderness Society released the following statement from Alaska Senior Manager Matt Jackson in response to Burgum's actions:

" Thousands of Alaskans and dozens of Tribes in the region have been crystal clear about saying 'NO' to the Ambler Road in the interest of protecting this wild Alaska landscape – the Brooks Range, the Koyokon and Kobuk rivers, and the thousands of tributaries the road would cross – for future generations.

"Our grandchildren deserve the same freedom to hunt for caribou, fish for salmon, and experience wilderness that we've received. We don't want this road, and we oppose these rights of way."

https://www.wilderness.org/articles/press-release/wilderness-society-condemns-unprecedented-approval-ambler-road-project


Alaskan Tribes and Activists Are Ready to Resist Ambler Road, Again
The proposed route would slash through pristine Indigenous land


Vent, who is Koyukon Athabascan and Iñupiaq, was raised by her great-grandmother and her aunties in Huslia, a village of 300 in the vast, wild country south of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. No roads traversed the spruce forest and boggy tundra. Rivers scrawled in great loops from the base of the mountains, writing their history across the flats in oxbow lakes and sloughs that gleamed with light. Huslia lay along one of the largest waterways, the Koyukuk. For generations, it and the region's other major rivers had served as highways connecting the Alaska Native communities scattered in this trackless landscape to one another and to the fish camps and hunting places and berry-picking grounds where residents like Vent harvested much of their food.

Over a decade ago, Vent joined an auntie at a public meeting in Huslia's community hall, where villagers had gathered to discuss a state proposal for a new road. Maps detailed a route that, if built, would begin northeast of Huslia from the Dalton Highway, the only major road in northern Alaska, and run more than 200 miles west, nearly to the Inupiat village of Kobuk, one of several on the Kobuk River. The so-called Ambler Access Project—led mostly by the state's economic development arm, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA—would allow foreign companies to develop copper mines near Kobuk. Trucks would travel the new road up to 168 times per day, carrying ore concentrate. Once they reached the Dalton Highway, they would transport the ore south to Fairbanks, where trains would carry it to a port in south-central Alaska—a total journey of about 800 miles.


Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login



https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2025-1-spring/feature/ambler-road-alaskan-tribes-and-activists-are-ready-resist-again

[Woolly Bugger]

Sign a petition here: https://www.tananachiefs.org/noamblerroad/