Science and Skulduggery

• Main Author: Dunaway, Finis
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; Prudhoe Bay; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469661100.003.0010

This chapter considers the politics of science in Arctic Alaska during the 1980s. It emphasizes how Ronald Reagan’s Interior Department altered the findings of government scientists to downplay the dangers of oil development. It also explains the key findings of caribou biologists related to the Porcupine caribou herd and the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. The chapter profiles two former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists—Fran Mauer and Pamela A. Miller—and foregrounds their perspectives on the period’s skulduggery. It recounts Miller’s story of becoming a whistleblower and leaking a controversial report to the New York Times in 1988. It also features stunning photographs taken by Mauer and Miller—of the Porcupine caribou herd and Prudhoe Bay oil development—that were included in The Last Great Wilderness . The slide show provided a grassroots mechanism for disseminating suppressed scientific knowledge to the public.