The Trump administration finalized plans Thursday to open more than a million-and-a-half acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. The Interior Department also announced the first oil and gas lease sale with the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska since 2019, and it approved a more than 200-mile industrial road through Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.

Environmentalists condemned the announcements. In a statement, the Alaska Wilderness League wrote, “Opening the entire coastal plain of the Arctic refuge to drilling would destroy one of the most ecologically significant landscapes on earth — the birthing grounds of the porcupine caribou herd, vital habitat for polar bears and migratory birds, and sacred land for the Gwich’in people who have stewarded its resources for millennia.”