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An Eye for the Arctic Refuge's Beauty

June 21, 2005

Interior Secretary Gale Norton once referred to the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a “flat, white nothingness.”

That’s a curious choice of phrase for a crown jewel of America’s natural heritage that Norton is responsible for managing on behalf of its 295 million owners.

Perhaps the honorable secretary would come away with a different point of view if she were to view “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land,” an exhibit of extraordinary photographs of the refuge that has traveled the country.

The images were taken by Subhankar Banerjee of Seattle, who spent 14 months crisscrossing the refuge a few years ago to capture a sense of the place – spring, summer, fall, and yes, winter, when temperatures can fall to 50 degrees below zero.

Banerjee’s exhibit will run in his hometown from June 25-Dec. 31 at the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus. The exhibit includes the heavy winter garb that kept him alive while he traveled about the refuge photographing the crisp beauty of winter: polar bears, musk oxen, winter ptarmigans, wolverine tracks, mountains, frozen rivers, glaciers – the thousand and one details of a complex polar landscape that seem to have escaped Norton’s attention.

Unlike the heroic mountains and sparkling light of Ansel Adams’ photographs, Banerjee’s Arctic Refuge possesses a subtle beauty that invites the viewer to linger and explore. His choices of composition and use of the subdued light characteristic of cloudy Arctic days reflected his goal to depict the refuge as an uncommon mix of grandeur, simplicity, and vulnerability.

The vulnerability captured by art is also borne out by science. The impacts wrought by oil drilling on the refuge would be large and permanent, says Dr. Gordon Orians, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences study of oil production impacts on the Alaskan North Slope. While oil companies have made big strides in reducing their environmental footprint on the slope, there is no tiptoeing an industrial infrastructure in and out of a remote wilderness. Opening the Arctic Refuge coastal plain to oil drilling would rend its wild character for lifetimes.

For those who regard the refuge as a “flat, white nothingness" atop pockets of oil, that probably doesn’t matter. For those who have been moved by Subhankar Banerjee’s evocative images of the Arctic Refuge and its amazing tapestry of life, it matters a great deal.