After decades of confrontation, research, public reviews, and indecisive government policy, a land-use planning process is at last underway in Lancaster Sound.

This spring, a newly established land-use planning commission has met twice in Yellowknife to set an agenda for planning in two priority regions of the Northwest Territories-the Beaufort Sea Mackenzie Delta and Lancaster Sound. The commission's agenda will implement the northern land-use planning policy that has been on federal government drawing boards since 1980. The planning process should begin to resolve conflicts that have festered since the 1960s- conflicts over values and priorities between resource developers, environmentalists, the aboriginal residents of these regions, and government decision makers.

 Lancaster Sound has an abundance of renewable and non-renewable resources that is rarely found in the North. It is thought to be rich in minerals and oil and gas deposits. The concentration of wildlife and the beauty of this region have caused biologists to call it an "oasis in the arctic desert." Communities of Inuit have survived on the bounty of the land, ice, and water for centuries; they have watched the whalers, the explorers, and the oilmen come and go.

 Like the Beaufort Sea - Mackenzie Delta region, Lancaster Sound has been a focus of development proposals for several decades. Proposals for hydrocarbon exploration and year-round shipping followed the granting of offshore exploration permits in 1968, the implementation of generous tax incentives through the National Energy Program, announced in 1976, and later the discovery of promising oil and gas reserves in the Beaufort Sea.

 Objections from the Inuit and the public to piecemeal development of the region, and widespread concern about the potential for damage to the environment, have led to a series of government initiatives meant to sort out how this region should be used. This issue of Northern Perspectives describes two of these initiatives-the Environmental Assessment and Review Process (EARP) concerning Norlands Petroleums' offshore drilling proposal, and the Lancaster Sound Regional Study. The authors consider the contribution of these initiatives to the land-use planning process now underway, and then take a more detailed look at the land-use planning process itself and the challenge of planning in Lancaster Sound.