Arctic's Last Wilderness Faces Oil Threat

0:00It's April 15th. Welcome in. This is Anchorage News Today, where local news meets AI. A national geographic photographer named Florian Schultz and his film team just screened their IMAX documentary. The Arctic are last great wilderness. At the Anchorage Museum, they spend years capturing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and all its road-free, power-line free glory, a true pristine spot up north. This place hosts massive caribou migrations with over 200,000 animals, polar bears along the coast, birds flocking from everywhere in, summer. And it's home to the Gwitchin people who've lived off its resources forever. Gwitchin leader Krista Morland, who grew up there, calls the refuge their sacred place where life begins. She's sounding the alarm on upcoming federal oil e-sales, saying they're not just paper. They green-might industrial mess-ups to fish, water, and their whole way of life. Over six years, Schultz chased those caribou herds across the huge landscape, snapped polar bears and musk oxen too, falling in love with the wild.

1:05Challenge. Both he and Morland hope the film sparks talk beyond oil as the only path forward. Already, subsistence hits like vanishing Yukon Riverfish are costing traditional knowledge passed down generations, making this a human rights end, climate fight playing out right now, urging us to protect what's left.