To drill or not to drill: let the environmentalists decide.

• Author: Lee, Dwight R.

High prices of gasoline and heating oil have made drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) an important issue. ANWR is the largest of Alaska's sixteen national wildlife refuges, containing 19.6 million acres. It also contains significant deposits of petroleum. The question is, Should oil companies be allowed to drill for that petroleum?

The case for drilling is straightforward. Alaskan oil would help to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign sources subject to disruptions caused by the volatile politics of the Middle East. Also, most of the infrastructure necessary for transporting the oil from nearby Prudhoe Bay to major U.S. markets is already in place. Furthermore, because of the experience gained at Prudhoe Bay, much has already been learned about how to mitigate the risks of recovering oil in the Arctic environment.

No one denies the environmental risks of drilling for oil in ANWR. No matter how careful the oil companies are, accidents that damage the environment at least temporarily might happen. Environmental groups consider such risks unacceptable; they argue that the value of the wilderness and natural beauty that would be spoiled by drilling in ANWR far exceeds the value of the oil that would be recovered. For example, the National Audubon Society characterizes opening ANWR to oil drilling as a threat "that will destroy the integrity" of the refuge (see statement at www .audubon.org/campaign/refuge).

So, which is more valuable, drilling for oil in ANWR or protecting it as an untouched wilderness and wildlife refuge? Are the benefits of the additional oil really less than the costs of bearing the environmental risks of recovering that oil? Obviously, answering this question with great confidence is difficult because the answer depends on subjective values. Just how do we compare the convenience value of using more petroleum with the almost spiritual value of maintaining the "integrity" of a remote and pristine wilderness area? Although such comparisons are difficult, we should recognize that they can be made. Indeed, we make them all the time.

We constantly make decisions that sacrifice environmental values for what many consider more mundane values, such as comfort, convenience, and material well-being. There is nothing wrong with making such sacrifices because up to some point the additional benefits we realize from sacrificing a little more environmental "integrity" are worth more than the necessary sacrifice. Ideally, we would somehow acquire the information necessary to determine where that point is and then motivate people with different perspectives and preferences to respond appropriately to that information.

Achieving this ideal is not as utopian as it might seem; in fact, such an achievement has been reached in situations very similar to the one at issue in ANWR. In this article, I discuss cases in which the appropriate sacrifice of wilderness protection for petroleum production has been responsibly determined and harmoniously implemented. Based on this discussion, I conclude that we should let the Audubon Society decide whether to allow drilling in ANWR. That conclusion may seem to recommend a foregone decision on the issue because the society has already said that drilling for oil in ANWR is unacceptable. But actions speak louder than words, and under certain conditions I am willing to accept the actions of environmental groups such as the Audubon Society as the best evidence of how they truly prefer to answer the question, To drill or not to drill in ANWR?

Private Property Changes One's Perspective

What a difference private property makes when it comes to managing multiuse resources. When people make decisions about the use of property they own, they take into account many more alternatives than they do when advocating decisions about the use of property owned by others. This straightforward principle explains why environmental groups' statements about oil drilling in ANWR (and in other publicly owned areas) and their actions in wildlife areas they own are two very different things.

For example, the Audubon Society owns the Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary, a 26,000-acre preserve in Louisiana that provides a home for fish, shrimp, crab, deer, ducks, and wading birds, and is a resting and feeding stopover for more than 100,000 migrating snow geese each year. By all accounts, it is a beautiful wilderness area and provides exactly the type of wildlife habitat that the Audubon Society seeks to preserve. But, as elsewhere in our world of scarcity, the use of the Rainey Sanctuary as a wildlife preserve competes with other valuable uses.

Besides being ideally suited for wildlife, the sanctuary contains commercially valuable reserves of natural gas and oil, which attracted the attention of energy companies when they were discovered in the 1940s. Clearly, the interests served by fossil fuels do not have high priority for the Audubon Society. No doubt, the society regards additional petroleum use as a social problem rather than a social benefit. Of course, most people have different priorities: they place a much higher value on keeping down the cost of energy than they do on bird-watching and on protecting what many regard as little more than mosquito-breeding swamps. One might suppose that members of the Audubon Society have no reason to consider such "anti-environmental" values when deciding how to use their own land. Because the society owns the Rainey Sanctuary, it can ignore interests antithetical to its own and refuse to allow drilling. Yet, precisely because the society owns the land, it has been willing to accommodate the interests of those whose priorities are different and has allowed thirty-seven wells to pump gas and oil from the Rainey Sanctuary. In return, it has received royalties of more than $25 million (Baden and Stroup 1981; Snyder and Shaw 1995).

One should not conclude that the Audubon Society has acted hypocritically by putting crass...