The world’s third largest oil company and fifth largest corporation has said it has no future plans to drill in the Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

BP, formerly British Petroleum, made the announcement at its annual meeting in London immediately after Bishop Mark MacDonald of Alaska spoke to a shareholder’s resolution that would have directed BP to report on the risks associated with operating in sensitive and protected areas, including ANWR.

“This is certainly a significant announcement for the Gwich’in people, who are arguably one of the most Anglican native nations in the world,” MacDonald said after the meeting, which drew nearly 2,000 investors, media, environmentalists and protestors to London’s Royal Festival Hall. “The scope of the resolution would have recognized the concerns of other indigenous peoples in its operations around the world.”
This is the first time BP has publicly announced that drilling in the sensitive refuge is not part of the company’s business plan. BP’s chairman, Peter D. Sutherland, portrayed BP’s concern for the rights and needs of indigenous peoples.

MacDonald told the BP board and investors that the Christian moral tradition and the Western legal tradition consistently had promoted aboriginal rights as a fundamental element of basic and minimal commitment to justice. “These traditions have been underlined in the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” he said.

Article 25 of that declaration, which is supported by many nations but not officially the United States, says, “Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual and material relationship with the lands, territories, waters and coastal sea and other resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard.”
“Though these traditions are accepted almost unanimously in theory, governments, corporations and, sadly, even religious institutions have far too consistently undermined or stolen the capacity for aboriginal peoples to survive,” MacDonald said.

Church takes stand
At its meeting in February, the church’s Executive Council voted to support a resolution that instructed the treasurer to vote in favor of all resolutions asking companies to report on the potential of environmental damage from oil drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic. A shareholder’s resolution similar to the one offered by BP investors is pending before Conoco Phillips.

“The Episcopal Church has been a powerful ally in the legislative campaign to protect the coastal plain from oil and gas exploration,” said Athan Manuel, director of the Arctic Wilderness Campaign of U.S. PIRG’s Education Fund, who co-presented the shareholder’s resolution.
 “The church has proven to be an equally powerful ally as a socially responsible investor.”