Arctic Dispatch | Trimble Gilbert

The fight over Arctic drilling

0:00Hey everybody, it's Amy Martin, founder of Threshold. Our most recent season, The Corridor, is now complete, and if you listen to it, you've heard about how the Trump administration is going all in on petrochemicals and fossil fuels, and is doing everything it can to dismantle regulations on those industries. That includes a big push to drill for oil and gas in places that were previously off-limits. One of those places is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

0:34The third season of Threshold is all about that controversy. I traveled to different communities living close to the refuge and talked to people with very different opinions about drilling there. That season is called The Refuge, and it won a Peabody Award. You can find it by scrolling back in our feed. But the thing is, that story is not over. After decades of intense debate, the Trump administration is still pushing to open America's largest wildlife refuge for drilling. And they've recently taken another step forward in that process. And that potentially has big

1:08consequences for the animals and the people who live in and around the refuge. People like Trimble Gilbert. My name is Trimble Gilbert. I live here all my life, probably since 1943.

1:27I met Trimble back in 2017 on my first reporting trip to Alaska. He's a traditional chief and a deeply knowledgeable elder from the Gwich'in community of Arctic Village. I am elder, and I can say anything I want. Trimble is one of the most memorable people I've met in all of my reporting for Threshold. He was in his 80s when we talked. He's 91 years old now. And he's lived through so much change. He grew up in an era before there were even snowmobiles in this community,

2:01when the rhythms of daily life were set by the seasons and the need for wild food. We can't just live one place because of the caribou and moose, and we have to move around a lot. When I was young, I get up in the morning and I eat a little meat. And then I get on my snowshoe for the day hunt, and I feel great. I never get tired. And all day, and I come home, and I'm still happy. But I can't do that now.

2:39You can hear a little bit of my conversation with Trimble in one of the episodes from our season about the refuge. But I've always wanted to share more of what he had to say. And now feels like the right time. Because in the years since we talked, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has become even more of a political football than it was before. And as that football gets tossed around in far-off places, it's easy to lose sight of what this place means for the people with the deepest ties to it.

3:11So you'll hear more from Trimble in just a minute.

Lease sales and political shifts

3:14But first, I'll give a quick recap on key moments in that political football game over the last few years. So in January 2021, in the final weeks of the first Trump presidency, the administration held a lease sale. They auctioned off the rights to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is what Gwich'in people like Trimble and others who oppose drilling in the refuge had been fighting against since the 1980s. So it was pretty intense to watch.

3:46And even more so because it happened on January 6, 2021. I remember flipping back and forth from the live broadcast of the lease sale and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was starting to unfold. But although this first-ever lease sale in the refuge was supposed to be a moment of triumph for the Trump administration, it turned out to be kind of a flop. The biggest oil companies weren't interested. And the few small leases that did get sold were later canceled by the Biden administration.

4:18They claimed that the environmental review process had been rushed and shoddy. So, leases sold. Leases canceled. But then, of course, Trump gets elected again in 2024. And one of the executive orders he signed on the first day of his presidency was aimed directly at the refuge. It basically tried to undo everything the Biden administration had done to prevent drilling and roll things back to a 2020 reality. The Bureau of Land Management held a second lease sale then, in January 2025.

4:52And it was another flop. No one put in a bid. But then, this past June, there was a third lease sale. And although it too failed to generate a lot of interest, a few parcels were sold. So, as it stands today, the door is officially open for drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge.

5:16Seismic testing could begin at any time. That involves big, heavy machines rolling across the landscape, trying to suss out where the pockets of oil might be and how big they are. I've been to the coastal plain. On a different reporting trip, I had the chance to spend a couple of hours on this wet, sensitive terrain. It's beautiful. Kind of like a wide-open, gently rolling prairie in between the sea and the dramatic peaks of the Brooks Range in the distance.

5:47There are no roads. There is no noise but the wind and waves. And all sorts of wild animals depend on this place to rest, find food, raise their young. Polar bears, caribou, a big mix of migratory birds. And it's also a place that holds enormous cultural significance for Alaska Native people, including both the Inupiat, who live in and around the northern edge of the refuge, and the Gwich'in, clustered more in the south. Arctic Village, where Trimble lives, is a community of only a few hundred people

6:21just over the southern boundary of the refuge. And it's only accessible by plane. So we're kind of remote.

Listening to elder Trimble Gilbert

6:29When I was there in 2017, Trimble and his wife invited me into their cozy home in the village, and friends and family members were coming and going from the house while we talked. There were drying racks for meat and fish set up above the wood-burning stove. Lots of signs everywhere of traditions of hunting, fishing, berry-picking, and community care that were still very much being practiced. But Trimble told me he was also noticing a lot of big changes. Yeah, climate change.

7:00We're losing a lot of ice.

7:06There's some glacier you can see in probably 1950. 60. And also there is a snow here and there in the mountain. And they're all gone right now. Nothing. Last 30 years, we're losing a lot of ice. And maybe permafrost is the worst one.

7:36We're losing a lot of lakes, important lakes we have around here too. That permafrost is thorn out and then they drain out. So there's a lot of lakes. You can see just willow and water level is going down. The Arctic is the fastest warming region of the planet. It's warmed by almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s.

8:09The most recent Arctic report card put together by an international team of climate scientists showed that the last 10 years have been the warmest on record. And even back in 2017, Trimble was seeing the impacts. A very sad thing to see when I grew up here, there's a lot of birds, ducks, ptarmacan. And, you know, swallow, you can see a thousand of them around here.

8:45And you can hear birds every day, noisy. Now it's going away. They're pretty quiet.

8:58The climate is getting knocked out of balance because we haven't stopped burning fossil fuels. That impacts all of the animals that live in the Arctic, including the porcupine caribou herd, which the Gwich'in people have relied on for thousands of years. Every spring, the caribou go to the coastal plain to calve their young. It's the part of the refuge known as the 1002 area. And it's the place where a few companies now own leases that allow them to drill for oil and gas. 1002 is a, that's a breeding place for the thousands of years.

9:36And they're a healthy animal. And that's one of our main nutritions for the people for thousands of years. That's a healthy food. Caribou immigration has really changed in two and when I was a kid. I remember the summertime, there's a glacier and there's too hot and they cool off and get away from bucks, you know.

10:14Sometimes that there's a whole ice is covered with caribou, even way up. Sometimes they come and they cover the whole snow. You can't see snow sometimes because they cover it. There's no more like that. Even young people, they know it's different.

10:33Although some Alaskan Native people are in favor of drilling, Trimble and other Gwich'in folks in Arctic Village have historically been overwhelmingly against it. We know that history about that and we want to save whatever we got here, like Procopine Herd. And also that clean water. Water is a life. And also that caribou meat and moose and all the animals we have here.

11:05We want to keep that way for the future generations. This is the last frontier and we want to keep it for the younger people behind us. Without that caribou, then I don't know how we're going to survive. It's going to be hard for us. When I first talked to Trimble, we were less than a year into the first Trump presidency. And as a leader himself, Trimble had concerns.

11:39I don't know about this president we have now. I never heard that kind of speech and words in my life and the big leaders talking like that.

11:55You should be careful talking to the nations because millions of people listening, especially the children. There's too much, too much greedy, rich people. Once they got trillions of dollars and they want more and more and more, never end. But when is our time to go? What are we going to do with all that money?

12:26We can't take it along with us. The land is going to be here yet for the next generation to come. We have to study our history.

12:42There's many good people, many good leaders we used to have.

12:49The Gwich'in are part of the Athabascan family of indigenous people, a big group of tribes with related languages, histories, and traditions living in the northern interior of North America. And they've been surviving here for some 10,000 years or more. But things are changing really fast now from all sorts of directions. And Trimble told me we need to slow down and think more about the consequences of any further drilling. Too much inhuman activity in this world, pollutions, and we do more batting against the nature.

13:31We can't get away with it.

13:35It'll come right back to us. That's where we're at right now.

13:41It's coming back. Yeah, coming back. Toward the end of my time with Trimble, I asked him what those of us in the lower 48 should think about what happens up there in Alaska. Well, they should learn from Gwich'in people now.

14:16We've been here 10,000, more than 10,000 years, and we're still here. We want to continue to keep this land a small area the way it is. Trimble Gilbert is currently the first traditional chief of the Tanana Chiefs Conference,

Credits and further listening

14:45a consortium of 37 federally recognized tribes in interior Alaska. If you'd like to hear more from Trimble and many other voices from around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, find Season 3 of Threshold, The Refuge, in your podcast feed. And when there's more news from The Refuge, I'll probably be writing about it on my substack. It's called Letters to Earthlings. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. This extra was produced by Sam Moore.

15:15The music is by Travis Yost and Todd Sikafoos. Thanks to Trimble Gilbert for talking with me, to Sarah James for introducing us, and thank you for listening. If you'd like to support our efforts to have these kind of intimate, personal conversations with people all over the world, one of the best things you can do is just pass on this extra to your friends. Because, thankfully, your personal recommendation means a lot more than a Facebook ad or an Instagram post.

15:46So thanks for sharing Threshold with your community. It really does make a difference for us. You can find out more about our show and how to support it at thresholdpodcast.org.

16:08Thank you. Thank you.