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.
