The battle to protect Alaska’s great wildlife sanctuary | Rebecca Solnit

As Barack Obama opens up the Arctic Ocean to oil drilling, how can this pristine wilderness withstand the human hunger for fossil fuels?

At midnight on 29 June, the sun was directly north and well above the hills. It had not gone down since I arrived in the Arctic, three days earlier, and would not set for weeks. It rolled around the sky like a marble in a bowl, sometimes behind clouds or mountains or the smoke of the three or four hundred wildfires somewhere south of us, but never below the horizon. The midnight sun made the green hilltops glow gold, and lit our walk through the wildflowers and the clouds of mosquitoes to the mountaintop.

Down below, I could see our tents, our camp kitchen, tiny from the heights, and our two rafts, all along the sandy beach and flowery grass bench alongside the shallow Kongakut River. A few days earlier, a couple of bush planes had dropped off our group of nine for a week's journey 65 miles down the river that threads its way from the Brooks Range of mountains to the northern coast of Alaska.