Oil Has Not Been Our Friend

I'm going to suggest the unthinkable. This means that what I am about to say would be regarded as heretical--and possibly a capital offense--by a solid 99% of the population of Alaska now living within twenty-five miles of a road or highway, and (sadly) by at least 80% of bush Alaska.

I'm going to suggest that the discovery of a "monster" North Slope oil reserve in the late 20th century, and its subsequent development and exploitation from the mid-1970s to the present day--a day which comes some five to ten years before the end of the run--has not been good for Alaska; that the net effect upon Alaska, its peoples', and its "happy destiny" has been one of loss, and not gain.

I'm saying that TAPS has been a misfortune for Alaska, and not the other way around, even with the obvious, if ambiguous, gains made through ANCSA and ANILCA--no matter the inevitable cries of protest and objection from the various Chambers of Commerce, Upscale Corporation Natives, Juneau-Anchorage-Fairbanks SoA Salarymen, and the Construction Industry. (To sense the meaning behind this conviction with the heart as well as the mind might require a person to have been a child in bush Alaska during the pre-TAPs years during the first decade and a half of statehood, or even before. Certainly to "get" the point will require one to have known Alaska before the 1980s era of concentrated Anchorage-railbelt-Fairbanks urban-suburban in-migration by big SUV drivin', flag wavin', "gettin' me some of that Alaska gold" newcomers who characteristically show themselves to little understand what it means to have moved into a subarctic bioregion spanning the last remaining unsettled open and wild country in all of North America, and--with few, very demanding exceptions like the Sahara and Gobi deserts--the world, and who have proved all too willing to absorb and articulate in fresh new ways Alaska's pre-existing and multi-generational, American-style "anti-Indian" bias.)

For evidence as to how and why Big Oil has not been good for just the one region of Alaska noted above, the Anchorage-to-Fairbanks, Parks Highway and Alaska Railroad axis, I suggest you simply use Google Earth to look at contrasting aerial views of, say, the South Island of New Zealand, and railbelt Alaska in the vicinity of Palmer-Wasilla, or for that matter, the much "gentler" Talkeetna.

(It should be pointed out that this particular exercise, instructive as it is--and I won't be giving you the answer here... you'll have to do the thing yourself--unfolds entirely from the very western, Euro-American perspective noted above, common to the dominant population of Alaska and the region in question, and in doing so, leaves aside many still-current, though minority, alternative ways of understanding a peoples' relationship with the landbase and ways of seeing place as home and homeland. Still, as I say, the exercise will be instructive. There is a very clear and very distinct difference to be seen in the two views which points to how the people who have come to each place from outside have chosen to see the new land, what they've considered important, and from where they expect the things of life to come, not just in the moment of instant riches, but for generations into the future.)

What we've had, instead of what we've needed, has been a frenzy... an extractive industrial economic frenzy: High heat and little light which has burned brightly for a time, now starting to leave little in its passing but ash and clinker and a bunch of formerly busy people standing around looking at each other wondering what they are going to do now, with the upper tier of the prevailing two-tier economy thinking hard about what they can do to try to stay on top of what has proved to be a very good living, and the lower tier just trying to get by, and willing to believe and to follow anyone who says he has a way to keep the good times rollin'.

Why does this matter, when the issue as to how Alaska's oil wealth might be used (exploited) has long been settled? There are several reasons, of which two seem to be paramount.

Item: 98% of Alaska's food comes from thousands of miles away in a world of rising instability five years gone from the 2005-2006 Oil Peak, and converging upon Peak Natural Gas--this in a state whose Division of Agriculture remains locked into an "Iowa Corn" massive-scale mono-cultural agribusiness mindset. Nearly NO attention has been paid to the agricultural patterns of other far-northern nations in place before the era of cheap energy. Little if any knowledge of important and innovative agricultural alternatives are a part of the Alaska Division of Agriculture knowledge base or bureaucratic culture. Much talk but little action has been applied to the issue of what has come to be called "food security" (this being a turn of phrase, incidentally, uttered without much thought as though food were something like a weapon or a shieldwall, instead of the basis for all life, and among humans, as much the means for social cohesion and liveliness, as it is nutrition.)

Not long ago, someone I know approached senior DoA officers with questions about what the Division was doing to foster some of the ideas from permaculture, microfarming and non-chemical-intensive cultivation. The net result of these questions? It was clear that not only did these DoA officers know little about these developments in the field of

agriculture--barely recognizing key terms--but they remained locked into a pre-CSA, pre-organic agriculture (condescending) mindset with respect to the applicability of anything like these ideas to Alaska. (In fact, it is grainbelt-style mega-agriculture that is the poor fit in Alaska.) On another occasion, when asked why agricultural land disposals tended to be so large and released in ways that tended to foster large landholdings to become still larger, the inquirer was told that it proved too expensive and too much hassle to do smaller disposals, and that the DoA needed to generate revenue. (Note the turn of phrase I used, "large landholdings" instead of "large farms." There is a reason for that. A big, big percentage--perhaps even a majority--of agricultural landholdings aren't under agricultural production. The legal minimums to obtain title in the form of required clearing and initial planting is done--usually, naturally-occurring, wild herbaceous vegetation and grasses in "hay" is "sown"--followed by little actual farming on the new cheaply-purchased and "proved-up" land.)

Item: Not unusually, with all that (all-but-gone) oil came a large volume of natural gas, most of which North Slope energy companies have been content to "sit on" contrary to their contractual obligations to Alaska, re-injecting the gas into into production fields, and waiting for the conditions they are waiting for. Currently, the most favored, official-approved option for getting the gas "to market" promotes a 54-inch pipeline to extract and to ship the gas outside as fast as possible--likely exhausting it within a single generation. The entire official rationale for this approach is "cost"--the cost of whatever gas is not shipped outside and therefore permitted to be locally used in Alaska, and the cost to build the line out (expected to be built by large corporate investors with only a "few" government incentives). Left entirely out of the discussion is the question whether an initially "low" cost for gas is worth extracting and exhausting in less than thirty years a resource that might be carefully managed for in-state, domestic use over a century and a half.

Those "costs"? It would be somewhat expensive to invest a portion of the State of Alaska's Permanent Fund to consciously choose to build a small diameter, domestic-use gas pipeline down the existing TAPS corridor to Fairbanks, and thence down the railbelt to Anchorage and the Kenai. Most likely (at least in the short term), the price per thousand cubic feet would be more expensive than the so-called "world price" if developed in this way, but also left almost entirely out of the present discussion is the fact that in energy matters, often stability in price is of greater value than a sudden glut and cheap price followed by price fluctuation and scarcity, and that in a world of looming chronic energy shortage, a locale in possession of a rational, sustainably managed energy supply would not experience many of the disturbances and instabilities of a "boom and bust" unrestrained, uncontrolled energy marketplace...

[This just in: one day before the 2010 General Election, and a few days after posting the paragraphs above, with early voting happening even as I write this, I learn--from foolishly trying to calm my drive on icy roads with old tires by turning on the radio--that hoping-to-be-elected Governor Sean Parnell and Tea Party favorite son, Joe Miller, believe that all the jobs and revenue to replace 85% of Alaska's current oil-based economy will come from rural Alaska, "where all the new jobs are going to be" (to quote Miller--the same runnin' Joe Miller who believes that ALL of Alaska's National Parks, Preserves, Wild and Senic Rivers and the like are "unconstitutional"), and all new roads to everywhere need to be quickly built right now. Never mind that even a short paper and pencil consultation on the back of an envelope will show that the numbers don't add up--not even close--and that there is NO remaining resource base in Alaska capable of replacing 35 years of multi-million barrel exports, royalties and taxes. Never mind that Alaska's open country is the last mostly roadless region in the US, and one of two in North America, and as such, bush Alaska remains one of the few places left that holds out some possibility for human beings being able to live under conditions better than hand-to-mouth desperation in the hard years to come for the entire planet, or that large blocks of largely unspoiled land are our best hope that there will be any human beings at all in a thousand years. No, instead we are presented with the Miller-Parnell dream of unrestrained, unregulated extractive industry as a reasonable response to our looming post-oil economic crisis. Would here be the place to point out that an interest in a continuing above-the-survival-minimum human future doesn't mean wearing "wise use" dollar bill blinders to convince ourselves that we can both put places in peril of being trashed (Pebble Mine) and keep them healthy and sustainably supporting reasonable numbers of people (Bristol Bay Salmon)? Perhaps it is.]

I’ve changed my mind, then. The best way forward for Alaska is one in which our governors and investors don't choose to rationally stretch Alaska's natural gas bounty over a century or more, but instead rapidly exploit it for short-term profit to be taken a self-selected few. The last thing we need to see is the careful and measured use of the gas presently "up there" on the slope. That will only make it possible for people like Miller and Parnell to do what they like to the rest of Alaska.

No, let the 54-inch pipe be built straight to the Canadian Tar Sands. Let the gas burn away in less than a generation. While the gas is flowin', interest in expanding into other resource extraction will be much reduced, and the ready availability and high heat of flying gas money will distract everyone, and will buy us time to let inevitable global contractions, crashes and chaos worldwide to unfold, at which time limited means everywhere will forestall the worst and the most damaging effects of the Miller-Parnell tunnel-vision idiocracy. After a generation, with the oil and the gas long gone, the newcomers will be forced to head back to where they came from, leaving a still mostly undamanged Alaska behind them—the Alaska we long for, those of us for whom this place is our home, come what may, and not simply one of the last opportunities for a good suburban, high-consumer lifestyle, with shopping in Anchorage for her, and lots of manly stories of a "huntin' and fishin’ with mah boat, mah fo'r-wheeler and mah rihg" for him.

Wilderness Access--Motorized and Not; Userfees

Perennially, the issue of motorized access to national and state interest lands comes up in public conversation. Tied to this is the question of access in general, impacts and user fees. There are always those who advocate banning any motorized access whatsoever and limiting the numbers of visitors granted a permit to enter the land so sharply as to accomplish an effective ban for all but the privileged. (Odd, how the wealthy and connected seem to be able to get into anything.) Others advocate charging admission fees to lands that theoretically belong us--user fees effectively causing public lands become the property of administrators. For these folk--most who are in some way connected to the administration of public lands, and so cannot be considered disinterested parties in contemplating user fee revenue--the way to control damaging access to public land is to offset it by charging the folks who enter public lands.

One's first reaction to all of this is to say: 'they'll be making outlaws of us all, yet,' and oppose any measure to address the access problem, and refuse to obey any laws that do appear. In the end, this may be the only choice open to those who consider open access to wilderness a legacy and right, rather than something optional to those who can afford to pay to enter the 'king's lands'---particularly in the light of the fact that no practicable limits to access appear in the path of those who wish to exploit national and state public lands for extractive uses. (Extractive industries are able to marshal armies of lawyers, lobbyists and planners to make the case for letting them do what they will. Often, all they have to say, over and over again, is the word 'jobs,' or sometimes, 'resources'.)

[For example of this, see http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200907/coal.aspx. A Delaware-incorporated partnership of investors want the Alaska Department of Natural Resources to approve construction of one of the largest open-pit coal mines in North America, and the largest ever in the State of Alaska. Of course, the usual dumping of millions of gallons of waste water into a key salmon stream--dumping which ultimately enters Alaska's Cook inlet--and the stripping of 5000 acres (7.8 square miles) in the first phase of mining are the known side effects. Never mind that coal is a key greenhouse gas and the main source of anthropogenic mercury pollution. Never mind that local and area residents don't want the mine. Never mind the devastating effects strip mined coal is having upon other areas of the the country. But I digress. Still, this is but a single example.]

Suppose we take the growing concern with access and other forms of intensive recreational use at face value as something those who are calling for regulation are truly concerned about. (In other words, let's stipulate the absence of a hidden agenda.) A case could be made that it is the ease of mechanized access that is destroying wilderness. The Alaskan historian Morgan Sherwood (http://www.jstor.org/pss/3984230, http://books.google.com/booksid=IGmj2lOKRLMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false) makes a strong argument that easy motorized access to remote areas spells the end of wilderness as we understand it. If so, the problem is less one of total numbers of people entering popular public lands for recreational purposes, and more the means they use for travel within them. I will relate but a single example with which I am fairly familiar. Admiralty Island National Monument lies a short airplane flight or boat ride across Stephens Passage from Juneau, Alaska's capital city, and the largest settlement in Southeast Alaska. The Monument is a popular fishing and hunting site---legal and illegal. As currently administered, almost no regulations govern motorized access to any part of the Monument, nor the use of motorized access within or in the air space above the Monument. It is not unusual for visitors owning or chartering private aircraft to land on any one of the more popular freshwater fishing lakes, fish from the floatplane for a few minutes to a few hours, and then take off to check out the fishing elsewhere. Whatever our answers, still the questions must be asked: Is this how we want users to come and go from our public lands, and is this how these lands are meant to be enjoyed? Is there something fundamentally wrong, and profoundly disturbing with an approach to wilderness access which equivocates it with instantly gratifying entertainment of the kind one finds at the mall, on the big screen TV, or in the cinema? Are there deep reasons, instead, to encourage long term and physically demanding contact with wilderness---what might be called a wholly involving or 'agonistic' experience?

If we decide in favor of wilderness as physically and spiritually involving, and yet wish to preserve the idea of wilderness access as a legacy and right, a solution to the problem of a tension between the ability of the land to absorb visitors, and the heartfelt need of many to visit these lands might be found in limiting not the fact of access, but the forms it can take. Perhaps we might require that visitors can only enter certain lands under human power (or, in some cases, with the assistance of animal power). In the case of Admiralty Island, a small handful of coastal boat and floatplane landing sites might be designated at authorized motorcraft and aircraft entry points. Once within the boundaries of the Monument---which would include saltwater within 250 to 500 meters of the shore---travel could be limited to any non-motorized means of conveyance: foot, bicycle, kayak, non-motorized sailboat, dogsled, pack animal, etc...

The model could apply to many of the more popular wilderness destinations in Alaska. In some areas, exceptions for bona-fide subsistence activity could be made, perhaps seasonally limited (access being seasonally limited, not the activity itself). In other areas, depending upon the situation, few limits to motorized access might be enforced, but in heavy-use areas these would be in the minority--not like today, where motorized access becomes the norm. Remote areas would be different, of course. There would be many details to work out, and the issues at stake would be surrounded with much controversy, and there would be those who would flout the law, but these represent practical details that could and would be worked out if the will were there to do so. There is no theoretical reason for such an access limiting scheme not to work, nor is there any reason for it to be applied to every single tract of public land. Certainly, though, a case might be made for many areas now open to motorized forms of travel by default.

We hear much from the right wing these days (who generally oppose--vroom! vroom!--any limits on motorized access) about how this is an era of self-responsibility, and how we all must be willing to 'work hard to get anywhere,' but we see very little of this in the actions on public lands by some of the loudest proclaimers of the doctrine. What could be a more profound manifestation of self-reliance, responsibility and respectful restraint than the notion that one must enter key tracts of wilderness on one's own or animal power, and depend upon one's own skills to flourish there as long as one is visiting? The aptness of this observation notwithstanding, somehow I think such a proposal as I make here will fail on the right, for lack of courageous sponsorship, as well as on the left, for lack of interest...



As to the matter of user fees--something I'm sure too many on both the left and the right would be happy to embrace as a simple solution that doesn't address the real problem but looks like something is being done: I would always stand up against them. Failing that, in compromise, I would strongly advocate that each and every resident of the US has a right to fee-less access to federal and state public lands closest to his or her place of residence. (One might create a 200 mile radius or some such, or allow persons to choose specific areas that lie farther away if no lands are closer. These are details, though. There would be many ways assuring fair and non-restrictive fee-less access for local residents.) With respect to federally-administered lands, for the people living where I lived not long ago, that would be the Tongass. For people living where I live now that would be Denali National Park and surrounding BLM lands in the area.

Hecatomb: 'Predator Control' Carnage

I am, myself, a hunter, and believing that no right exists in isolation, I am also a fervent defender of a constitutionally-based individual right to keep and bear arms (defending the 'cartridge box' that goes along with the ballot and the jury boxes---A R Amar and A Hirsch---to which we might add the 'soap box'). Of course, I may not be the sort of hunter familiar to most Americans---though familiar to many Alaskans---for I am a 'meat hunter'. Taking a moose during fall hunting season has been for years an important part of my diet and the diet of my family. (Even now, as I choose to eat far less meat than I once did, I prefer---both ethically and nutritionally---to eat the flesh of wild herbivores taken not in excessive numbers, and with an absolute minimum of suffering on the part of the animal leading up to and during the moment of its killing.) I am a hunter. I have to emphasize this for what I am about to say.

There are many reasons why I deeply believe we ought to culturally and ethically include hunting as a part of what we do. Yet, I have to say that sometimes I feel compelled to shake my head and spit on the ground at the doings of about half of the hunters and shooters out there. It would seem that half of them are giving the rest of us a bad name. There has been some growth in the hunting ethos over the past thirty years, but with that, also has grown up a reliance upon 'big iron' machinery and technology for the 'hunter', and an industry that serves it. Along with this, something called 'varmint hunting' is alive and well. (I will have more to say about this later.) Something seems to have been lost, or turned away from, in the simple act of carefully preparing one's body, mind and focussed attention in going out to 'make meat'. (Perhaps it is that most hunters now aren't rural folk, but suburbanites.) Yet this essay, as much as I want it to be, is not about troubling changes in the hunting culture as observed in the pages of Field and Stream, Outdoor Life and American Hunter over the past thirty years. That will have to be a discussion for another time.

What I need to talk about here is Alaskan 'predator control'---particularly wolf control---and the role of the 'bad fifty percent' in the political promotion of an issue more wisely left to the cool calculations of science.

To-wit:

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s there was a certain he-man 'hunting' experience that many 'hunters' came north to enjoy---that of riding in an airplane, rifle in shaking hands (and presumably, visions of a much more dangerous game dancing in heads), along for the ride while wolves chased from the air would be harassed and panicked into running across country more or less in a straight lines, or played to exhaustion, at which point the heroic 'hunter' would make his---inevitably his---slaying shot.

This was a part of 'hunting' in Alaska not that long ago, and there have been a number of guides and 'hunters' who've ached to see a return to the good old days of human-wolf interaction, before a meddlesome legislature and 'emotional' public opinion caused them to have to put away their toys. Several times the people of Alaska have voted against a return to aerial wolf hunting.

Now, in many areas of the state, human hunting pressure upon moose populations year-round (either illegally or for 'subsistence') is very great. This is particularly so in a time when inexpensive snow-machine travel can take a hunter even hundreds of miles into wild country. The issue of 'predator control' in the State of Alaska, as it addresses strained local or regional populations of moose and caribou, characteristically does not refer to the most efficient predator out there---humans assisted by mechanical means for travel---but to wolf, and now bear, control.

'Control' means killing. There remains a fairly strong distaste in the general population---including many hunters---for a return to the free-for-all days of commercially guided aerial wolf hunting. Accordingly, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game under direction by the Alaska Board of Game and certain legislative factions, has been compelled (willingly or less willingly) to introduce a permitting process for the taking of wolves (and sometimes bears) in areas where large herbivore populations are deemed to be held artificially low by predation.

There are ecological reasons why an herbivore population can stabilize---subsequent to experiencing significant human, wolf and bear predation pressure---at a level much lower than the forage capacity of the region can support. These reasons are too technical and detailed to outline here. Suffice to say, there may be instances when human intervention to restore game populations is called for. Of course, for some people, even hunters, the matter of such intervention is problematic without taking into consideration, and changing, the overwhelming human impact. Still, under very specific and measurable conditions, a very particular situation can arise which might necessitate increased hunting and trapping of predators over a number of years, in an area, to restore a historically known and ecologically understood balance. Key to this, though, is that making the policy decisions to intervene in these situations must follow peer-reviewed, unpoliticized, field research---in other words well-founded, unhasty biological science---and not be introduced and adopted prior to actually knowing what is going on. (To know what is going on in the field is the reason we now have state departments of fish and game nationwide. That the large animals inhabiting the wild country matter, and are valued by us, for more than their meat or their 'trophies', is why we have not had commercial market hunting in the US for over a hundred years, and why we have not had bounties on predators for over almost 40 years.)

Nothing like science--and this is important... nothing like science is driving the recently renewed Palin administration 'plentiful game' initiative to open up 'predator control'. The Sarah Palin administration proposes measures to: kill denned wolf pups with poison gas, expand same-day helicopter hunting of wolves and bears, permit snare-trapping of bears, and allow non-resident 'hunters' to participate in unlimited black bear 'predator control' harvests, and to create new areas (such as in the vicinity of Anvik) for up to an 80% reduction in wolf populations--this in a complete absence of any scientific study in the new areas under proposal.

Compounding the recent frenzy for new 'predator control' is the fact that many hunters stand up in their defense of 'predator control' out of a certain political allegiance, and not out of any specific knowledge of the issues. In such an atmosphere, it is easy to see how any introduction of predator control, anywhere, whether needed or not, whether scientifically based, or not, will automatically find its defending constituency. Many of us who stand in opposition to specific wolf-control measures proposed for specific areas do so because we fear that politically motivated, naive 'predator control', in the current Alaskan political climate, will become the solution of first resort--a panacea--in the minds of hunters and pro-hunting legislators.

Then, also, there is this: For some people, wolf, coyotes, lynx, fox, and the like are merely 'varmints'; animals to be killed without question, on sight. (Even the American Bald Eagle, the patriotically holy symbol of our nation, went through decades of falling under the varmint classification. That's why we have laws for the protection of these birds.) Recall mention of a predator bounty system around some 50 years ago? That was a government sponsored program in place for decades, nationwide. It was understood that wolves and bears, and the like, were simply nuisance animals. This resulted, by the way, in interesting situations like the Grizzily Bear (a subspecies of Ursus arctos, the Brown Bear) appearing on the California Flag in a state where wild populations of Grizzily Bears can no longer be found. In part, then, the opposition to wolves being 'allowed' to take game is a visceral, irrational response, with roots deep in the European experience in Europe and in North America. As deeply as those roots go, we now know enough to say that a cultural bias is no basis on which to decide matters better left to biologists. If it is to be said that 'emotion' drives those who would preserve wolves and other predators at any cost, then certainly it is also true that emotion drives those who would kill predators because they are 'varmints'.

I have to disagree with the 'hunter' Sarah Palin. Her version of predator control is simply wrong.


[For those---hunters particularly---who wish to learn a lot more about the biology of the wolf and the history of human-wolf interactions in Europe and North America, it would be hard to do better than to read Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez.]

Stupid Cruise Industry Raw Sewage Tricks

The 10 February 09 online edition of the Anchorage Daily News --- http://www.adn.com/money/industries/tourism/story/685219.html --- reports that the Alaska cruise industry and its lobbyists are in the first stages a 'hard sell' campaign to persuade legislators to roll back the provisions of the strict water-pollution and head tax initiative easily passed by voters in 2006. (For those who don't recall, or who aren't acquainted with Alaskan politics, the measure passed in the face of a million-dollar advertisement campaign in opposition by the cruise industry, and did so in a state that tends toward the right wing on most fiscal and taxation issues. In short, insuring that cruise ships visiting Alaska's coastal waters don't dump raw sewage and fuel is popular with Alaskan voters.)

Alaska's constitution gives the legislature power to quickly repeal initiatives approved by Alaskan voters in plebiscite, but should it? We've before seen instances of legislative attempts, at the behest of powerful interest group lobbies, to undo the Alaskan people's will. Maybe it is time for a constitutional amendment that puts a limit on how soon the legislature can enact legislation to alter laws made by initiative, particularly in the light of a referendum enacted into law under the former Murkowski administration that greatly increases the difficulty of putting initiative measures on the ballot, by requiring signatures from at least one voter in each of 2/3 of Alaska's forty state house districts. (In other words, petitioners have to obtain signatures from at least 27 separate districts in a geographically vast and mostly rural state.)

Presently, the legislature doesn't yet appear ready to jump hop-frog at the demands of the cruise industry ("asking how high on the way up," as my father used to say). This might easily change if lobbyists are able to find an eager or hungry legislator-Champion willing to push for the rollback.

The cruise industry now claims that the strict measures in the 2006 law are no longer needed, because the industry has reformed itself. In the light of recent instances on the national stage, in which strict regulation was not seen as necessary to provide oversight to an industry that was deemed capable of watching itself, do the words, "sub-prime loans", "toxic assets", "financial melt-down" and "deep recession" ring a bell? How about the word "deregulation" standing for what started it all?

No, I have to disagree with the self-assessment of the cruise industry. There is a reason why we can count on the cruise industry to behave itself, and not to dump pollution into Alaskan coastal waters, anymore. That's because Alaskans passed the 2006 initiative, and only because the measures adopted in this law have held the cruise industry to strict standards of accountability and oversight. Further, if the industry has truly accepted the necessity for regulating its own actions so that it doesn't run afoul of basic demands for taking extra care of the coastal waters that are its bread and butter, then what is the need to change a law to which it has, by its own claim of good behavior, completely adapted?

The cruise industry doesn't want the law governing its actions in Alaska to set a higher water quality standard than other industries are required to meet. Why shouldn't the standards for cruise ships be higher?

First, the very waters through which these ships cruise are vital to not just the industry itself, but to the people living in Alaska's coastal communities. This is an instance where interests ought to coincide. The cruise industry is able both to advertise its extreme environmental sensitivity, and to maintain the highest standard of good will between itself and the people living in the homeland to which it is bringing its "guests". The people of coastal Alaska are able to be sure their waters aren't being polluted by dumping.

Second, by their very nature, cruise companies represent a transient and outside-Alaska-based industry. Cruise companies make their money visiting a land where they, along each season's receipts, do not remain. The economic benefits that come from selling the scenery and experience of being in Alaska mostly don't go to benefit the places that are forced to accommodate a large volume of visitors each and every season. (Without a corporate tax on the cruise industry, almost none of the revenue generated for the industry by local communities would return to the governments of those communities responsible for the infrastructure and services enjoyed by visitors.) Local impacts from a high volume of visiting cruise ships can be intense, with some communities experiencing the presence of three or four ships in port several times per week throughout a five-month tourist season. To dump even a little wastewater from cruise ships into our coastal zone, beyond that which is strictly and minimally permitted, demands that localities accept an additional price for the presence of the cruise industry without a single compensatory benefit. Coastal communities rely upon the purity of their nearshore waters. In instances where some communities have suffered from pre-existing pollution mixing zones, the additional impact of hundreds of cruise ship visits per season obtaining permission to dump would complicate already difficult remediation and recovery measures.

Third, the cruise industry is selling a product that depends upon, and is advertised to be, a pristine and wild setting. In doing this, it is not at all unfair for the cruise industry to be held to a higher standard of water quality than local sewage treatment and seafood processing plants, or mines. People are attracted to cruise vacations along Alaska's coasts for a chance to view marine wildlife, and enjoy an unpolluted natural setting as much as they are attracted to the glaciers and the mountains.


As to the industry objection that the per-passenger cruise ship 'head tax' will discourage visits to Alaska on the part of people willing to purchase expensive cruise ship tours, I offer the following little play to put the thing into perspective:

Scene: The living room of Mr. and Mrs. Peoria, somewhere in a midwestern small town... We see a comfortably well-off retired couple sitting in easy chairs. Mr. Peoria is looking at some sort of printed matter. Mrs. Peoria is knitting.

Mr. Peoria: The new flyer from the Cruise Ship company came in today, Ella.

Mrs. Peoria: Oh good! What does it say?

Mr. Peoria: It looks like the head tax on cruise passengers to Alaska is still on. It's going to cost $2848.00 for the cruise, in addition to the $1200.00 for airfare for both of us to go to Alaska this summer. With the $50.00 per passenger tax on our cruise, I just don't see how we can afford that extra hundred dollars the cruise company is passing along. I heard on the news that Alaskans voted for the tax to keep the cruise ships from dumping sewage and fuel like they used to do.

Mrs. Peoria: Oh, that's too bad! I did so want to see Alaska, and we planned for our trip for so long. If only it wasn't going to cost us two and a half percent more than we planned, to go to Alaska, perhaps we could. Those darn Alaskans and their worries!


Are we really expected to believe that a $50.00-per-passenger tax on cruises visiting our coastal Alaskan waters is going to stop people from coming? Oh, come on! Fifty dollars hardly gets a small family into and out of the movie theater, these days, after buying tickets and popcorn! Show a little sense, tourism industry, show a little sense.

Copyright © DHales.

Wood Bison, Oil, Gas

In the 29 Jan 09 edition of the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, we read an Op-Ed piece by columnist Tim Mowry, criticizing the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's hasty "jump[ing of the] gun" in bringing Wood Bison into Alaska for possible introduction into the Yukon Flats before all the Endangered Species Act "i's were dotted and t's were crossed." (Currently, 53 Canadian Wood Bison are captive in Portage, Alaska, awaiting transplantation. -- http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080709/0414211.html )

What is the Wood Bison? It is a distinctly larger northern subspecies of Bison bison whose original range included the boreal forests of Alaska, in addition to the areas in Canada where populations of this bison still persist. Something around 3000 Wood Bison still remain on the planet, anywhere. Wild, native populations of Wood Bison lived in Alaska for 400,000 years until their disappearance within the last 100 to 200 years. Estimates suggest that there were once as many as 200,000 Wood Bison in North America. Native elders in Interior Alaska and northwestern Canada have described how bison were hunted as an important source of food and materials, suggesting their recent historical presence in Alaska, as well as Canada.

http://www.sararegistry.gc.ca/species/speciesDetails_e.cfm?sid=143
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Bison

The "bureaucratic boondoggle" cited in Tim Mowry's article has to do with (surprise!) a perceived conflict in the presence of released Wood Bison populations with oil and gas exploration in the Minto Flats area and the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. It appears that the staff of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't necessarily agree with the scientific evidence that the Wood Bison disappearance from Alaska was caused by human activity.

Several thoughts come to mind, regarding the matter.

Whether or not the disappearance of the Wood Bison from Alaska was caused entirely by human activity seems hardly relevant to returning a threatened or endangered species to a land where they once persisted over the course of four-tenths of a million years. This is a time span crossing a known record of several profound climatic changes. (If nothing else, there is something very suggestive in that bit of information which hints at the role of humans in the Alaskan extinction of these magnificent animals, particularly in the light of the fact that a lot of ideal Wood Bison habitat remains in the areas under consideration for their release.) One wonders how much of the F&W energy behind resisting Alaska's plan to re-create wild herds of Wood Bison arises from an eight-year-long effort on the part of the former Bush Administration to 'change the culture' of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Mr. Mowry seems sympathetic in his article to the plight of potential oil and gas exploration in affected areas. The Alaska Native Corporation Doyon Limited plans to explore for gas in the Nenana Basin, on the edge of the potential release area. Is this an example of a corporation thinking like a corporation, no matter its ultimate origin? Perhaps. Also, perhaps, we might think a bit more long term, here. Long after our present era of oil and gas exploration, and long after any era of regional oil and gas production (and related creation of "jobz"), our chief concern as human beings will lie elsewhere. In the long term, whether or not we have viable Wood Bison populations throughout interior Alaska will matter a great deal more than whether or not we Explored for Oil and Gas (note the respectful capitalization) under the ground where these populations are able to live.

The interest (and decision to move toward) transplanting Wood Bison populations in Alaska predated Governor Sarah Palin's rise to national prominence by her selection to be Senator John McCain's running mate for the presidency. Just months ago, everything seemed just fine with the Wood Bison release program. How much of the renewed attention to the impact of Wood Bison upon oil and gas exploration arises out of a changed set of Palin priorities? About this, we can't probably do more than speculate, but the question is suggestive. Alaska's political climate remains very much pro-oil-and-gas, pro-carbon. It is easy to see why, when 70-85% of Alaska's economic base (and the popular Permanent Fund Dividend) derives directly from the North Slope/TAPS oil production system, now some 19 years past peak. Anyone wishing to remain at the forefront of political attention could hardly do so without standing up for oil and gas exploration within Alaska, and by implication, nationally.

Let's not forget that our future, springing out of a global Peak Oil and a soon-to-be Peak Gas present moment, no matter what we do, simply cannot be expected to include high rates of fossil fuel exploitation. Caring for the future of this northern land, and its environment, through efforts such as the Wood Bison restoration project makes at least as much sense as exploring for new oil and gas reserves. Anyone weighing the trade-offs in releasing populations of Wood Bison into the wild needs to understand this.

Copyright © DHales.

Social Investing

A story from the daily broadcast of the Alaska Public Radio Network's "Alaska News Nightly" for 29 Jan 09
( http://media.aprn.org/2009/ann-20090129-02.mp3 ),
cites the introduction in the Alaska State House of Representatives of three similar bills to consider divestiture of Permanent and Retirement Funds "in foreign companies doing genocide-related business in Sudan". These would be companies providing military supplies and services to Sudan and companies that pay oil and mineral royalties to the Sudanese government, for example. Governor Sarah Palin, whose administration last year opposed a similar bill for being too broad, says now that "...investment in companies with ties to the repressive regime in Sudan is inconsistent with the moral and political values of the people of Alaska."

Present State of Alaska law, under the Prudent Investor Rule, forbids divestiture of assets for any reasons other than those which strive to maximize return on investment. In other words, Permanent and Retirement Fund investors cannot consider issues outside economic gain or loss. Permanent Fund Executive Director Mike Burns dismisses consideration of any other factors as "social investing" which "carries the risk" of "expanding non-financial goals" for the Fund.


The case is often made that corporate organizations dedicated to business should base their decisions exclusively upon financial considerations. No surprise there. Of course, not a few observers would question that this must be necessarily so. Any debate between the two positions is likely to be heated, but that is not the question to be addressed in this entry, nor are related matters pertaining to the private and public roles of large corporations and companies in a world where the effects of doing business globally impinges upon the lives of people in so many non-economic ways. Those issues would be grist for a different discussion than this one.

No, I wish to take the discussion in a different direction--toward the role of a state in managing the investment of its liquid assets--assuming we are going to continue to affirm a necessity for states, for governance in economic and social affairs, and the ownership of economic assets by states. The goals of governments are very different than those of businesses. This key insight begs for emphasis: The goals and purposes of government organizations are very different than those of business organizations. (This is why it makes almost no sense at all to hear a candidate for elective public office--often coming to politics from a business career of sufficient success to afford the candidate scope to seek a second career in politics--tell us he or she intends to "run the government like a business." This sort of thing sounds earnest and impressive, but fails to understand that governments are very distinct entities from businesses.)

Governments, by their very nature, are commissioned to concern themselves with the well-being of people. Looking beyond the relatively narrow question of economics, government decision-makers and planners must necessarily take into account a wide range of social, environmental and legal issues, pertaining to the most local to the national--and even international. Surprisingly to some, this wide geographical scope for thinking is not limited only to nation states, but often must enter the awareness of even the most local of governing bodies.

Governments, unlike businesses, must be more concerned with the effects of competition upon the less fortunate than with successfully prosecuting strategies for successful competition. Governments must provide for commonly accessible infrastructure available for use by businesses as well as people. Governments must consider the direct and indirect effects of business activity—externalization, transportation and communication bottlenecks, land use, waste disposal and the like. The “business” of government is NOT the business of business. Governments (at least wise and enviable ones) are (and ought to be) concerned with the wide-ranging and complex issues of peoples’ well-being rather than the narrow goal of profit.

Accordingly, it makes complete sense for a government to proactively consider the effects upon peoples’ well-being of its investments, even if to do so demands significant financial sacrifice. Certainly, when the consideration of non-financial goals results in a reduction in return on investment amounting to fractions of a percent, the case in favor of embracing what Permanent Fund Executive Director criticizes as “social investing” should be open and shut. (Having asserted this, I should hasten to point to the observation that each of the present bills supported by the Palin Administration are written to narrowly constrain the basis for Permanent and Retirement Fund divestiture, and that a former bill was not supported because it was construed to be too broad.)

During the discussion of the bills now before the Alaska State House, Democrat Les Gara of Anchorage said, “... we should draw the line at genocide.” (“Genocide” has been a designation attached to the activities of the Sudanese government by the UN and the US Congress, and affirmed by both Presidents Bush and Obama.) State of Alaska Revenue Commissioner Pat Galvin said, “... the State has a moral imperative to act.” Granting that there is at least one kind of action at which we are committed to “draw the line”, and against which we have a “moral imperative to act", the question naturally arises: having admitted the necessity for divestiture in concept, are there any other sorts of actions from which we might flinch?

I suggest there are. This may not be the moment to attempt a comprehensive list, but certainly any designation of actions worthy of divestiture would include actions on the parts of governments and corporate entities that seriously impinge upon the social and economic well-being of a region’s people. If nothing else, to understand this is to understand that the label “genocide” often comes late to a conflict between unequal opponents, and is often preceded by decisions and manufactured events, though falling somewhat short of the definition of overt genocide, nevertheless have profoundly negative (even deadly) consequences for the people involved. I am ashamed to admit that history tells us of instances when US corporations were instrumental to just these sorts of events.

Putting a “tight fence” around the “risk of expanding non-financial goals,” upon closer inspection, turns out to be the opposite of what a government should do, whether or not it seeks a place of prominence in world affairs.

(Some might argue that though the case for “social investing” can be made, people far away in Sudan shouldn't concern us here in Alaska—that “social investing” must necessarily strive to be local. Such a declaration--if sincere--of allegiance to locality in a world of increasing globalization is laudable. In a world where money rapidly flows from continent to continent in an eyeblink, though, it makes little sense to understand multi-billion-dollar fund investments and divestitures in terms of any particular locale. The locus of concern for those devoted to relocalization presently lies in other directions.)

Copyright © DHales.

Natural Gas Dilemma

Taken from: http://oilsandstruth.org/2030-proposed-pipelines , this map suggests just about when the Alaska's North Slope gas pipeline can be expected to be built (2030), and for whom the gas is already earmarked. This map suggests why there is not now, and will not be, any rush on the part of industry to build a North Slope natural gas pipeline sooner than the determined target date, and why the pipeline will run, once it is built, where industry wants it to run. By 2030, the Canadian arctic gas field will be in depletion, but the strip mining of Northern Alberta for its tar sands will have just started. (Natural gas is a necessary, if not particularly efficient, energy source for the extraction of a petroleum-like substance from bituminous sand.)

If all goes according to plan, only after the Canadian arctic gas is going or gone, will it be time to suck Alaska's gas dry as quickly as possible.

Some might suggest that a 54-inch mega-pipeline built according to the long term schedule of a particularly dirty and inefficient Canadian energy industry--an industry with no ties or obligations to Alaska's people or land--wouldn't be in Alaska's best interest. (Perhaps we can be thankful that the Yukon Flats or the Kuskokwim Valley isn't underlain by huge bituminous sand deposits.)

What would be in Alaska's interest? Despite the reluctance on the part of the current governor to look toward a more domestic use of Alaska's gas, there is real merit in the suggestion that Alaska might use some of its own invested wealth to build a small-diameter natural gas pipeline down the Dalton Highway right-of-way to Fairbanks and thence down the railbelt to Anchorage and the Kenai--in one swoop answering a big part of the energy needs for three-quarters of the State's population. (We can envision a future in which vehicles in the railbelt might see conversion to natural gas, and in which various means for the supply of natural gas might reach out to larger bush communities.)

Natural gas is a non-renewable resource, but as a fossil fuel, it burns as cleanly as any fossil fuel can, and can be made to burn very efficiently. As a transition fuel to a different energy future, natural gas is ideal. It would give Alaska time to develop other, renewable energy sources. Properly priced, it would allow Alaskans to make a smooth transition to the sort of "times ten" efficiency that will be required in a post-carbon future. A domestic source of natural gas would forestall the urgent move toward some of the crazier "renewable" energy schemes, like converting 4 million acres of boreal forest in the vicinity of Fairbanks to solid fuel electrical generation, as has been suggested by the current mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough. (Was this only a trial balloon? Who can say?) Assuring a reliable and steady supply of natural gas available to companies investing in "green" alternatives for which energy to power manufacturing processes is of concern (e.g. photovoltaic panels) would both provide high-quality jobs to Alaskans and project Alaska toward the cutting edge of the new energy economy--without putting the State on the inevitable "boom and bust" exploitation-and-depletion curve. (A reliable energy supply in a friendly investment environment would also attract green businesses of the kind not yet invented, but which will come with inevitable innovation.)

Here is the dilemma, though, found in the history of the Cook Inlet gas field close to Anchorage. What would have been a century-long supply of natural gas to Anchorage--a city built in large part from its ready access to inexpensive gas energy--has been nearly exhausted in twenty years of massive exploitation by the Agram Fertilizer manufacturing facility. The heady mix of a few ardently defended high-paying jobs, lots of gas, and immense profits to be made from selling high-demand chemical fertilizers on the world market made for a quick depletion of one of Alaska's key resource pools.

Under the current zeitgeist of "anything goes" capitalism (in which there seems to be no such thing as a bad profit, or any such thing as an unwise externality), it is hard to see how inefficient or dirty industries such as those which manufacture plastic feedstock and make fertilizer would not be given carte blanche to take and use up as much North Slope natural gas as possible, as quickly as possible. It is hard to see how the State of Alaska in its current political incarnation would go out of its way to say "no" to a wasteful and polluting 19th-century industrial model while at the same time saying "yes" to transition-to-green-energy 21st century industries.

Instead of cleverly figuring out how to let a relatively inexpensive, steady and reliable transitional energy supply allow Alaska to join in the effort to grow the green economy of the future, today's Alaska would inevitably instead take the easy and familiar path of the known and deplete the resource in decades (and do so in the worst possible way), instead of efficiently husbanding it for centuries.

For some of us, Alaska's land and water has been trashed quite enough, with little or no reason or gain. (For example not one of our "managed" fisheries can honestly be said not to fall on a depletion curve.) As bad as it will be, for the long term health of our northern land, and the people who will remain up here, come what may, perhaps allowing Canadian or other non-Alaskan energy companies to strip and ship our North Slope natural gas outside as quickly as possible is the best way: At least it won't be going to further foul the nest here, where we hope our distant descendants will still live, unto the seventy-times-seventh generation.

Copyright © DHales.