Postcard from Alaska: There's trouble in paradise
By Molly Ivins, July 27, 2003

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Many and varied are the wonders, the splendors and the peculiarities of the Other Great State. The funniest thing said by Alaskans is, "Gonna be another scorcher" (means "could get into the 70s").

In Alaska, God is called Ted Stevens. The senior senator and chairman of the Appropriations Committee is worth an estimated $3 billion a year to the state. One of the oddest things about Alaska is the complete disconnect between its politics and its reality. Alaska is an implacably conservative state, albeit with a lovely libertarian lilt. Consequently, the right-wing radio talk-show hosts bash government unmercifully, and Alaskans wander around under the impression that they are all rugged individualists who can take care of themselves and don't need no goldern govamint. That the state is painfully dependent on government is clear only to those who think.

The state is also dependent on salmon, and therein lies some bad news. The salmon market is in a disastrous state, in large part because of salmon-farming in Canada and South America. Do yourself and Alaska a favor, and insist on buying only wild Alaska salmon. It is sooooo much better than those pale, flabby, chemical-laden farm fishies.

Unfortunately, salmon are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature variations. Global warming, as the scientists predicted, is affecting Alaska first and worst. Alaska has warmed by 5.4 degrees in three decades, and by 8 degrees in winter. This has drastically affected every part of Alaska. The ecologists and conservationists are desperately worried. The sea is rising, the salmon runs are getting earlier, and in the permafrost, the oceans and the geology, the changes are unambiguous and demonstrable. The polar bear is an unlikely canary in the mines, but the largest land predators on Earth are becoming dangerously skinny and have to be killed because they keep moving south.

The temperature variations may sound minor and even welcome in a state that can still haul off and get 80-below on any given winter day, but there is only one degree of difference between freezing and melting. How much a plant reflects and absorbs the sun, the reflection off snow cover, the growth of parasites in herring, a 10-degree warming in the Yukon River - all of this has a combined impact that is incalculable. The trees are getting new diseases, king/Chinook salmon are dying off in the Yukon. And the state is still full of people who think global warming is a commie plot or there is no global warming, or if there is, it will just improve the climate. Classic case of denial.

Seventeen percent of Alaskans are native people, who have lived in this difficult and delicate environment for thousands of years. Subsistence, or subsistence slightly mixed with the money economy, is still the most common way of life in rural Alaska. Even the berries picked by native women, a critical source of vitamin C, are becoming scarcer. The response of Alaska's Republican right is to slash and burn, subsidize mining and give tax breaks to oil and gas companies for exploration. Cronyism and favors for special interest groups have become the hallmarks of state government. Gov. Frank H. Murkowski even appointed his own daughter to the U.S. Senate.

Any summer visitor to Alaska would assume that tourism must be a gold mine for the state. Great shoals of tourists wander about like musk ox, spending money on everything from moose-kitsch to superb hotels. Unfortunately, the industry is vertically integrated and owned by out-of-state cruise lines. The cruise companies bring the tourists, bus them hither and yon, put them up at their own hotels and take them on their own packaged tours, and most Alaskans never see a penny of the money.

In many ways, Alaska is a classic colony, exploited for its natural resources by huge corporations from the Lower 48. Forty percent of the world's remaining temperate rain forest is in southeast Alaska - and only 0.02 percent of the Earth's surface is temperate rain forest. Alaska Republicans seem determined to cut it all down as rapidly as possible - 70 percent of the old growth has already been not just cut but clear-cut. It makes no economic sense; the timber market is so depressed they're losing money on every tree they cut. They get $1.75 a tree for 150-year-old timber, according to conservationists around the state.

It is so easy to fall in love with this glorious place, and most of the people are as enchanting as the wildlife - friendly, hospitable, helpful, tough and resilient.

The struggle in Alaska is ultimately between the short-timers and the long-termers, both in terms of length of residence and of foresight. The military and the oil and gas industry account for most of the population growth, and are both notoriously conservative and transient. You get some dentist from Anchorage who wants to fly out to the bush and shoot a moose for his living-room wall and doesn't care whether the native subsistence culture is affected or not. Alaska still has the mentality that everyone should have a right to do pretty much whatever he or she wants, regardless of the fragility of the ecology. Such a beautiful, magical place deserves much, much better.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION:
We believe that harmful pollution is promoted by the following causes: the existence of public property, the incomplete application of private property rights, and the failure to defend private property rights under the law. Because private property owners have the greatest incentive to defend what is theirs, and because Libertarians believe in the strict accountability of individuals for their actions.

...And if Exxon owned vast acres of Alaska wilderness and didn't care about accidental oil spills from their wells, no one could make them clean it up if the pollution only ruined "their" land.

That's called LIBERTY!!!

>Seventeen percent of Alaskans are native people, who have lived in this difficult and delicate environment for thousands of years.

They're so old, they've got hieroglyphics on their drivers licenses

>Seventeen percent of Alaskans are native people, who have lived in this difficult and delicate environment for thousands of years.

They're so old, they've got hieroglyphics on their drivers licenses

they think Bob Hope was funny.

ml, leave the comedy to those who know how. Just stick to hating everything. It's more your style.

That's my specialty!!! Here's some of my quotes:

"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

"I know how hard it is to put food on your family."

Signing other people's handles to racist postings ridiculing Eskimos - none of whom you have, in all probability, met. Really funny. Ha ha ha ha ha. The boys down at the sports bar will really love that one when you tell them.

"racist postings ridiculing Eskimos"

You wanna point out one post ridiculing Eskimos, cause I'm not seeing any.

In case you haven't heard, native peoples in Alaska are often referred to as Eskimos. You know, the ones who supposedly have hieroglyphics on their drivers' licences. Actually, if any of them refuse to get drivers' licences or own automobiles that might be a sign of high civilization worthy of emulation here.

>Seventeen percent of Alaskans are native people, who have lived in this difficult and delicate environment for thousands of years.

They're so old, they've got hieroglyphics on their drivers licenses

---------------------------

That's not a racist statement. It's a joke made about Molly's bad sentence structure. She should have written:

"Seventeen percent of Alaskans are natives, the descendants of a people which have lived in this difficult and delicate environment for thousands of years."

Instead, she wrote it like 17% of the native Alaskians had been living there for thousands of years. Someone's just goofing on her having written the sentence badly.

Go back to being angry. Like hating cars. It suits you better.

She clearly meant it in the sense that people would say that Muslims have lived in northern India since the early Middle Ages or that the population of lowland Scotland has spoken English as its native language since the HIgh Middle Ages. These statements are correct and not gramatical errors; no one but a fool would believe that the author was stating that the same individuals have been living there for a thousand years.
I am still suspicious of your intentions, and I don't think that you would have made a statement like that to a group of Native Alaskans, because you would realize that at least some of them would take it as an insult.