This article is co-published with Public Domain.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order singling out the state of Alaska and its abundant stores of oil, gas and minerals. “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” called for expanding oil and gas development across Alaska’s North Slope, including some of the largest tracts of public land in North America.

The administration wanted to reverse regulations and new protections put in place during the previous administration — “punitive restrictions,” according to Trump — and streamline the permitting and review process for new projects, particularly in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve (NPRA).

Now, according to two sources familiar with the process and documents reviewed by High Country News and Public Domain, Trump and his team are following through on their promise to fast-track drilling in the NPRA by allowing new winter exploration and drilling to move forward without any kind of environmental review. The Department of the Interior is set to publish a “categorical exclusion” to the National Environmental Policy Act that would make it easier for the oil and gas industry to conduct seismic surveys, obtain rights of way and drill new exploration wells in the NPRA, an area that has become increasingly attractive to industry.

Seismic surveys, which are done with massive vibroseis trucks that weigh over 15 tons, can scar tundra and disturb wildlife, including female polar bears that den along the coastal region of the North Slope in winter and whose numbers have declined over the last two decades. Drilling and related infrastructure are also highly intrusive and, according to recent U.S. Geological Survey studies, have altered caribou behavior and Arctic migration patterns. The impacts of oil and gas development have been further complicated by rapidly warming conditions in the region, particularly thawing permafrost, which must be taken into account when operating on the North Slope.

But the Trump administration is stripping away existing environmental protections for nearly all stages of development. According to the sources, the categorical exclusion — tentatively titled “NPR-A Wintertime Oil and Gas Exploration Operations” — could be released as early as this week in order to facilitate seismic surveys and drilling over the winter. It was drafted without any public comment period or input from those in the region directly affected.

In an emailed statement, an Interior spokesperson confirmed that the department is working on a categorical exclusion, based on findings from “dozens of environmental reviews,” to speed up permitting for winter activity, including seismic surveys and exploratory drilling. According to the department, “These efforts are about using decades of experience and analysis to create a more efficient, predictable, and effective process while upholding environmental standards.”

The legal basis for a categorical exclusion is that the proposed activities will have “no significant impact” on the environment. Such exclusions are typically applied in places where the agency has determined there is little risk to natural resources. Jeremy Lieb, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group that has sued to block development in the NPRA, said that exploratory drilling and seismic testing have had well-documented impacts and are precisely the kind of actions that should be scrutinized by the land-management agency. The new rules, along with other changes being made by the administration, will effectively rubber-stamp industry operations in a remote and highly sensitive ecosystem.

“Drilling and seismic exploration for oil and gas in the Arctic are large-scale, industrial activities that cause significant, lasting negative impacts to the environment and nearby communities,” Lieb said in a written statement. “The administration cannot rely on a categorical exclusion to hide these projects from the public and avoid evaluating their environmental impacts.”

The 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve — the largest chunk of land managed by the Interior Department — provides important habitat to dozens of migratory bird species, denning polar bears and three distinct caribou herds, two of which have dramatically declined over the last decade. Under President Biden, a significant portion of the reserve was set aside for conservation purposes; the Interior Department was in the process of creating a roughly 1 million-acre caribou conservation area requested by the Native Village of Nuiqsut, which sits just to the east of the reserve and relies on the Teshekpuk Caribou herd as a significant food source. The agreement, signed just before Biden left office, would have imposed additional restrictions on drilling activity in the herd’s prime calving area. 

Former Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, who now heads up an environmental nonprofit, said the area around the village has been inundated with new drilling activity. She added that there’s evidence that the Teshekpuk herd’s migration patterns have already been impacted.

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books,” she said. “We feel that it doesn’t matter that we have a unique DNA, a small community of 500 people, that are just being totally disregarded and sacrificed for the greed of development.”

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books.”

Since Trump took office, Interior has scrapped the Biden-era regulations and canceled the caribou conservation initiative, instead prioritizing oil and gas development. Nuiqsut sued the department over its cancellation of the program and received a preliminary injunction in March. In May, after receiving a petition from the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), a trade group that promotes drilling in the state and whose former CEO and president, Kara Moriarty, is now a senior advisor at Interior, the federal agency announced that it would begin “streamlining permitting for oil and gas infrastructure” in the NPRA. (Interior’s senior advisor for Alaska during Trump’s first term, Steve Wackowski, replaced Moriarty as head of AOGA.) 

This rule, effectively written by AOGA, would create a kind of blanket environmental impact statement that would apply to all oil and gas production sites in the NPRA, making it easier for industry to obtain approval for the construction of pipelines, gravel mines, access roads and related infrastructure. The new categorical exclusion appears to be focused on winter exploration activity — particularly seismic surveys — and follows recent guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality that underscored “the importance of CEs as a core feature of NEPA.”

The categorical exclusion is also being developed without any public input. Until recently, it was a legally required part of the process, but last April, the council relinquished its government-wide responsibility to oversee and implement NEPA, allowing federal agencies to forgo the 30-day public comment period.

Ted Boling, a partner at Ashurst Perkins Coie, who served as a member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2000 to 2010 and during Trump’s first term, said this is largely uncharted territory for federal agencies. Given the size and complexity of the NPRA, he added, it could leave the forthcoming provision vulnerable to legal challenges.

“These (categorical exclusions) historically have been done if there’s a rulemaking procedure,” Boling said. “So, if they’re not going to get public comment on it, we’ll see how reliable it is.”

In a changing Arctic, how much noise is too much?

The elimination of standard environmental reviews for certain drilling-related activity comes as industry has acquired dozens of new leases in the NPRA — an area roughly the size of Indiana. During a lease sale held in March, nearly 200 parcels totaling more than 1.3 million acres were secured by oil and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Much of the newly leased land is close to Conoco’s controversial Willow Project, which was approved during the Biden administration and includes infrastructure that will  facilitate future development. ExxonMobil’s new leases — just south of Teshekpuk Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Arctic Alaska — fall within the caribou conservation area.  

Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, which is currently suing the Interior Department over its development plans in the NPRA, said that public lands in the Arctic are being “sacrificed for oil company profits.”

The NPRA was first set aside as a naval petroleum reserve in the early 1920s, but despite its name, it has seen remarkably little development over the years, with most oil and gas drilling on the North Slope occurring on state-owned land in and around Prudhoe Bay. In the last couple of decades, however, ConocoPhillips has gradually expanded its operations westward and into the reserve. A new discovery by wildcatter Bill Armstrong in 2013 renewed interest in the area, especially the formation in and around the Willow Project, spurring talk of a “North Slope renaissance.” In the recent NPRA lease sale, Armstrong’s company, North Slope Exploration LLC, acquired the highest number of tracts and will now seek to develop those leases, with minimal environmental oversight.

The proposed development poses increased risk to an already fragile and rapidly changing environment. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, which has led to widespread permafrost thaw, coastal erosion and unpredictable winter weather during which most of the drilling activity takes place.

This past January, after an unusually warm week, one of the drilling rigs deployed by ConocoPhillips — known as “the beast” because it is the largest rig on the North Slope — toppled over and caught fire as it was being moved along an ice road toward the Willow project.

Several employees were injured, and thousands of gallons of oil were spilled on the surrounding tundra. It took the operator four months to remove the rig and clean up the site.

Lieb, the attorney at Earthjustice, said the incident was a good reminder of the “scale of these projects and the kind of things that can go wrong.”

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On a clear August morning in Hood River, Oregon, Lesley Tamura walked through her 42-acre pear orchard. The sounds of a Spanish-language radio station wafted through the leaves as workers raced up and down ladders, grabbing green Bartletts and tossing them into bags strapped to their chests. In the distance, the rising sun bathed Mount Hood in a pink glow.

Tamura is a fourth-generation pear grower. Her great-grandfather started working this land more than a century ago. The farm even remained in the family’s hands while they were incarcerated during World War II — a time when many other Japanese Americans lost everything.

Because of that, Tamura has always considered her family fortunate. But now, eight decades later, she’s wondering if their luck has run out.

“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year,” Tamura said. “I would love to survive doing this and doing it well, but I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year.”

Between low revenue, high production costs and a debilitating pest, Hood River’s pear growers lost an estimated $40 million to $45 million last year. In a plea for help, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a disaster designation that could open up low-cost loans and other financial relief. But even if that request is approved, it may not be enough.

“I think it’s safe to say that many pear producers will be either reducing pear acreage or, frankly, going bankrupt,” said Tim Delbridge, an agricultural economist with Oregon State University Extension Service.

EVERY SPRING, the Hood River Valley erupts in delicate white blossoms. Though pears are picky about their climate, they grow well here: Altogether, Oregon and Washington produce nearly 90% of the nation’s fresh pears.

But last year, something else covered the region’s trees as well: the pear psylla. This small pest, similar to an aphid, munches its way through pear trees, excreting a sticky substance called honeydew. If that honeydew is left on the pears, it causes a type of mold that’s edible but unsightly, and that makes the fruit unsellable.

The psylla population was unusually large in 2025. Scientists aren’t sure why; though climate change could be a factor, such psylla spikes have occurred only about once a decade, making them difficult to study.

“It’s really hard for us to tease apart all of these big ecological interactions and try and figure out exactly what’s happening,” said Ashley Thompson, a horticulturalist who studies the region’s pear crops. “We don’t have good answers, and that’s frustrating for us and for the farmers.”

Still, by regularly hosing down their trees — Tamura, for one, used roughly triple the amount of water she normally does in a season — Hood River’s pear farmers were able to remove the honeydew and salvage most of their fruit.

The harvest was massive, in fact, producing a surplus that, unfortunately, led to low prices. Compounding the issue was the closure of a cannery in Yakima, Washington, one of the region’s long-standing avenues for excess fruit.

The farmers accepted that 2025 wasn’t going to be a great year but thought they’d avoided disaster. So last August and September, they sent a year’s worth of work off in truckloads to nearby packing companies, which would store the fruit and release it to the market incrementally.

Then, in January, as the packers started opening boxes of stored pears, they discovered that not all the honeydew had been removed, and that many bins of fruit had developed mold and would have to be discarded.

That’s when alarm bells started ringing for Tamura, who also chairs the Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers. For each bin of pears that she grew, at a cost of roughly $300, the packinghouse would pay her somewhere between nothing at all and $150, on average. In some cases, she might even get billed to cover the packers’ costs.

“We paid to grow the pears, we paid to pick the pears, we paid to pack and store the pears,” Tamura said. “We’re going to pay for the cost to discard them as well.”

The loss was emotional, too: Tamura still remembers the sticky pear juice that covered the roads near the packing facility, as truck after truck of moldy fruit was carted away.

The federal government’s crop insurance is meant to protect farmers in such situations, but it’s usually available only to those who notify their insurers soon after the harvest. And this disaster didn’t unfold until months later. So Tamura and her colleagues asked Gov. Kotek for help.

The governor’s July letter to the USDA suggested a variety of measures, including loans and relief payments. When High Country News asked the agency when it planned to make a decision, a spokesperson said, “USDA has received Gov. Kotek’s letter and is actively working to gather the necessary data and information.”

PEAR PRODUCERS DON’T HAVE much to fall back on. As they like to say, “We’re price takers, not price makers,” meaning that the retailers determine what they’ll pay, and the farmers have no choice but to accept that price if they want to move their product.

Farmers don’t find out exactly how much they’ll get paid until almost a year after they harvest their fruit. Though partial distribution checks arrive starting in January, they only receive the full payment once the packers and retailers have subtracted their share. 

“We just get whatever’s left over,” Tamura said. “And for a very long time now, that amount is not even enough to cover our costs.”

In 2008, Oregon’s farmers received an average of $473 per ton for their pears, according to the USDA. Seventeen years later, in 2025, the amount was unchanged: $473 per ton.

Many blame retail consolidation for this stagnation: Just four companies capture an estimated two-thirds of America’s grocery dollars, giving them enormous power over how much farmers are paid.

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But Delbridge, the economist, said research on that front is inconclusive. “It is intuitive that that level of market power at the retail level would have an impact, but it is tough to say that’s what’s driving lower prices,” he said.

What is clear, Delbridge said, is that pears are not the fruit of the moment. Since the 1980s, the country’s consumption of canned pears has decreased by about 70%. And the demand for fresh pears has remained sluggish even as the demand for other fruit, like fresh berries, has more than tripled.

One challenge with pears, Delbridge said, is that consumers don’t always know how to eat them. People often expect them to be ready straight from the store. But many pears must ripen on the counter for several days first.

Tamura agrees that consumer education is a hurdle. “People are so used to the immediate results of ordering things and getting same-day delivery,” she said. “We’ve lost a bit of our patience, and that works against us as pear growers.”

WHILE REVENUE HAS FLATLINED, pear producers’ expenses have surged. Since 2008, not only has the cost of labor gone up, but inflation has risen by 54%, making it more expensive to buy everything from fertilizer to fuel.

Mike McCarthy has been growing pears in Parkdale, just up the road from Tamura, for 47 years. He estimates that labor now accounts for 60% of his expenses. He said that many well-intentioned regulations, like the state’s recent laws on farmworker overtime and housing, have stretched him and other farmers beyond capacity.

Last season was the worst of McCarthy’s long career. To hang on for another year, he said that many of his fellow farmers have “borrowed to the hilt,” with some taking out mortgages on land that has long been paid off. Others have sold to larger operations, or simply given up.

“There’s a number of abandoned orchards around the county now, which is very unusual,” McCarthy said. “It seems like the number is growing all the time.”

And though McCarthy is near the end of his own career, he’s worried about the next generation of farmers. “That’s really where the rubber meets the road is with these younger people,” he said. “Many of them are just super depressed.”

Tamura is doing her best to remain hopeful. The current harvest looks smaller and much less affected by psylla than last year, two factors that should lead to better prices.

She’s keeping her fingers crossed for a good season — one in which she breaks even.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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Earlier this summer, I was jogging on a local trail with my 7-year-old black lab mutt, Camas, when she suddenly froze. The fur along her spine bristled. Then she let out a single, sharp bark — a timbre I’d never before heard. 

I caught the unmistakable musk of an animal and my hand shot to the bear spray on my chest. Halfway up a tree less than 20 yards away, a beautiful, small cinnamon black bear stared back at us.

The bear scampered off as Camas growled, standing her ground in front of me on the trail. “Good girl,” I told her, my heart rate slowing to a normal pace. My dog, I assumed, warned me early of a potential threat. I was proud. 

In bear country, common wisdom holds that dogs serve as early bear alarms, or even deterrents. That belief, however, has long rested mostly on anecdote. Until recently, almost no one had tested whether it was actually true.

A new study in the Journal of Wildlife Management analyzed bear-dog conflicts involving black, polar and brown bears from Alaska to Florida. The results challenge the idea that dogs make people safer in bear country and they have me rethinking my relationship with Camas in the woods.

“If you think a house pet is likely going to be your bear, not only detector but deterrent, you might want to think twice about that,” lead author of the paper Tom Smith told me over Zoom, one of his dogs begging for attention in the background while mine snoozed next to me. 

Smith, a research wildlife biologist at Brigham Young University in Utah, analyzed 326 bear-dog encounters spanning more than a century, drawing from newspaper articles, federal and state government reports, books, records compiled by other bear specialists, and internet searches. 

Smith began working with bears more than 30 years ago in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He’s published influential research on bear spray and guns as bear deterrents, and has become one of the world’s leading experts on human-bear interaction. “As soon as you become the bear guy, then everybody comes running to you for advice on how to be safe,” he said. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to have to get to the heart of this.”

Smith has long been interested in the way dogs impact humans’ odds of an encounter in bear country. But the issue became urgent and tangible to him following a 2023 attack that left two people and their dog dead in a tent in Canada’s Banff National Park. The issue hasn’t gone away. This summer alone, a jogger and his dog were mauled near Island Park, Idaho, while recordings of separate encounters involving dogs in Banff and Alberta went viral online. 

The findings

The data show people are largely unprepared for bear encounters and naive to their possible consequences. Dogs ran away, fought with bears, provoked confrontations, drew owners in to fight off bears barehanded, and even boomeranged bears back to people. 

The first surprise in the data was how few people carried any deterrent at all. That might be because people thought, erroneously, Smith says, that dogs would be sufficient to keep bears away. Recreators wielded bear spray in only about a tenth of cases and a firearm in roughly a third. All told, five people and 56 dogs died in the encounters Smith analyzed.

Contrary to some common wisdom, dogs also weren’t effective warning systems for bears. In fact, they alerted their owners early of a bear in only 1 in 11 of the encounters the study analyzed. Dogs provoked the bear, instigating the encounter, in more than half the cases. After the bear conflict began, things didn’t look much better: Dogs tangled with bears about 40% of the time, ran away in 20% of encounters, and didn’t engage at all in about 17% of cases. So much for dogs being excellent protectors.

Other findings were less surprising. Leashes were a major decider in the severity of the interaction. Unleashed dogs were involved in six times as many incidents as leashed pets. Smith said dogs without a leash can dart ahead of owners or crash through brush and spook a bear. Canines can also act as bear boomerangs. In 27 of the encounters, dogs brought a bear back to their owners. In 70% of these instances, the dog owner was injured. Worse yet, many owners in the data came to rescue their pet when it got in a scuffle with a bear, often with no deterrent. The result: 85% of the time, those owners were injured. 

Additionally, the data reinforced something bear experts have known for years: the larger the group of people, the less likely the encounter. However, the presence of a dog dramatically shifts that risk. Dogs roughly doubled the odds of a conflict compared to the same-sized groups with no canine companions. 

Taken as a whole, the data paint a portrait in which bears and domestic dogs don’t get along. Smith suspects it’s part of the long evolutionary relationship between bears and wolves. For thousands of years, wolves competed with bears for food, killed cubs and even kicked bruins off carcasses. Some of this behavior is on public display in places like Yellowstone National Park, where populations of both species flourish. Modern dogs may still trigger those ancient instincts. 

Smith recognizes limitations and nuance in his data, too. For one, it’s important to note that the dogs in the analysis were domestic companions, not highly-trained guardian dogs meant to fend off predators — which data show can reduce bear presence at ranches and farms. Also, data on human-bear conflict inherently shows a bias, depicting only the encounters that went majorly wrong rather than the majority of experiences when people venture into the places bruins live and the species coexist without incident. “For the most part, people and their dogs pass through bear country without incident,” Smith wrote in the paper.

Should your pup join the hike?

“The takeaway isn’t to keep dogs out of bear country,” Smith said. “The takeaway is there are things you can do that greatly improve your odds.”

Best practices, backed by Smith’s data, say to travel in groups, eliminate smells if you’re camping and make noise. Bear bells, he says, don’t work. Above almost all else? “You have no business being in bear country without a deterrent,” Smith said.

“You have no business being in bear country without a deterrent.”

Dogs just don’t cut it on that front. According to Smith, bear spray has the highest likelihood of fending off an aggressive bear for the vast majority of recreationists in bear country. But firearms can work too for experienced users. Carry your spray (or gun) where you can reach it in a split second. No matter what deterrent you choose, practice with it. Bear encounters can happen in seconds. 

If you do take your dog, consider a leash. “It’s not just dogs and bears,” Smith said. “It’s also dogs and everything else.” Smith’s own dog had been sprayed by a skunk twice in the last month. Mine finds few greater joys in life than chasing ground squirrels, marmots and grouse. So, we’re both faced with navigating how to behave in wild places with these family members that, if they see a deer or elk or bear, may not be able to hold themselves back.

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Since talking with Smith, I’ve thought about the role Camas plays in bear country in a more nuanced way. She’s warned me about bears — even since that encounter on my jog. But she’s also ignored bears less than 30 yards away, chased wildlife she shouldn’t and, even in her younger days, treed a black bear.

The lesson isn’t that dogs don’t belong in bear country writ large. It’s that they’re dogs. If recreating in bear country is an odds game, they’re not doing you any favors. As much as we love and trust them, they’re unpredictable. And they can make things worse as often as they make things better. 

“It’s a personal thing, it really is,” Smith said. “We work in statistics with a pool of instances. But you are not a pool of instances. You’re you.”

This story was produced as part of the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative, a partnership between Mountain Journal/Montana Free Press, High Country News, Report for America and local news organizations across the West.

The post Does your dog make you safer in bear country? appeared first on High Country News.