True NORTHby. T.H. Watkins Some 250 miles North of the Arctic Circle Lies "American's Serengeti". The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where caribou and musk oxen roam and where our hunger for oil may threaten one of the nation's last truly wild places. There is oil to be found under this coastal plain, they say. But how much, and at what cost? We wouldn't drill Yosemite for a pittance of oil or gas - so why sacrifice this other incomparable place? there is no landscape quite like it anywhere in the world. Spilling across the northeastern corner of Alaska, its coast looks out on the glimmering pack ice of the Beaufort Sea. Thirty or 40 miles south, across a flat, river-braided plain, rise the starkly drawn mountains of the Brooks Range, a jumble of beetling Alps and broad, U-shaped valleys that sweeps across the top of the state. It is complex land of crackling, glacier fed rivers, of snow-spattered mountain peaks whose edges are like saw blades against the huge blue sky, of tussock and tundra and space that takes the breath away. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, established by the Alaska lands act in 1980, is little known but an equal in beauty and ecological value to any of the most revered and sacrosanct national parks in the country. Its 19 million acres shelter grizzlies, polar bears, wolves, wolverines, arctic foxes, muck oxen, Dall sheep, ptarmigans, snowy owls, arctic terns, tundra swans, tens of thousands of summer-nesting birds. And caribou-the Porcupine herd of caribou that winter in the mountain valleys of the Brooks Range and in Canada, then migrate to the coastal plain of the Artic refuge every summer to drop their calves before fattening up on tundra grasses for the journey back to the mountains in early fall. It is no small phenomenon: The Porcupine herd can range between 100,000 and 180,000 animals, and the sight of those tens of thousands of creatures gathering on the coastal plain has inspired its description as American's Serengeti. But perhaps not for long. Although 8 million acres of the refuge were given protection as wilderness in 1980, the 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain were only designated for further study. Conservationists have been pushing to get the plain into the wilderness system ever since. Meanwhile, Alaska's congressional delegation, its governor, and a gaggle of U.S. and foreign oil companies want to make another Prudhoe Bay out of this American Serengeti, thirsting after the oil they hope lies beneath the cotton-grass tussocks and the permafrost. Never mind the fact that it's a long shot that any commercially viable deposits are there and that even if they exist they would provide only a pitiful addition to the nations oil supply. Never mind the fact that development would obliterate the region's wilderness character, cripple the viability of the Porcupine caribou heard, and profoundly disrupt the lives of the Gwich'in Athabascan Indians, who have depended on the caribou for thousands of years. A congressional attempt to open the coastal plain to drilling was vetoed last year by President Clinton, who has vowed to hold the line. But the issue is not likely to vanish, and the fate of the Arctic refuge may soon provide an answer to a most troubling question: Is there nothing we will not sacrifice to the transient desires of consumption?