The Ambler Industrial Access Road, or Ambler Road, is a proposed 211-mile transportation corridor that would traverse Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park, one of the largest roadless wilderness areas in the country, in hopes of extracting copper, cobalt, zinc, lead and other minerals. The proposed roadway would cut across the heart of Indigenous lands with 11 major river crossings (including the Koyukuk, Kobuk, and Yukon watersheds) and more than 3,000 freshwater stream crossings resulting in severe habitat destruction. As such, the Ambler Road project would pose a grave threat to the delicate ecosystems, subsistence ways of life, and cultural heritage of Alaska Native communities throughout the state.

In 2020, the Ambler Road project was briefly approved under former President Donald Trump, but then suspended by the Biden Administration for “significant deficiencies” in its environmental review process. A newly released Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Ambler Road Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement identified 66 communities dependent on a subsistence way of life that could be impacted by the project, compared to only 27 communities in the previous analysis. According to the BLM, an estimated 50% of these communities would be significantly impacted because of the road. Potential impacts of the road include increased thawing of permafrost, wildlife population declines, and numerous negative health impacts on caribou and fish.

The proposed Ambler industrial mining road would fragment wildlife habitat, altering the movement and migration of keystone subsistence species that local residents are dependent upon. For example, sheefish and salmon habitat would become polluted, and the migration and habitat of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd would be disrupted.

The Norton Bay Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, a nonprofit Tribal organization dedicated to the protection and sustainable management of water and subsistence resources, climate change, adaption planning, Alaska Native Tribal sovereignty, and environmental human rights, urges that the BLM follow a “no action” alternative which prohibits the construction of the road.

According to Doug Katchatag, the President of the Norton Bay Watershed Council, “We have opposed this road for almost 20 years now. We opposed it back then, and I’m still opposing it today.” He added, “We as Alaska Natives, we cannot afford that road. We’re Natives, we rely heavily on animals that roam the country. Our store is the country out there. The animals we get, that’s our mainstay. We need the subsistence way of life. We need the animals to survive and if they built that road we would not be able to exist.”

Unalakleet resident and Norton Bay Watershed Council member Frances Degnan also expressed opposition to the project, saying, “We don’t want to see it built. I strongly oppose it. A pristine environment is critical for all living creatures on the Earth. We need to have places that remain pristine with clean water, clean air, and clean land.”

The Norton Bay Watershed Council continues to voice its opposition against the
Ambler Road project and urges the BLM not to build the road. Clean watersheds and subsistence resource protection are central to a healthy future for Alaska. The multigenerational and irreversible impacts of the Ambler mining road would open the floodgates to future mining activities, severely damaging an iconic wilderness region deserving of protection and dozens of communities dependent upon a traditional way of life.