The Act outlined four separate purposes: to conserve fish and wildlife populations and habitats in their natural diversity including, but not limited to, the Porcupine caribou herd, polar bears, grizzly bears, muskoxen, Dall sheep, wolves, wolverines, snow geese, peregrine falcons and other migratory birds and Arctic char and grayling; to fulfill the international fish and wildlife treaty obligations of the United States; to provide the opportunity for continued subsistence uses by local residents; and to ensure water quality and necessary water quantity within the refuge
The Act also provides protection, in what it calls the "national interest" (Public Law 96-487 Title I-d), for the scenic, natural, cultural and environmental values of the public lands of Alaska, the Refuge falling under the broad term of public lands.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a place where ecological and evolutionary processes occur naturally, unaffected by commercialism and the whims of man. Given this, it is a laboratory where today's scientists, and future scientists, can study to further understand the natural dynamics of a land unaltered. The Refuge is the most biologically diverse conservation area in the polar north, supporting forty-five species of land and marine mammals, thirty-six species of fish, and 180 species of birds from four different continents. It is also in the migratory pattern, and home to the coastal plain (the same coastal plain in question for development for oil drilling) where birthing occurs, of a 120,000 member Porcupine caribou herd, and is occasionally used by another caribou herd. The Refuge is also singularly unique as it is the only refuge which dens all three species of North American bears, black, grizzly and polar, within its borders. The Refuge contains North America's two largest alpine lakes, Peters Lake and Schrader Lake. The Refuge also has more than twenty rivers flowing within its borders, with three (the Sheenjek, Ivishak and Wind Rivers) rivers designated as National Wild Rivers.