In August 2024, tribal and conservation groups in Alaska celebrated the United States Department of the Interior’s move to finalize federal protections for 28 million acres of wilderness lands across the state.
Now, through executive order, the Trump administration has directed the agency to remove those protections as part of an effort to maximize resource development in Alaska.
More than half of Alaska’s 229 federally-recognized tribes have come out in strong opposition to opening the lands, known as “D-1” lands, to potential development. They say that it could further threaten food security at a time when subsistence resources are already in peril, including near-total salmon fishing closures on the Yukon River.
Eugene Paul, former first chief of the lower Yukon River community of Holy Cross, chairs the Bering Sea-Interior Tribal Commission, a group representing 38 of the tribes in opposition. He says he hopes that dialogue will be possible with the new U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum of North Dakota.
"We're going to be an uphill battle again, but we're ready. I think we're going to be prepared to, you know, educate who's going to be in [Trump's] Cabinet. Maybe we could sit down with him," Paul said.
The 28 million acres in question are scattered across Alaska, but the majority lie in the vast western reaches of the state, where they overlap with the range of the declining Western Arctic Caribou herd and trace large portions of the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems.
The question of D-1 land status goes back more than five decades, when they were set aside in the public interest by the U.S. Department of the Interior following passage of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
Numerous initiatives, some successful, have been made to show that opening the lands to potential development through what are known as public land orders (PLOs) is in the public interest, rather than leaving them closed.
The recent White House directive turns back the clock to what was attempted in 2021 during the final days of the first Trump administration under then-Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt.
The Biden administration quickly reversed Bernhardt’s public land orders, citing legal defects and a lack of consultation with tribes, initiating a yearslong review of the potential impacts of removing protections.
Charisse Arce, a senior attorney with the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice, said that it isn’t clear what strategy the Trump administration may use given the extensive documentation backing the current D-1 protections.
"They're going to have to address these facts, which I think will be difficult, because there was 19 different public meetings and a pretty robust public process and extensive evidence gathering," Arce said. "As the executive order is written, it's just simply to reinstate them in their original form, but they'll still suffer from the same legal defects."
Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have previously cosponsored legislation aimed at opening up the D-1 lands, and Murkowksi has called the BLM’s analysis that led to the protections currently in place unilateral and unnecessary.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has also been a strong proponent of opening D-1 lands. In a press conference on Jan. 22 praising Trump’s executive order, Dunleavy didn’t specifically address the D-1 lands, but spoke generally about the benefits of resource development for rural Alaskans.
"In the rural parts of the state of Alaska where some of our most economically disadvantaged fellow Alaskans live, they want opportunities. They want the ability for their kids to stay close to home," Dunleavy said.
But for Paul of Holy Cross, the concept of jobs holds a different meaning in communities where he says roughly 75% of food comes from subsistence. He’s also skeptical that opening up D-1 lands to potential development would lead to local job creation.
"We don't have the economy of, you know, having jobs and stuff. If they say that, they're going to have more jobs if they open up land. I don't see it happening because it never did work in the past," Paul said. "People fly in, they fly their own people in, and they get their jobs done and they fly out, and that's it."
With the sprawling list of actions in Trump’s Alaska-specific executive order, Interior Secretary Burgum has much more than just the issue of D-1 lands on his plate. It remains to be seen whether tribal or conservation groups will ultimately decide to mount a legal challenge.
The U.S. Department of the Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
