Posted on 11/22/2003 6:57:49 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
ANCHORAGE – Southwestern Alaska's Bristol Bay, site of the world's biggest sockeye salmon runs, was long considered too valuable to risk to oil rigs. Like the California and Florida coasts, this part of Alaska has been under a national leasing moratorium to spare it from the threat of spilled crude.
But now, eight years after a federal move to buy back oil leases in the vast Bay, residents and state officials are doing what would have seemed unthinkable not long ago: inviting oil firms back.
The reversal reflects the fallen fortunes of Alaska's once-powerful salmon industry, and the economic challenges facing rural Alaska.
"The fishing industry is failing so badly.... We've got to do something else," said Nels Anderson, a former state lawmaker and native leader spearheading the push for energy development. "We just can't afford to live out here."
Despite Bristol Bay's salmon bounty, commercial fishers have been hit by the rise of cheap farmed salmon. Last year's Bristol Bay commercial salmon catch was worth only $29.8 million, less than a quarter the 20-year average. And there are few moneymaking alternatives for residents, largely Yupik Eskimos, Athabaskan Indians, and Aleuts. The economic problem affects other fishing-dependent areas of Alaska as well.
So, as local energy costs soar - fuel is so expensive that fishermen say they can't even afford to make ice to chill their salmon - the once-rejected oil and gas industry is being wooed as a potential paycheck savior.
The pro-drilling mood is a dramatic turnabout for Bristol Bay. Back when President Reagan's Interior Department first began planning oil and gas leasing in the region, the state of Alaska sued to block exploration. A sale went ahead in 1988, drawing $96 million in bids.
Eight years ago, the buyback of those leases by the Clinton Interior Department was a celebrated move in the region. But today, Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski (R) is touting the region as Alaska's new energy frontier, saying its "prospects are as bright here as anywhere in the state relative to oil and gas."
At Mr. Murkowski's direction, the state Division of Oil and Gas is offering exploration licenses for state and native lands and coastal areas in the region, to allow companies to explore a frontier area for a nominal fee and an investment commitment. A conventional state lease sale is also planned near the end of 2005 - not seen in the region since 1984.
To further spur oil and gas development, Murkowski wants the state to build a new 182-mile gravel road through the sparsely populated Alaska Peninsula. He says the road's $285 million cost can be covered by lease revenues. But the revenue estimate is higher than the average Alaska oil lease-sale standard.
Onshore first, offshore later
For now, proposed development is limited to onshore drilling, including possible extended-reach drilling to target some offshore areas. But the governor and many Bristol Bay residents, including several native organizations, are pushing for full-scale offshore drilling. That is more controversial, because biologists say currents can sweep spilled oil around the entire bay, - an international crossroads for whales, birds, and other sea life.
Harvey Samuelson, a native leader heading the charge for local energy development, says those who are leery about offshore drilling have not been educated about modern energy technology. "We can go to the moon and back. We can do this," he said.
Samuelson has an ally in US Sen. Ted Stevens (R). Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has drafted a budget bill that effectively removes a congressional ban on oil leasing there.
How valuable to industry?
It is unclear whether the industry still sees Bristol Bay as attractive.
Judy Brady, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, said the region has long been seen as rich in potential. "Some geologists that I know from past experience drool when you talk about Bristol Bay," she says.
But estimates from the US Minerals Management Service, the agency in charge of offshore drilling in federal waters, describe the area as rich more in gas than oil. The North Aleutian Basin, as the federal agency calls the offshore area there, could hold 230 million to 570 million barrels of recoverable oil, versus 7 trillion to 17 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to geologists' estimates from 1995.
Commercialization of natural gas in Alaska has long been hampered by remoteness from major markets.
President Bush might consider lifting the presidential moratorium on Bristol Bay, but only if Congress removes its leasing ban and there is clear support from Alaskans, including the affected native people, said Johnnie Burton, director of the Mineral Management Service, during a recent Anchorage visit. "It's not going to be initiated in Washington," she said. "It has to be initiated in Alaska."
Not everyone in the region favors energy development. Tom Tilden, a local native leader and former Dillingham mayor, confessed to "mixed feelings" at the recent meeting between Murkowski and native organizations. "That is our backyard.... There are some worries."
Environmentalists strongly oppose development. Onshore development, they say, could affect a collection of neighboring parks and wildlife refuges. A key concern is that aggressive roadbuilding could degrade salmon-spawning areas and other habitat.
As for offshore drilling, all the past concerns remain valid, said Dorothy Childers of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council. "We just don't think the oil industry is prepared any better now than they were 10 years ago to respond to an oil spill."
Geologists believe the 22.5 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska may contain 6 billion to 13 billion barrels of oil. Henri Bisson, the Alaska director for the department's Bureau of Land Management, in a statement obtained Thursday by the Associated Press, said he expects a lease sale by the bureau in June. Environmentalists said the plan would jeopardize habitats that provide sanctuary for wildlife but were set aside in the 1920s for energy development.***
Why some greens favor energy bill***But while environmentalists steam, the surprise is that some renewable energy trade groups are actually excited over the money the bill is likely to send their way. Indeed, the bill threatens to drive a wedge between green power and environmental activists.***
ANWR Two tribes split on Alaskan oil plan*** ''This is a matter of survival for our people,'' said Sweeney, a 28-year-old Inupiat who follows in her mother's footsteps in lobbying on the issue. ''We're human and we're willing to work for the luxuries that people take for granted.'' Those luxuries are running water, flush toilets, heat. Inupiat communities stretch along all of Alaska's northern coast, but the Kactovik area still struggles to enter the modern age.
Sweeney described the subsistence living for the Inupiat of Kactovik in an area ''with no agriculture, no commercial fishing, no trees, and no tourism.'' But thanks to the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, they do have a stake in the oil that is pulled from the ground, a stake that over the years has provided billions of dollars in gross revenues to Inupiat people throughout Alaska.
''The only thing that brought our people out of Third World living conditions was the Prudhoe Bay development,'' she said, refering to the spread of oil development roughly 65 miles west along the arctic slope. The Prudhoe Bay fields will run out, and many Inupiat fear that the dollars that have started to modernize their communities will dry up as well.
The Gwich'in have the opposite fear. Like the Inupiat, they have for centuries earned a subsistence existence off the land. The Gwich'in's principal food source is the porcupine caribou that migrates through the region, calving during the summers in the disputed section of the refuge.
''It provides us with everything we need,'' said Faith Gemmill, a Gwich'in speaking by telephone from Arctic Village. ''It's 80 percent of our diet, we make clothes from the hide, we make tools from the bones, and we have spiritual dances and songs that tell of our relationship to the caribou.'' ***
The perils of designer tribalism***In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published Le sanglot de l’homme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.
It was an unfortunate, and undeserved, fate. Bruckner’s book is a vigorous indictment of “Third Worldism”—the odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for “the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.”)
The very power of Bruckner’s indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) “Solidarity with oppressed peoples,” Bruckner wrote,
is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism.
Clearly, Bruckner’s message is as pertinent today as it was in the 1980s—more so, perhaps, since the attitudes it chronicles, if often less histrionic, are today more thoroughly institutionalized, more thoroughly absorbed into established opinion.
It is worth pointing out that, unlike many Third Worldists, Bruckner had firsthand knowledge of the problems about which he wrote. Having worked as a member of the International Action Against Hunger, he animated compassion with deeds. If this tempered his romanticism, it also sharpened his vision. Bruckner did not march arm-in-arm with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was not a beneficiary of UNESCO’s extortionist escapades. He did not rail against Western oppression. He did not curse the evils of colonialism. On the contrary, he understood that the West’s real crime was not pursuing but rather abandoning its responsibilities as a colonial power.
Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckner’s sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. “An overblown conscience,” he points out, “is an empty conscience.”
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our “soft pity,” as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong. ***
The march of progress, if that is what it is, is not without some very large bumps. People living in the slums have a very different view of things than those on the hill. Those who lose their jobs to globalization think far less of it than those who profit.
On balance, are we better off than our ancestors, than current-day primitives? Most would think so - including the primitives (which is Bruckner's point). But this judgement is far less certain during major depression or at the end of major wars - which occur with disturbing frequency.
If we say that we give up a moral postion which is known in the body of people, then we say that we create a new morality. this as I said has been going on in the various churchs for 400 years and was the struggle of greeks and romans.
Bruckner's ideas that the pervese morality of keeping people in a cage depriving them of what others have is a crime or a sin depending on your point of view.
to me, the arguement that working people are not interested in progress has been disproven by the results of companies like Harley DAvidson and Springfield Remanufacturing where they have given the worker the right to make change and to share in the progress and profits of the company. good management of ideas as designed by Demming still allow the worker to grow and for a change in society. this is the revolution that still ahs not taken hold in either the west or any other part of the world. even the japanese still have a caste system that will not go away.
You have never lived as a primitive have you? I have. I would prefer London during the Blitz or the US during the Depression.
I listen to people who have never done it babble nonsense like this and I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up.
They lived in the old way, in crude stone houses with packed earth floors and thatched roofs, making their own clothes, tending to their crops and animals.
They were gradually being forced off their lands as foreigners - mostly Americans - sought it for development. The evictees moved to the cities, adopted Western ways and clothes, and worked at what they could find.
Universally, so far as I could tell, they preferred the old ways and resented modernization.
That's why there was a revolution.
But the process of obtaining those things is never without cost or even-handed. New knowledge often conflicts with inherited wisdom. Development for one group often brings poverty for another.
In my reply to another poster I cited a Guatemalan example. Here's another. From 1880 to 1920 all of Malibu, Califoria, more than 13,000 acres, was a single ranch belonging to the Rindge family. They were forced off it by advancing population. They sure didn't think that was "progress".
It's accepted wisdom that the Luddites were short-sighted and mistaken - but that judgement may, itself, be short-sighted and mistaken.
Actually they likely would have preferred a mix. But they wouldn't have told you that. As an outsider you would have been told whatever they thought you wanted to hear. It is the way things are.
Change that comes too fast brings problems. But with the exception of a few die-hard back to nature types most people prefer clean water, clean food, modern medicine and electricity to cholera, food poisoning, and death from lockjaw. None of this is possible without modernization.
Yeah, but their kids prefer going to McDonalds & hanging out at the mall.
Did I say that? I don't think so. I certainly didn't mean to.
I do not agree that a dying culture should always take precedence over the active culture’s improvement
Here again, I don't think I ever said it should. I was only pointing out that one man's meat is another man's poison.
How can we draw a line?
I have no real idea. I think we should limit development, preserve some of the natural world, and some alternates to modern, industrial culture. But I'm not sure it's possible. I think without endless growth and expansion, modern culture might collapse.
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