Let the sun shine in—Alaska News Brief June 2026
Soon the longest day of sunlight in North America will embrace us: Summer solstice, a day and night for grounding our feet on Earth, breathing fresh air, taking in the midnight light that stretches to early morning.
Rhubarb leaf, June 2026. Photo by Dawnell Smith.
Here in Alaska, we welcome the month of June like a BFF, the way it blazes across the state with a basket full of Midnight Sun, music festivals, bird song, camp outs, and rhubarb leaves bigger than a catcher’s mitt, bigger even than the landing nets used to pull up a hooked salmon.
June for me means gardening, dog parks, visiting my favorite Alaska places and friends, and remembering how long I’ve been doing the work I do. June 17th marks my 23rd year with Trustees for Alaska, not counting my gig as a Trustees’ legal intern in 1994, which set the hook to my love for Alaska.
So much has gone on since then. We’ve lost people who meant so much to us, and we’ve welcomed the next generation of legal minds and advocates. This reflection always makes me feel old. Generation? Yikes!
In over two decades, I’ve seen plenty of new threats to Alaska land, water, wildlife and people, but they’re really the same or similar ideas and projects cycling through over and over again—Groundhog Day, anyone? When will decision makers stop the short-term thinking and financial gain behind the effort to churn up and extract from places that people call home and need for and as nourishment? People have forever fought to protect the land to which they owe their lives and ways of life.
I’m reminded of this now as the cycle of light brings nourishment to a landscape that was only a few months ago shrouded in ice, snow, and low gray light.
This June light feels especially good for Trustees and so many others. The latest oil and gas lease sale of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—number 3, if you’re counting—drew no bids from big oil companies. The two bidders in the sale include a very small company that has only operated in Cook Inlet and has no Arctic experience, and a quasi-state bank with a reputation for throwing away millions of Alaska’s public money for bad proposals that funnel cash out of state for good. What’s more, the lawsuit we filed in 2020 and amended in 2025 challenges the legality of these leases.
What the absence of big oil corporations in this lease sale told us is that Arctic Refuge drilling is a fiscally bad idea. It’s also a culturally and ecologically bad idea, which has been strongly communicated by the Gwich’in Steering Committee and other partners to oil corporations as well as banks and insurance companies.
Our Arctic work, which we’ve been doing for five decades, aims to prevent further industrialization from harming Arctic communities, ways of life, and landscapes important to the health of wildlife and Earth.
What happens in the Arctic never stays there. The warming happening in the Arctic at rates far beyond other places—itself caused by the fossil fuel industry’s carbon emissions—melts ice and thaws permafrost with a devastating effect on food and infrastructure in local communities. That warming, in turn, causes more extreme storms in Alaska, as well as heat waves and more extreme winters across the world. Global sea levels rise and more communities suffer.
And that treadmill of bad ideas and projects? A new proposal for a coal-fired power plant and mining project in the Susitna River Valley for data centers is beginning after a coalition chased the proposed Chuitna coal project, the Wishbone Hill project, and other coal projects out of Alaska nearly a decade ago.
Lachlan harvesting rhubarb for use at Wild Scoops, June 2026. Photo by Lorraine Garlock.
Yes, we welcome June in Alaska and also recognize that it brings with it a more and more dangerous season of heat waves, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes in Alaska, across the country, and around world.
I’ve been around long enough to know to let the sun shine in while I can, to marvel at the chickadees and rhubarb leaves, to put my hands in soil and my feet in cold creek water, because that grounding in land and water and life recharges and nurtures me for the work ahead and all it might ask of me.
May we all find time to bask in that light and life.
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
View of the Brooks Range from the 1002 area of the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. Photo by Danielle Brigida.
Another failed Arctic Refuge lease sale and other Arctic news
Teshekpuk Lake Special Area in the western Arctic. Photo by Gerrit Vyn.
Litigation 101: What’s an integrated activity plan and how does it play into Interior’s proposed rule to rubber stamp Big Oil projects like Willow in the Arctic?
Walruses hauled out on Round Island. Photo by J Schoen.
On beings and biomes—the pacific walrus
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