Goldman Sachs agreed to stop funding Arctic drilling. Will other banks join them?

If banks destroy our homeland, they’ll have the Gwich’in Nation, and the millions of Americans who stand with us, to answer to

Last fall, I traveled more than 4,000 miles from my home in Alaska to meet with major banks and urge them to help protect the Arctic national wildlife refuge from destructive oil drilling and exploration. In all the years I’ve worked to defend this place, we’ve been focused on trying to make our voices heard by leaders in the White House or in Congress, and I never thought I’d be sitting in a conference room on the 43rd floor of Goldman Sachs’ global headquarters in downtown New York, talking about the Arctic refuge.

But times have changed. Since the day Republicans in Congress added a rider to the 2017 tax bill opening up the Arctic refuge’s coastal plain for drilling, we’ve known that we would have to move beyond our usual tactics, get creative and fight on every possible front to ensure that this place, which is sacred to my people and critical to our way of life, remains protected.

The Trump administration has made it clear that they’re willing to pull out all the stops to sell off the coastal plain to oil companies. They’ve rushed through the environmental review process, suppressed concerns from scientists, dismissed Indigenous voices and ignored the fact that the vast majority of Americans do not want to see the Arctic refuge spoiled by drilling.

We know we can’t count on Trump to do the right thing, so it’s more important than ever that we hold financial institutions accountable for their role in helping destroy this sacred place or keeping it intact. Drilling in a place as remote as the Arctic refuge isn’t cheap, and there’s still a chance we can stop it if we cut off the money that would fund it…