Alaska Wilderness League

The Alaska Wilderness League (AWL) is a nonprofit organization that works to protect Alaska’s most significant wild lands from oil and gas drilling and from other industrial threats. Founded in 1993, AWL has its main office in Washington, DC, with additional offices in Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska.

For the past ten years, AWL has taken the lead in the fight to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from being opened to oil and gas development, and its leadership has made a significant impact in this area. The organization has rallied public support and successfully stopped numerous attempts by Congress to open the refuge to development.

In 2001 AWL and its supporters helped fund photographer Subhankar Banerjee’s ground-breaking winter field photography in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The photos he took were published in the book "Seasons of Life and Land" [cite book|author=Subhankar Banerjee|title=Seasons of Life and Land|publisher=Mountaineer Books|date=2003] . Banerjee’s photographs of the Refuge were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and controversy erupted when his caption for the photos were altered and the exhibit was moved to a far corner of the museum. Some charged that that Alaska Senator Ted Stevens had used political pressure to remove the exhibit from the spolight because Sentaor Barbara Boxer had held up Banerjee’s book during a Senate floor debate over oil drilling in the Refuge, but the museum maintained the changes were made “for artistic reasons”. [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E2D9113EF932A15756C0A9659C8B63 Censorship or Politics? Views Differ Over Exhibit] ]

Starting in 2004 AWL expanded it work to include ecologially significant areas of Alaska’s vast National Petroleum Reserve, the Tongass National Forest, and the outer continental shelf areas of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

AWL's work has had long-standing support from President Jimmy Carter, who remains the Honorary Chairman of their Board of Directors.

Press

[http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/whos-backing-gingrichs-drill-here-drill-now-push/ Andrew Revkin: Who’s Backing Gingrich’s ‘Drill Here’ Push? (NY Times)]

[http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/15/143039/130/ Grist: Gingrich’s ‘grassroots’ drilling campaign is funded by Big Oil, reports says]

Notes

External Links

[http://www.alaskawild.org/ Alaska Wilderness League web site]

[http://www.law.nyu.edu/JOURNALS/ENVTLLAW/issues/vol10/1/v10n1a2.pdf Dochetry, Bonnie. Challenging Boundaries: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and International Environmental Law Protection.]