Frigid Embrace: Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska

193 Pages·2002·1.34 MB·English

by  Stephen W. Haycox

politics, economics and environment in alaska
stephen haycox
Frigid Embrace
Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska
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Other titles in the
Culture and Environment in the Pacific West Series
Series Editor: William L. Lang
Empty Nets: Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River by Roberta Ulrich
The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity edited by
William G. Robbins
Planning a New West: The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area
by Carl Abbott, Sy Adler, and Margery Post Abbott
The Tillamook: A Created Forest Comes of Age by Gail Wells
Frigid Embrace
Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska
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Stephen Haycox
Oregon State University Press
Corvallis
For Dagmar,
with enduring gratitude
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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources and the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haycox, Stephen W.
Politics, economics, and the environment in Alaska / by Stephen
Haycox.— 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Culture and environment in the Pacific West)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-87071-536-4 (alk. paper)
1. Alaska—Civilization. 2. Alaska—Environmental conditions. 3.
Alaska—Economic conditions. 4. Human ecology—Alaska—History. 5.
Nature—Effect of human beings on—Alaska. 6. Frontier and pioneer
life—Alaska. 7. Pioneers—Alaska—Attitudes—History. 8. Indians of
North America—Alaska—History. I. Title. II. Series.
F904 .H26 2002
979.8—dc21
2001005633
© 2002 Stephen Haycox
All rights reserved. First edition 2002
Printed in the United States of America
Oregon State University Press
101 Waldo Hall
Corvallis OR 97331-6407
541-737-3166 • fax [phone]
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press
Series Editor’s Preface
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Alaska may be the epitome of the myth of American exceptionalism. It is at
once an extreme representation of the idea that America is beyond
comparison, and literally an exceptional place of natural and cultural extremes.
Alaskan tourist promotions trumpet the idea, and the state has a long and
powerful history that appears to justify the image. From the time William
Henry Seward pushed through its purchase from Russia in 1867, Alaska has
offered residents of the “lower 48” a destination and a reference point for
wilderness, frontier, and isolation. In ways entrancing and surprising, the
idea of Alaska has combined elements of an extreme environment and a
spartan culture. Alaska was America’s last landed frontier, a kind of hyperbolic
extension of all the nation’s previous frontiers, even as it replicated similar
enthusiasms about earlier boomer destinations. It was a place of rushes and
excitements: pelagic furs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; gold
in the early twentieth; fish, timber, and finally oil in the late twentieth. In
each episode, Alaska has been portrayed as a cultural extremity, a place far
removed but rich for the daring and resourceful.
From the beginning, culture and the environment combined to create a
myth about Alaska that hyped the larger American myth. There is no denying
the powerful pull Alaska’s exotic image had on the immigrants to that far-
north land. But how the new settlers understood their relationships with
the monumental Alaskan environment and how they created their lives are
different questions. In Frigid Embrace, Stephen Haycox focuses on how Alaskan
settlers lived out their dreams. He calls his book a “historical commentary,”
because it is only through the lens of history that we can understand the
larger pattern of relationships between environment and culture that
dominate Alaskan society. Haycox asks a central question: how have Alaskan
settlers’ ideas about their environment affected and directed their approaches
to indigenous people and the region’s natural resource wealth? The answer
is complex. As Haycox points out, migrants to Alaska have embraced the
idea of wilderness, but they have resisted becoming wilderness residents.
Alaskans saw nature as economic opportunity and they have defended their
perceived right to open, unfettered access to ores, fisheries, forests, furs, and
more, even if the chief agents of development lived far removed from Alaska.
Haycox argues that Alaskans have a colonial mindset that puts them at
the mercy of both outside political and economic forces, while they often
act themselves like transients. The result is a culture that exploits its nature,
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while it rhetorically embraces the beatitudes of wilderness. It is, as Haycox
explains, an oppositional culture, one that looks at society as a set of binary
relationships: Native and non-Native; environmentalist and developer; insider
and outsider.
Alaskans are not the only westerners to exhibit these tendencies. Earlier
boomer societies have perceived themselves and the world in similar ways,
but Alaska is distinct because of its size and importance to the nation. It
contains most of the nation’s designated wilderness, the greatest expanse of
roadless areas, the largest national forest, the most extensive region of snow,
mountains, and ice, the largest known oil reserves, and a physical isolation
that ranks second only to Hawaii. Alaska is what the tourist brochures
proclaim: a place of wilderness dreams and experiences. America projects its
historic conflict with wilderness on Alaska, leaving the resolution in Alaska’s
hands.
What Haycox has described and explained is the nation’s last effort at
denying its heritage of using and abusing the environment in the name of
culture. It is a sobering story. Frigid Embrace documents and comments on
one of the quintessential encounters between culture and environment in
the American West. The myth of the West, Haycox concludes, prospers in
Alaska perhaps as in no other place. This book reminds us that how people
understand their environment—what values they place on nature—and how
they imagine living in their environment—what values they place on
community—defines much more than settling up a frontier area and building
an economy. How we work out the relationships between culture and
environment determines a dominant percentage of our lives in the Pacific
West.
William L. Lang
Contents
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Preface.....................................................................................ix
Introduction: Alaska History and Opposition .............................1
Chapter 1: A Good American Town.........................................19
Chapter 2: Pioneer Alaskans, Their Environment,
and Alaska Natives...............................................................36
Chapter 3: At Any Cost: Pioneer Alaska and Economic
Development.......................................................................59
Chapter 4: Bonanza: Prudhoe Bay and ANCSA .......................83
Chapter 5: “Big Oil” ANCSA, and the Transformation..........100
Chapter 6: Debacle: The Exxon Valdez, The Tongass Forest,
and the ELF ......................................................................134
Chapter 7: Dividend Alaska....................................................149
Note on Sources ...................................................................175
Index ....................................................................................177
Map of Alaska. (Courtesy Alaska Geographic Society)
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Preface
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Frigid Embrace is a historical commentary on the character of human culture
in Alaska and how it has affected the natural environment there.
Environmental historians have argued that a place shapes the people who
live in it, and that the people shape the place where they are living. Most
writers employing this concept focus on the geographical or biological
environment. But the ideas a society has about the appropriate relationship
between its members and the environment they live in, and depend on,
become themselves a cultural shaping force. My study of Alaska history has
persuaded me that while most Alaska residents have impressed their notion
of what Alaska should be on the landscape they inhabit, they have been
much less shaped themselves by that same landscape, much less than might
be expected of a people who have migrated to America’s last wilderness.
While they have professed love for that wilderness and its arresting awe,
beneath the surface of their perceptions they have remained immune from
its power and majesty. They have been insensitive to their impact on nature
and landscape, regarding the land as infinitely renewable and its resources as
inexhaustible, and theirs to appropriate for their own uses.
Their activities seem to suggest that most non-Native Alaskans who
migrated to Alaska did so with one primary thought in mind: to acquire
wealth that could be transferred to more ostensibly hospitable climes. Alaska
has always had a very high non-Native transiency rate and this is one of the
indications of its colonial character. Considering themselves non-permanent
residents, non-Native Alaskans generally have been much more concerned
to extract wealth through commodification of the environment than to
construct an identity that reflects the environment. While accumulating
wealth, or trying to, most non-Natives helped to establish or lived in towns,
and now cities; for the most part they have not inhabited the wilderness. In
the towns they built, they set out to replicate the material, institutional, and
ideological culture they left behind, much like the settlers of the earlier
American West. Most Alaskans have been willing to stay in the territory
only if they could enjoy the amenities and comforts of modern American
culture. They did not go to the frontier to live a subsistence lifestyle in the
wilderness. They went there for the money.
Most Alaskans have seen Alaska as the frontier. The idea of frontier depends
on its opposite: development. If the wilderness is not developed, it’s still
wilderness—a denial of the purpose of frontier settlement. The conclusion
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