Alaska’s public lands are a political battleground

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Over the past year, a wave of high-profile development proposals — from oil fields and mining roads to timber projects — has reshaped a fast-moving debate, propelling Alaska into the center of the national conversation over how to balance energy production with conservation. These projects have revived long-running tensions over what the state’s public lands are for, and who they ultimately benefit.

The federal government has long viewed Alaska as resource-rich, a posture that’s intensified under the Trump administration. After meeting Trump in 2018, Gov. Mike Dunleavy called Alaska “America’s natural resource warehouse.”

But the last time Alaska figured this prominently in national energy and conservation debates was in the late 1970s, during negotiations over the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, said Philip Wight, an Arctic energy historian at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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