Unfortunately, unlike here, ANWR has no crowd of indigenous residents who can come to the meeting and tell those people to go home, back to wherever they live, and leave us alone.
More unfortunately, this allows the "activists" to claim to "speak for the environment", not to mention all the wee beasties and plants.
When the "Buffalo Commons" bunch came through here, they were politiely treated, but their ideas recieved the well-deserved derision they should have. And they went back to New Jersey with their grand plan for the Northern Prairie of herding people into town and letting the rest go to seed.
They even tried to make a dozen or so small parcels of land into Designated Wilderness Area, an idea which failed when a few of us marked the areas on the map and saw that it made a continuous strip through part of Southwestern North Dakota, one which would have shut down oil drilling and ranching in a much larger area.
Of course, the legal descriptions of those parcels as presented did not strike a note, at least until one realized that parcel 9 abuts parcel 1, and so on, which inspired the map.
It isn't just ANWR, and it isn't just oil.