If the Biden administration ultimately rejects the access road, its decision will likely be challenged by the state agency overseeing the project. And a rejection is sure to infuriate Alaska lawmakers who lobbied the administration to allow the road to be built.
The Ambler Road decision represents the latest challenge to Biden’s efforts to balance his climate goals, which require building out a domestic supply chain for the minerals needed to transition away from fossil fuels, while ensuring that the clean energy push he is spearheading will not harm tribal communities. An earlier draft of the project’s environmental impact statement found that more than 30 tribal communities would face restrictions on subsistence hunting and fishing if the road were built — a key factor in the administration’s reasoning.
The 211-mile-long Ambler Road was initially approved under the previous administration, which issued a 50-year right-of-way permit to build the road just days before President Donald Trump left office.
But the project has faced strong opposition from tribes in interior Alaska as well as hunting and angling groups who argue it will hurt subsistence resources, including caribou migration patterns and some of Alaska’s most important salmon and sheefish spawning streams. The industrial access road would cross hundreds of rivers and streams, 26 miles of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, and the tribal lands of several Alaska Native communities -- allowing for approximately 168 truck trips a day.
The area south of the Brooks Range—a patchwork of wetlands and densely forested wilderness—is one of the largest roadless areas in North America.