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A federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated protections for Arctic Alaska seals across a coastal and marine region stretching from the Central Bering Sea to the Beaufort Sea off the state’s northern coast.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal regulators acted properly in 2022 when they designated nearly 160 million acres as critical habitat for ringed seals and bearded seals. Both species are listed as threatened because of their dependence on Arctic sea ice. Designated critical habitat is required under the Endangered Species Act. It protects listed populations in the places they are most concentrated.

The appeals court ruling reverses a 2024 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason that struck down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s critical habitat designation as overly broad. And Wednesday’s ruling rejects arguments made by the state of Alaska that the critical habitat designated by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service was too vast to justify the negative impacts to oil development and other activities.

NMFS acted properly and in accordance with the law when it designated critical habitat for the seals, making the decisions after weighing impacts to activities like oil development, the ruling said.

The appeals court ruling said that the nearly 160 million acres of designated critical habitat area is large, but size is relative.

“To put that number into perspective, Alaska and its surrounding waters cover nearly half a billion acres—so even a small subset of the state may seem large in the abstract,” it said.

The seal ruling cited one of its earlier decisions, made in 2016, that upheld the designation of 120 million acres of Arctic territory as critical habitat for polar bears, a species listed as threatened in 2008.

“Like the polar bears, the seal species ‘need room to roam,’” Wednesday’s ruling said. “NMFS explained in detail that the seal species rely on resources spread out over a wide area, including sea ice that is ‘dynamic’ by nature. . . . The text of the ESA plainly permits NMFS to designate habitat on that basis.”

Critical habitat designations add a layer of review for any federally permitted activities. Under the Endangered Species Act, permits for activities in critical habitat must undergo an analysis to determine whether listed populations would be harmed.

Ringed and bearded seals were granted Endangered Species Act protections because of the impacts to their Arctic habitat from climate change. Sea ice extent and thickness have diminished over the long term, and shorter winters and more spring rains have compromised the layers of snow on sea ice that ringed seals use to build protective lairs for their newborn pups, federal scientists have said.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the lawsuit that prompted the 2022 critical habitat designation and later appealed Gleason’s 2024 ruling, celebrated the ruling.

“This is a great victory for these ice-dependent seals,” Marlee Goska, an Alaska staff attorney for the center, said in a statement. “It’s just common sense that you can’t protect imperiled animals without protecting the places they live, and I’m glad the court agreed. This decision gives these Arctic seals some breathing room, but we still need to stop expanding oil and gas drilling in their habitat to provide these species and so many others a true shot at survival.”

A statement from the Alaska Department of Law said the state continues to object to the designation and “will continue to fight for a commonsense, plain-text reading of the law that achieves the twin goals of conservation and Alaskan success.”

“The State of Alaska is disappointed by today’s Ninth Circuit decision reinstating an unlawful and expansive critical habitat designation. This designation of over 160 million acres of Alaska’s coastline and offshore waters exceeds the authority granted under the Endangered Species Act and sets a troubling precedent unmatched anywhere else in the nation,” the statement said.

“In Alaska, Arctic ringed seals and bearded seals are abundant and healthy. Yet bureaucrats have decided to directly burden responsible resource development, sustainable fisheries, and other vital economic and subsistence activities essential to Alaska through unnecessary habitat designations larger than the state of Texas.”

The 9th circuit ruling is the latest in a long series of litigation over ice-dependent seals in Alaska’s Arctic waters.

The listing was initiated by a 2008 Center for Biological Diversity petition that was followed by a lawsuit filed by the group in 2012. The state, North Slope Borough, Alaska Oil and Gas Association and others filed legal challenges in the past that sought to overturn the threatened listings for each species. Those lawsuits failed, and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 declined to take up the state’s case about bearded seals.

The state and North Slope Borough made another attempt in 2022 when they sued NMFS to try to compel the agency to remove ringed seals from the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The state and borough also lost that case. Last year, the 9th Circuit Court upheld the agency’s decision to maintain the threatened listing.

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The Alaska Senate approved a measure to boost state taxes on oil and gas production on Wednesday. Lawmakers tacked it on to what would have been a routine renewal of a state oil royalty agreement.

Sen. Forrest Dunbar, D-Anchorage, sponsored the amendment to House Bill 194, saying it would close a corporate income tax loophole and potentially capture more than $100 million in new state revenues each year — at a time when Alaska is in dire need of revenue to pay for state services. 

“Can we afford this loophole while we close schools? Can we afford this tax subsidy while we slash the permanent fund dividend? Can we afford this tax subsidy while our infrastructure languishes, while we struggle to recruit and retain state troopers and firefighters and maintenance crews?” Dunbar said. “The answer is no.”

The provision would impose the state’s corporate tax rate on oil and gas companies doing business in the state, at a maximum rate of 9.4% for companies whose net profits are more than $5 million per year. 

Alaska’s oil prices are surging amid the Iran War, and state forecasters are projecting hundreds of millions in potential state revenue in the coming months. Despite the spike in oil prices, Dunbar said lawmaker action to capture more revenue from the oil and gas industry is long overdue. 

“There is still a long term revenue problem in this state, regardless of short term prices connected to the Iran war,” he said. “Now is the time to do this. Prices for oil are high. These corporations are doing very well. You fix the roof when the sun is shining.”

The Senate approved the amendment by an 11 to 8 vote, then passed the underlying legislation by a 12 to 7 vote, with Sen. Kelly Merrick, R-Eagle River, absent. 

The original legislation was introduced by the governor, and passed the Alaska House last year. It would renew a three-year oil royalty agreement between the state and Marathon Petroleum Corporation, for state owned oil to be processed at its refinery in Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula. The proposed contract is estimated to generate between $4 million to $18 million in state revenue.

However the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Soldotna, objected to the new oil tax provision, saying the Senate should take time to evaluate how the tax measure would affect the broader industry and energy supply for Alaskans. 

“I’m a no vote on this amendment, because we do need a legitimate plan,” he said. “We don’t rush things. We don’t do things in a half-cocked manner, because that’s how mistakes are made.”

He said lawmakers should model potential revenue measures so they know how they will function within a state fiscal plan.

Lawmakers have been hotly debating Alaska’s oil and gas tax structure for years. A bill introduced last year, Senate Bill 92, would change the way the state’s corporate income tax applies to the oil company Hilcorp, which is an S-corporation, and the state’s largest oil producer. Hilcorp is a privately held, Texas-based energy company that since 2020 has operated the Prudhoe Bay oil field in the North Slope, as well as most of the operations in Cook Inlet. 

That bill is currently in the Senate Rules Committee and has not moved this year. 

The measure approved by the Senate on Wednesday would enact state taxes not just on Hilcorp but many companies, and collect revenues that would otherwise be leaving the state, Dunbar said in an interview after the vote.

“To be clear, it’s not just Hilorp that might be affected by this, but that is one of the large, obvious holes we see in our oil tax structure right now that is causing us to shift tens of millions, and over the long term, hundreds of millions of dollars, from schools and roads and the permanent fund dividend to out of state companies and individuals,” he said.

The amended bill now goes to the House for a concurrence vote. 

Dunbar urged support for the measure, citing financial woes in his own district where the Anchorage School Board has voted to close three elementary schools and cut hundreds of staff positions to help address a $90 million budget shortfall. 

“I hope they agree that it’s not an acceptable world where the price is high and this industry is booming and we are closing Lake Otis Elementary School because we don’t have enough money,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the bill numbers, and misstated how the tax would be levied on companies’ income. The story has been updated. 

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The story of a family is a story of the world, and the story of the world is that of a family. That premise is at work in a new book by Alaska author Ch’igiioonta She Holds a Child, who explores the displacement of the Nendaaghe Dena people through her own family stories. Readers interested in the precolonial history of the Western Brooks Range will see how no one element or person stands alone in Ïyaġaaġmiut: People Who Live Among the Rock Caches. From multiple viewpoints, Ch’igiioonta brings out what belonging to one another and the land requires amid great and complex changes.  

The Nendaaghe Dena people were called Ïyaġaaġmiut by their Iñupiat neighbors, who characterized them as the ones who live among rock caches — a reference to pits they dug below permafrost levels to store caribou and other meats. As Ch’igiioonta tells their story, she refers to their homeland as their “estate. The author defines “estate” as a territory and economic unit formed from Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of the land, existing trail systems and natural boundaries, each with distinct features and ability to sustain a number of persons. 

Throughout the book, many colorful maps guide readers through the storied, “late prehistory” geographies of the Nendaaghe Dena Estate in extended kinships with others of Northwestern “Alaska.” The full “map-in-progress” of the focal area is printed at the book’s front. I recommend viewing a larger version of the “Map of Athabascan and Inupiat Estates in Northern Alaska, ca. 1800” on the website of AthabascanWoman.com. The author’s discussions are replete with place names and changes in place names across multiple languages and cultures—Iñupiatun, and three Athabascan ones, Dinjii Zhuh K’yaa —the author’s own, Denaakk’e, and Lower Tanana and their various subgroups. The whole book is organized with an introduction and five chapters, featuring multiple family genealogies and six useful glossaries listing regional, place and family names as well as some Indigenous word definitions and a chronology of key events. 

 This work develops two mutually contributing historical contentions, an environmental one and an economic-colonialist one. At the same time, Ch’igiioonta’ shows their interactions. Her environmental argument, an underrecognized one, links volcanic eruptions that cause worldwide weather cooling with Iñupiat and Athabascan oral histories of two back-to-back winters with no intervening summer. Consequences included Arctic famine and depopulation with consequential demographic and societal shifts. With brilliant sleuthing, the author pinpoints the 1815-16 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia as the likely culprit. She does so by contributing the oral genealogies and family stories her father, Stephen, taught her, as well as ones shared by others. She combines these teachings with nineteenth-century ship logs and maps showing coastal ice conditions, tree ring evidence, and other ecological and climatological sciences.  

Lethal environmental hardships, including consequences of subsequent volcanic eruptions, and adaptive recoveries from them interact with the chronologically overlapping economic-colonialist contention. From the late eighteenth century new trade items brought changes to established economic relationships within and among estates and their families. This was followed by appearances of European and Russian explorers, naval expeditions, and Hudson’s Bay company traders themselves, and Christian missionaries. Nineteenth-century incursions also included smallpox and scarlet fever epidemics and introductions of guns. Whereas customary respect among Arctic Indigenous citizens called on those from another estate to take up the ways and language of their hosts, many Europeans arrivals expected and began administering adherence to their own views and ways brought from outside.  

Through many stories, the author shows how environmental forces, causing fluxes of food availability, overlapped with Europeans’ press into long-established socio-economic-cultural networks. The book shows those forces and intrusions  cannot be separated from internecine conflict, altered ecologies, adaptive kinship patterns, traditional boundaries and outright dispossession. In one of my favorite stories from the book, I learn how the Nendaaghe’s Tłeevihiti’ family included a man whose life was protected while battling Iñupiat. This was because—although they were not from the same people—the two men were brothers. In the author’s words, “a person’s relationships had everything to do with survival.”  

Amid intense climatological changes, violent conflict and the ongoing march of empire, there is something to learn—particularly for those with deep family ties—for every serious reader interested in Alaskana, world history, climatology, geography, colonialism, decolonization, Indigenous languages, worldviews, self-determination and more-than-survival for everyone. As Ch’igiioonta’ herself writes: “As with all my writing this will not be your bedside reading.” Ïyaġaaġmiut is a rich, authoritative book well worth reading while wide awake. 

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