The Alaskan Way
article and photographs by Alex Hawes
Alaska. No word in our national vernacular so evokes the majesty and resilience of nature. A state wholly out of proportion, Alaska boasts more caribou than people, a glacier larger than Rhode Island, and the most massive mountain on Earth. Humans have tempted this immense wilderness in waves—Inuit, Aleut, and Athabaskan hunter-gatherers, then Russian trappers, and eventually gold prospectors, bushwhackers, anglers, and other escapees from American suburbia. But none have conquered it.
Modern
Alaskans’ relationship with the land is not easily understood
by civilized captives of the Lower 48. A true “sourdougher”—as
sons and daughters of the 49th state are known—keeps
snowshoes on the porch, a rifle in the closet, a Cessna in
the backyard. This might be interpreted as an attempt to master
the elements, but many residents would disagree. The Alaskan,
if such a stereotypical beast might be imagined, cherishes
the wilderness and bows before it humbly, knowing full well
the danger of treating nature casually. Citizens here must
watch out for moose in the spruce, grizzlies in the willow,
earthquakes, blizzards, and calving glaciers. Nature rules
Alaska. The Alaskan would have it no other way.
Yet the balance is shifting. The development of the commercial fishing, timber, oil, and tourism industries has successively worn at the threads of Alaska’s natural fabric. Sawdust and sky are replacing old-growth canopies; remote tundra is abuzz with snowmobiles and oil derricks. More than in any other state, Alaskans must rely on the continued availability and extraction of natural resources for their survival, making conservation vital in the long term—but threatening to individuals’ economic potential in the short term. Twenty years after Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act—a landmark bill that protected more than 100 million acres here—environmentalists still have much unfinished business.
Geology gives shape to Alaska’s mottled ecosystems. Glaciers have carved fjords and an archipelago of more than 1,000 islands out of the southeastern sliver of the state, where rain trapped by the Coast Mountains showers down upon the largest temperate rainforest in North America. Pointing westward to Asia, the Aleutian island chain emerges from the top of the Pacific Ocean’s volcanic Ring of Fire, forging refuge for tufted puffins, crested auklets, and millions of migratory birds. Treeless above 4,000 feet, the grand Alaska Range pushes northward from the Gulf of Alaska into the vast interior. At lower elevations, taiga woodlands—dominated by spruce, poplar, and birch—spill as far north as the Brooks Range, inside the Arctic Circle. Beyond these ancient peaks, tundra reigns—right up to the North Slope, along the Beaufort Sea, where ice and ocean creek and crash, and oil gurgles beneath the surface.
Even amid such vastness, access to land remains the singular, defining issue in the state. When Secretary of State William Seward purchased Alaska from Russia for $7 million (or two cents an acre) in 1867, indigenous populations retained the right to inhabit and use the territory essentially as they saw fit. Yet when the Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 authorized the newly crafted state government to choose, over time, a patchwork of 104 million acres from the state’s 375 million acres as its economic base, lawmakers failed to resolve existing Native American title to the land.
Then came the discovery of vast oil reserves at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, and the state suddenly became much more willing to negotiate with indigenous groups and move on. The result: the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which granted 44 million acres and nearly $1 billion to 12 newly created Native Corporations—for-profit institutions whose capitalist mission some Native individuals have found contradictory to their cultural values. The act also ordered the Department of Interior to set aside for possible federal protection a further 80 million acres not already claimed by the Native Corporations or the state government. Conservation essentially finished last—but at least it had joined the race.
“To a very large extent, the state and the Native Corporations picked the most economically viable land,” says Chuck Clusen, public lands program officer for the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “It tended to be lowlands along the rivers, lakeshores, and the ocean. It tended to be where there are mineral deposits. It tended to be where the biggest trees are.” Single ecosystems, on paper, became a checkerboard of private, Native, state and federal properties. Still, in a state with roughly one person for every two square miles, many extensive, biologically diverse areas remained.
The question of how to treat federal selections under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act remained, however. After years of negotiation in Congress, President Jimmy Carter settled the matter by signing the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) on December 2, 1980, the last legislative act of his presidency. Breathtaking in sweep, ANILCA established ten new national parks and expanded three more, doubling the size of the entire U.S. National Parks System and tripling the amount of federally designated wilderness. From the volcanic caldera of Aniakchak National Monument to the gold rush waters of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve to the desolate wilderness of Gates of the Arctic National Park, more than 200,000 square miles (roughly the size of California and Virginia combined) now fell under some category of federal protection in Alaska.
In contrast with the reactive conservation of the Lower 48—in which habitat often hasn’t been protected until after being seriously harmed—ANILCA’s creators had a chance to preserve intact some of the last pristine, fully functioning ecosystems anywhere. Yet the bill also mandated oil exploration along the Arctic coastal plain and enormous annual timber harvests in the virgin forests of the southeast, while setting few limits on potentially damaging, extractive uses of these new preserves by citizens of the state.
“Ultimately [ANILCA] did a lot that conservationists didn’t like, and it did a lot that developers didn’t like,” says Adam Kolton of the Alaska Wilderness League. Further threats to Alaska’s ecological future have since emerged from ANILCA’s vague policy goals, particularly its support for “traditional use” of protected lands. Today, this catch phrase permits tour companies to crowd brown bears on the Katmai Peninsula, all-terrain vehicles to chew up delicate tundra across Gates of the Arctic, and hunters to battle wolves over caribou throughout the state.
Three areas in particular—Tongass National Forest in the southeast, Denali National Park in the interior, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge along the North Slope—best illustrate that, with continued wrangling over ANILCA’s legacy 20 years after its enactment, Alaska’s copious resources remain up for grab.
Sailing
north from Seattle or Vancouver, 19th-century explorers of
Alaska encountered a mist-shrouded coastline hemmed in by
giant mountains, thick with eagles and bears. John Muir, in
1890, described southeastern Alaska’s dense forests of
Sitka spruce and western hemlock as “still in the morning
of creation.” The countless streams here continue to
throb with salmon, whose dying bodies fertilize the soil;
locals call the tallest trees “salmon trees” for
this reason. In turn, the old-growth canopy keeps snow off
the ground and sunlight off the streams, allowing deer to
forage and fish to thrive in cool waters. Deer feed the wolves,
fish feed the bears, and both feed the people.
Today, more than 90 percent of southeast Alaska falls inside the boundaries of the Tongass National Forest—at 17 million acres, bigger than West Virginia and by far the largest unit of the U.S. Forest Service. ANILCA gave life to Admiralty Island National Monument—where today more than 1,000 brown bears thrive in a forest once slated for a proposed pulp mill in Juneau—as well as Misty Fiords National Monument. But the act left most of the rest of the cherished old-growth forest here open to logging. To the horror of conservationists, ANILCA also set minimum timber sale targets of 450 million board feet per year in the Tongass and provided $400 million in funding for new logging roads and other programs. Simply to meet these quotas and maintain their sweetheart 50-year contracts, the two major pulp mills at Sitka and Ketchikan cleared entire stands of old-growth forest, according to Matt Zencey of the Alaska Rainforest Campaign. Meanwhile, the mills could buy hulking Sitka spruce logs, worth upwards of $300 on the open market, from the Forest Service for two bucks each.
Through the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990, the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and other groups eventually overturned some of ANILCA’s most damaging timber incentives, which were costing the federal government an average of $50 million a year through road construction costs and price subsidies. The act also added 300,000 more acres of wilderness within the Tongass and mandated buffers along salmon and trout streams and bald eagle roosts. Yet when the Clinton Administration last May announced its intention to prohibit new road construction in national forest wilderness areas, the Tongass was the lone exception.
“A new roadless plan would have basically ended all logging in the Tongass,” argues Chuck Kleeschulte, press secretary for Alaskan Senator Frank Murkowski. “In Alaska, if we don’t build new roads, we don’t log anything.” Kleeschulte points out that the total cut in the Tongass has already dropped from a level of 590 million board feet in 1973 to about 140 million currently. (For comparison, last year more than 700 million board feet were harvested on private lands in the State of New York, a territory roughly twice the size of the Tongass.)
Some conservationists believe that southeast Alaska could support small-scale timber operations, extracting yellow cedar and other high-quality woods for bowls, doors, violins, and other profitable products. “The Tongass can be a working forest that still has room for people who want to live amidst the stunning beauty of its remote areas,” says Matt Zencey. “But it can't sustain an economy with jobs that depend on liquidating the last old-growth wildlands of this great rainforest.”
“The only endangered species in the Tongass at the moment is commercial loggers,” counters Chuck Kleeschulte. Indeed, the overall number of Sitka deer in the Tongass appears stable, and annual salmon harvests have steadily increased from 25 million fish a year in 1959 to more than 200 million last year. The Alexander Archipelago wolf, a subspecies of gray wolf whose diet depends heavily on deer, also seems to be maintaining stable numbers.
However, trouble may be brewing beneath the numbers, says Tim Bristol of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. Fishermen are mostly finding pink, sockeye, and chum salmon, rather than the rarer king (or chinook) and coho salmon—species that reproduce poorly in streams affected by timber harvesting—and more and more of these harvested salmon have been born in hatcheries rather than in the wild.
Logging may soon catch up with the deer and wolves as well. Thirty to 40 years after a clear-cut, second-growth trees—mostly all the same age and height—converge to form a uniformly closed canopy, limiting sunlight and, in turn, the amount of low-lying vegetation for deer to eat. Bristol points to Prince of Wales Island, site of the earliest timbering operations in the 1950s, and now a “biological desert.” Deer populations may soon suffer elsewhere in the Tongass, as canopies in more recently harvested areas begin sealing out the sun. And as deer go, so go the wolves, warns Bristol.
Nonetheless, the demand for the Tongass’s trees has abated. Without guaranteed federal assistance, lost through passage of the Timber Reform Act—and facing an economic downturn in East Asia, where most Tongass timber ends up—the Sitka pulp mill shut down in 1993. The mill at Ketchikan followed suit in 1997. Fishing and tourism today outrank timber in providing employment in the southeast, although population and average income have both declined slightly across the region (except in the capital, Juneau). An increasing proportion of the local citizenry now supports preservation of the forest in order to attract tourists, maintain healthy fish stocks, and support deer and other wildlife that many here rely on for subsistence.
Tourism has tripled since 1980 to a $1 billion-a-year industry in the state. Preserving habitat for travelers’ aesthetic sensibilities can yield superficial results, however: Behind shallow shoreline facades of spruce, left for the benefit of cruise ship passengers, clear-cuts often hide.
The largest cruise ships docking at Juneau’s pier stand taller than the city’s tallest building. On any given summer day, the tourists these ships deposit may outnumber the city’s native populace. Communities are struggling to strike a workable balance. The cruise industry has become particularly critical to the economies of Ketchikan and Sitka since the closure of their timber mills, although Sitka’s residents have refused to build a dock for their benefit. Instead, small water-taxis motor passengers to and from the massive boats anchored offshore.
The National Park Service has also chosen to cap the number of cruise ships entering Glacier Bay National Park each summer, fearful that too many boats might scare off the orcas and humpback whales feeding in the bay’s rich waters. The environmental hazards of these vessels have residents and conservationists worried up and down the coast from Ketchikan to Seward. In 1999, Royal Caribbean was fined $6.5 million for illegally dumping oil and other pollutants in Alaskan waters, and this year six cruise ship operators were cited by the Environmental Protection Agency for exceeding federal and state air pollution limits.
Contending with the impact of recreation and mass tourism is a challenge National Park Service staff farther north already know well.
The Athabaskan Indians dubbed Mount McKinley Denali— “the high one.” To its neighbors today, it is simply The Mountain. The granite and ice face of Mount McKinley rises from its base at 2,000 feet in elevation to a peak of 20,320 feet, a mass of rock greater than that of any other mountain in the world. For 28 years, the only way for most visitors to see The Mountain reflected in Wonder Lake, or any other site inside the heart of Denali National Park, has been by shuttle bus.
Larger than New Hampshire, the park is served by a single, 91-mile dirt road, which has been closed to personal vehicles since 1972. Converted school buses, complete with green vinyl bench seats, transport paying customers along the winding park road to a series of drop-offs and rest stops. Guides point out moose, snowshoe hare, and red fox at lower elevations. As the road rises and taiga gives way to tundra, visitors strain to spot grizzlies, ptarmigan, or Dall sheep high in the scramble. The bus halts briefly for wildlife, then rumbles on.
With few accommodations inside Denali, most visitors either camp in primitive sites or take daytrips on the shuttle, requiring 11 bumpy hours for round-trips to Wonder Lake. The chance of seeing The Mountain during the cloudy days of summer is about 35 percent. Exhausted sightseers sometimes disembark back at the park entrance in a foul mood—yet the majority seems to enjoy the odyssey, according to NPS surveys.
Closer to Siberia than Seattle, Denali greets fewer than 400,000 visitors a year, a tiny number compared with the popular national parks of the Lower 48 (see “Trafficking in Yosemite” in the May/June 2000 ZooGoer). Many local lodge owners and politicians are pushing to expand access into the park, most dramatically with a proposed second road into the core of Denali from the town of Healy. The road—or, alternately, a rail line—would follow the Stampede Trail, first blazed by miners bound for the gold claims at Kantishna, the settlement at the end of the current park road. (Readers of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild will remember the Stampede Trail as the now tangled path that a young Chris McCandless brashly challenged before dying of starvation inside an abandoned school bus in 1992.)
At an estimated cost of $87 to $100 million, a new road would allow for a complete circuit—or “race track” as some critics fear—looping through the park’s glacial valleys and polychrome cliffs, as well as a closer point of entry for visitors coming south from Fairbanks. Chuck Kleeschulte in Senator Murkowski’s office says that this second route, along a flat and “not terribly sensitive” valley, would reduce traffic and its impact on wildlife along the original road. Biologists with the Park Service predict that such a road would instead disrupt the ranges of wolves, caribou, and grizzlies. Protecting the entire 3,900-square-mile range of Denali’s resident caribou herd, and the habitat of other species, has permitted biologists to study the park’s animals in as close to a pristine setting as is possible these days. Further development might eliminate this unique benchmark.
“Preserving an intact ecosystem is the greatest gift [ANILCA] had for us,” says Jane Tranel, information officer for Denali National Park. However, legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to amend ANILCA so that federal park managers must always select the cheapest and most direct rights-of-way to private in-holdings, regardless of potential environmental damage. One owner of a former mining claim within Denali hopes to build a new hotel near Wonder Lake, to be linked to the park road with a proposed access road through the biologically rich Moose Creek Valley corridor. Many Alaskans insist that ANILCA guaranteed such rights-of-way for local landowners, but the Park Service is hesitant.
“Alaskans feel that the original promises of the act have not been kept,” says Chuck Kleeschulte. However, interpreting ANILCA has never been without debate.
The original, two-million-acre Mount McKinley National Park was founded in 1917 as a refuge for Dall sheep, which were threatened by hunters venturing into Alaska’s interior primarily in search of gold. ANILCA expanded and renamed the park Denali, designating about 95 percent of the original “Old Park” as wilderness, but adding nearly four million acres in which sport hunting, helicoptering, snowmobiling, and other popular activities were guaranteed.
Since then, advances in snowmobile manufacture have allowed a growing number of riders to plow ever farther into backcountry wilderness. Park managers at Denali this year decided to close the original two-million-acre Old Park to snowmobiles, citing their potential disruption to caribou, denning bears, and vegetation.
However, the same legislation targeting rights-of-way would further mandate that the Park Service regulate recreational activities only after they have been shown to have negative environmental effects. The Alaska Snowmobile Association has also recently filed suit against the Park Service to overturn the snowmobile ban. Yet more than 90 percent of Alaskans agree that Denali’s Old Park should be off-limits, knowing that snowmobiles are allowed in the four million acres of the park added in 1980, as well as in most of the rest of the state .
“Denali is one of the few places where folks can experience natural quiet,” says Marcia Argust of the National Parks Conservation Association. Such serenity, after all, is what drew many Alaskans to their adopted home in the first place.
That, and the $2,000 each resident receives yearly from Prudhoe Bay crude.
Draw a vertical line across a map of Alaska, and you’re bound to cross at least one federal conservation unit. The only highway north to the Beaufort Sea coast follows the narrow corridor of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, which worms its way through three wildlife refuges and one national park on its course from Valdez to the petroleum fields of the North Slope. Here, at the top of the world, lies either Alaska’s eternal salvation or its ultimate insult, depending on whom you ask.
Petroleum provides more income to Alaska than any other industry. Derived originally from the $900 million the State of Alaska received in North Slope drilling rights, the Alaskan Permanent Fund safeguards citizens against the eventual day—now forecasted to arrive in 20 to 30 years—when Prudhoe Bay’s reserves finally dry up. Oil companies themselves must look elsewhere in preparation for that sad moment. Increasingly, they are peering east from Prudhoe Bay to the frozen tundra of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for solace.
The Arctic coastal plain of Alaska—known affectionately as “America’s Serengeti”—hosts a startling diversity of life during the warmer months when the ground thaws and, with moisture trapped by a solid layer of permafrost beginning just inches beneath the surface, the tundra sprouts a vibrant carpet of lichens and moss. Golden plovers from Hawaii, snow geese and tundra swans from the Lower 48, buff-breasted sandpipers from Africa, and Arctic terns from the opposite pole all migrate thousands of miles to nest here and feed off the dense clouds of mosquitoes breeding in the muskeg. Polar bears hunt for adult seals and their pups out on the pack ice but come ashore here in the summer to mate. Grizzlies forage across the tundra, digging up the occasional Arctic ground squirrel for a quick snack. Once extinguished in this part of the state, musk oxen have since been reintroduced to the coastal plain.
Yet the tundra’s fragile vegetative mat can be destroyed merely by the weight of human footsteps, not to mention the waffled tread of all-terrain vehicles or the scrape of bulldozers. Thermokarsting—the melting of permafrost near the surface—can occur if vehicles cross the tundra when snow cover is less than six inches deep.
This fact frightens conservationists, in light of continuing attempts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for petroleum extraction. Section 1002 of ANILCA set aside a 100-mile coastal stretch along the reserve’s western edge as a study site for possible oil exploration. With $2-a-gallon prices making motorists question America’s dependence on OPEC, pressure is mounting to test the so-called “ten-oh-two” area of the Arctic coastal plain for its petroleum potential.
In 1998, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there was a 95-percent chance the refuge held more than 11 billion barrels of oil, and a five-percent chance it held more than 31 billion barrels. Of this total, anywhere from six to 16 billion barrels could then be extracted profitably, based on the $12-a-barrel prices at that time. But if the price of crude continues to hover above $30-a-barrel, much more of the refuge’s potential reserves would be considered recoverable.
The environmental costs of such an endeavor are far more difficult to estimate. More than the birds and bears and bugs, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is famous for what Chuck Clusen of NRDC calls the “last great North American wildlife pageant”: the migration each spring of about 150,000 caribou from the Canada-Alaska border as much as 700 miles north and west to the refuge’s coastal plains. Named for its wintering grounds along the Porcupine River, the Porcupine herd—the largest migratory caribou herd in the world—calves along the ice fields of the Beaufort Sea throughout the summer, far from the predators and mosquitoes stalking the interior, but smack in the middle of area 1002.
In the southern part of the herd’s range, the Gwich’in Indian tribe hunts the tuttu, as they refer to the herd, for clothing, tools, weapons, and ritual objects. Believing that every caribou heart is part human and every human heart part caribou, the Gwich’in naturally oppose development of area 1002, putting them in conflict with the Kaktovik Inupiat Native Corporation, which owns subsurface rights inside 1002. A 1987 environmental impact statement concluded that drilling in area 1002 would create “widespread, long-term change in habitat availability or quality” for caribou and musk oxen, as well as more moderate effects on wolverine, polar bears, snow geese, and other species. The ruling delayed exploration inside the refuge, but the demand for oil is getting stronger.
“If the coastal plain gets developed, the birthing ground of that herd is going to be substantially industrialized,” warns Chuck Clusen. “It will look like Prudhoe Bay—a maze of pipelines and airstrips.” The Interior Department predicts a 40-percent drop in the Porcupine caribou population if oil exploration upsets the herd’s migratory patterns. Petroleum industry supporters counter that new advances in horizontal drilling techniques, which can access numerous wells from a single pad at the surface, would disrupt wildlife far less than earlier exploration at Prudhoe Bay.
Despite hundreds of minor spills and other damaging activities, which the Sierra Club claims have ruined 17,000 acres of habitat along the North Slope, Prudhoe Bay’s own resident Central Arctic caribou herd has increased from fewer than 6,000 animals to nearly 20,000 since drilling began there. Petroleum industry supporters maintain that the Porcupine herd would similarly flourish upon development of the Arctic refuge. Conservationists counter that drilling has driven off most of the caribou’s predators at Prudhoe Bay, explaining the proliferation of the herd there.
More than 70 percent of Americans support protection for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, perhaps chastened by the memory of March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, dumping 11 million gallons of toxic crude into Prince William Sound. Such a spill on the North Slope could endanger a glory of nature that belongs not just to Alaskans but to all Americans. Certainly, none of ANILCA’s framers intended that.
Fourth of July in Ketchikan, gateway to the Tongass. A flotilla of fire engines, marching bands, logging trucks, and politicians-in-pick-ups winds along Main Street, past clapboard homes, darkened saloons, and bait-and-tackle shops. It’s a rare day of sun in one of the rainiest towns on Earth. Flightseeing planes buzz overhead. Rusting vessels tie up dockside. A gargantuan cruise boat bleats its imminent departure. Overhead, a bald eagle circles and then dives, skimming the harbor’s silver surface with talons clenched before ascending to circle again. Optimism reigns at the height of summer. Yet how could a land so big suddenly feel so crowded?
“So many people here are intimately connected with the land,” says Tim Bristol of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. “Some [Alaskans] may bristle at a big legislative issue coming out of Washington, D.C., or the Lower 48, but if you break it down to someone’s backyard, the place they go to hunt or the place they go to fish or hike—the place near and dear to them—they have a much different attitude about cutting it down.”
Perhaps the Alaskan way of life will adapt. If not, it may go extinct.
—Alex Hawes is Associate Editor of ZooGoer.
ZooGoer 29(6) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
