Many junkies, before hitting bottom, stoop low enough to steal their mothers’ jewels. That’s what’s happening at a national scale on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Three weeks ago, I was there. For 12 days my friends and I floated 80 miles of the Hulahula River . Our journey traversed much of the refuge, from the mountains of the Brooks Range to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. We saw an abundance and diversity of birds and mammals that beggared imagination, slept on tundra prairies as soft as mattresses, and heard that rare, spacious silence that rolls in from beyond the limits of sight.

These wonders now appear doomed by America’s fossil fuel addiction. Oil and gas leasing within the refuge is imminent. Additionally, a seismic survey to evaluate oil-bearing geologic formations could be carried out as soon as this winter by trucks as heavy as combat tanks and by crews of men, organized in mobile villages, that will hopscotch day by day across the delicate tundra . Part of the tragedy of the Arctic Refuge is that its integrity is to be sacrificed not to meet a national emergency or vital economic needs, but out of spite.

All my adult life I longed to see the Far North. I was not disappointed, not by the howls of the wolves we watched hunting Dall sheep in the mountains, not by the young, blond-headed grizzly we surprised at the river’s edge, and certainly not by the caribou that streamed by us day by day, at first in groups of 10 and 20, then by the hundreds, finally by the thousands, always bound northward into and across the coastal plain, which is their calving ground and the terminus of their annual migration, the longest of any terrestrial mammal on the planet.