ENVIRONMENT, Page 56COVER STORIES: The Two AlaskasOne is wild, one is industrial, and they existed in harmonyuntil the oil spill set off a raging debate over the future ofthe largest stateBy Michael D. Lemonick
The state's name comes from an Aleutian word that means "great
land." And no one who has ever seen Alaska's panoramic peaks, its
rushing rivers and teeming wildlife would argue with that
description. Alaska is great in beauty, in majesty and in sheer
size. If laid atop the lower 48 states, it would stretch from
Florida to California. The territory that was once called Seward's
Folly is rich almost beyond comprehension in oil, coal, timber and
fish. Alaska is truly America's last frontier, a place of wonder
that is virtually unspoiled and a priceless treasure that is
largely unspent.
But there is another Alaska -- a land of mining towns and
tourist boats, of developers and exploiters. Gradually, but
inexorably, oil rigs encroached upon the wilderness, and a huge
pipeline now snakes its way across the icy expanses where caribou
roam. Loggers have cut ever deeper into the lush forests, and
fishermen have cast ever wider nets off the winding shores. From
Prudhoe Bay in the north to Anchorage in the south, swarms of
settlers have tapped the state's wealth as fast as they could.
For a long time, most Alaskans were not disturbed by any of
this. They assumed that the two Alaskas -- one wild and the other
industrial -- could exist in harmony. Surely the logging companies
would not be able to make a noticeable dent in the state's vast
forests. Surely the bears and wolves and snow geese would not be
bothered by a few oil rigs.
But that assumption has been shattered, perhaps irreparably,
by the 10 million gal. of oil that have poured from the Exxon
Valdez since it went off course and ran aground in Prince William
Sound in late March. By last week the thick, tarry crude had spread
into a slick that covered 1,600 sq. mi. of water, fouling 800 miles
of shoreline in one of the world's richest wildlife areas. In the
wake of the largest oil spill in U.S. history, Alaskans are in
shock. Said Dennis Kelso, the state's environment commissioner:
"People are going to have strong feelings about this for a long
time. Every time people here go to a favorite fishing hole, they
will think of the spill and they will be angry."
Even as cleanup crews struggled to contain the damage, the
incident was igniting a debate on the future of Alaska,
intensifying a longtime battle between developers and
preservationists. In Washington EPA Administrator William Reilly
called for a re-evaluation of oil exploration proposals pending for
the state. And in Alaska itself, a tradition of favoring
development is suddenly in doubt.
Legislators and regulators are asking tough questions: Should
oil exploration in Alaska be drastically curtailed, or even
stopped? Should larger areas of the state be put under federal
protection from development? If the U.S. holds back the pumping of
Alaskan oil, how will the country satisfy its hunger for energy?
Until the Exxon Valdez hit a reef, these questions did not seem
quite so urgent. But like the accident at a once obscure
nuclear-power plant known as Three Mile Island, this single
disaster could be the turning point for an entire industry. Says
Alaska Governor Steve Cowper: "There's going to be a permanent
change in the political chemistry of Alaska as a result of this
tragedy. Most Alaskans are going to reassess their attitude toward
oil and development in this state."
For Exxon, meanwhile, the nightmare keeps getting worse. After
responding late and ineffectively to an accident that it could have
prevented, the company finally refloated the crippled tanker last
week, towing it about 25 miles to nearby Naked Island for temporary
repairs. But Exxon had trouble finding a dry dock that would accept
the vessel. Cowper, who had cited the company's bungled attempts
to manage the cleanup and called on the Coast Guard to take over,
gave qualified approval to a belated offer of aid from the Bush
Administration. The President remained opposed to the Government's
directing the cleanup, but said he would provide personnel and
equipment to help out.
In hearings held by the Senate Commerce, Science and
Transportation Committee, Exxon Chairman L.G. Rawl faced a
merciless grilling. Rawl said once again that the company is taking
full responsibility for the spill and will pay cleanup costs, but
the Senators were not satisfied. Slade Gorton, a Republican from
Washington, pointed out to Rawl that when Japanese companies cause
serious accidents, their executives often resign in remorse. "I
suggest that the disaster your company caused calls for that sort
of response," said Gorton. Replied Rawl: "A lot of Japanese kill
themselves also, and I refuse to do that."
Much of the outrage continued to focus on Exxon's reliance on
Joseph Hazelwood, the Exxon Valdez skipper, who was apparently
drunk while on duty. The company announced last week that tanker
crews will now have to be on board at least four hours before
leaving port -- a regulation Exxon Shipping President Frank Iarossi
admits is designed to provide sobering-up time. But Hazelwood had
an unacceptably high blood-alcohol level nine hours after the
incident, and so would have been impaired even under the new rules.
Moreover, despite Hazelwood's several arrests for drunken driving
and treatment in 1985 for alcohol abuse, Exxon failed to supervise
the skipper adequately and allowed him to keep piloting.
Hazelwood, who fled Alaska soon after the accident to avoid
arrest on drunken-piloting charges, finally turned himself in last
week near his home on Long Island. He was initially held on $1
million bail, a figure 40 times higher than prosecutors had
recommended. But it was reduced to $25,000 on appeal, and Hazelwood
was released. The FBI is looking into whether he can be charged
with criminal violations of the federal Clean Water Act. According
to a report in the Anchorage Times last week, Hazelwood may have
done more than just hand the ship over to an uncertified third
mate, a serious enough lapse in itself. To change sea-lanes, he had
set the ship on a course that pointed it toward treacherous Bligh
Reef, the Times reported, then allegedly left it on autopilot
without telling anyone. Thus, when the third mate realized he was
headed for disaster and tried to steer the ship, he could not.
The oil from the wreck, some of it with a consistency like that
of hot fudge, continued to spread across Prince William Sound,
causing damage that may not be fully measured for years. The
initial body count is bad enough. At least 82 sea otters have been
brought to a makeshift field hospital in Valdez. They were nearly
frozen because a coat of oil had destroyed the insulating ability
of their fur; 42 have died. Animals dead on arrival steadily filled
up a white refrigerated truck trailer parked nearby. A black-tailed
Sitka deer carcass stuck out of a 32-gal. garbage can, and dozens
of otters lay in a pile, covered with plastic. Uncounted other
victims will never be retrieved. A preliminary beach survey
indicated an average of 80 oil-coated ducks and other kinds of
birds per 100 meters. Bald eagles have been scavenging the
contaminated birds, and the sound's population of 3,000 eagles may
therefore be at risk.
It is not just the gluelike quality of the oil that poses a
danger. The crude contains substances that are either poisonous or
carcinogenic. The danger from contaminated fish prompted state
officials to announce that this year's herring season, expected to
bring fishermen $12 million in revenues, would be canceled. Salmon
fisheries are also in danger: within the next few weeks, hundreds
of millions of salmon fry were scheduled to be released from
hatcheries located in protected bays ringing Prince William Sound.
So far, salmon fishermen, using their own boats to deploy
containment booms, have kept the slick from spreading to the
hatcheries. If this tactic should fail, Exxon has promised to move
the tiny fish to safe hatcheries elsewhere along the coast. But
cancellation of the salmon season is still a possibility.
In the longer term, no one is sure what will happen to the
area's wildlife. Besides the fish, mollusks and marine
microorganisms that inhabit the water, the sound is home to some
10,000 sea otters and, in winter, to 100,000 birds. Later this
month, an estimated 1 million more birds will show up at the end
of their springtime migration. In addition, there are deer, which
graze on kelp deposited along the beaches, and brown bears, just
now coming out of hibernation and ready to scavenge on the shore.
How many will die depends in part on whether winds and storms blow
the bulk of the spill onto the shore or keep the oil afloat until
it can disperse.
David Kennedy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's scientific-support coordinator, predicts a fairly
temporary setback. He expects a 25% reduction in the amount of
zooplankton, a fundamental link in the food chain of the sea. That
could hurt many varieties of fish. But Kennedy foresees relatively
little damage to larger marine mammals, such as seals, dolphins and
killer whales. If weather conditions stay favorable, most smaller
animals may escape serious harm as well.
There are no guarantees, however, and Alaskans are thinking of
little besides the spill. Airline pilots are banking their planes
to give passengers a view of the faint shadow of stain spreading
over the sound. Flags in nearby fishing villages are flying at
half-staff. And some fishermen are wearing black armbands and
crying openly, an unusual display of emotion for men who pride
themselves on their toughness and independence. Laments Cliff
Davidson, a longshoreman and member of the state legislature: "It's
all like a wake now. How many more things are going to die? How
many more livelihoods?"
Davidson considers himself an environmentalist, and in recent
years -- especially in the past three weeks -- he has had plenty
of company. But for most of its history, Alaska has not been
dominated by the conservation ethic. Almost from its discovery in
1741 by Vitus Bering, Alaska was seen as a land to be exploited for
all it was worth. At first the lure was furs, and then whaling,
timber and fishing. When the U.S. bought the territory from Russia
in 1867 for $7 million, little changed. The gold rushes of the late
1800s brought hordes of prospectors, beginning a boom-and-bust
cycle that continues to this day. Says Celia Hunter, a lodge keeper
who came to the territory 42 years ago: "Alaskans have always
looked for the big bang that would solve all their problems." Some
development schemes were downright absurd. In the late 1950s,
Hunter helped quash a proposal to use atom bombs to blast an
artificial harbor out of the northern coast. "The argument even
then was jobs, jobs, jobs," she says.
The biggest boom of all began in 1968, when enormous quantities
of oil were discovered at Prudhoe Bay. In 1969 the state held an
auction for oil-drilling leases and suddenly found itself $900
million richer. Almost overnight, tens of thousands of Americans
followed the advice in the chorus of the Johnny Horton pop tune,
"North to Alaska! Go north -- the rush is on!" The state began to
fill with drilling crews, geologists and oil-company executives.
The barren North Slope, where only a few Inupiat, or Eskimos, had
lived, now bristled with hard-hatted workers who were hardy enough
to endure temperatures that could fall as low as -80 degrees F.
The long history of invasions has transformed the population.
In 1880 there were only about 33,500 people in Alaska, 99% of them
natives. But by 1959, when the territory became a state, the
population had increased nearly sevenfold, and the typical Alaskan
was no longer an Indian fisherman or an Inupiat hunter but a white
storekeeper, bush pilot or construction worker. Today nonnatives
account for 84% of the state's 530,000 people.
For the vast majority of the immigrants, the whole point of
coming to Alaska was to profit from the land. Red Swanson, who
arrived in 1945, is a good example. For more than 40 years he has
bulldozed Alaska, pumped oil out of it, cut down its trees and
paved it with asphalt. Says Swanson: "The environmentalists have
stopped Alaska from being great. They say hundreds of birds have
been killed by this oil spill. But we have millions of birds. These
things happen."
A decade or two ago, Swanson would have been considered
moderate in his criticism of environmentalists. Geologist Bill
Glude, head of the Alaska environmental lobby, recalls that when
he worked in the 1970s in bush towns, he had to hide his enthusiasm
for national parks to avoid being beaten up. Those who favored
protection of the land were accused of wanting to lock up valuable
resources. A 1980 federal law made the pro-development forces even
angrier: the U.S. Government designated 104 million acres of the
land it owned in the state -- a total area bigger than California
-- as parks, refuges and wilderness areas.
It is no mystery why preservation is unpopular. In recent years
oil money has come to rule the state. Income from oil leases,
oil-rig construction and oil taxes has given Alaskans an appetite
for more and more cash. Oil money has helped build schools, roads
and other public-works projects. It made personal taxes unnecessary
and enabled the government to pay each resident a yearly oil
dividend (in 1988 the figure was $826.93 a person). Even today,
after the oil-price collapse of the mid-1980s, the state gets 85%
of its revenues from the petroleum industry.
Native Alaskans have not been immune to oil fever. While some
tribes feared that development would ruin their traditional
life-styles, others gladly went along with the coming of the
drillers. Reason: the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act,
which gave descendants of the territory's original inhabitants
nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres of land in return for
renouncing all future claims. Twelve regional native corporations
were set up at the time, and they began to exploit the land
themselves.
Despite the avalanche of oil money, Alaska's environmental
movement has gradually gained strength. Its first major cause was
the effort to stop construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline. That
fight was eventually lost, but the oil companies were forced to
make extensive concessions to minimize the impact on the land and
its animals.
Now, the Exxon Valdez spill, whether or not it causes permanent
damage, could tip the balance of power more toward the
environmentalists. Last week the state senate's oil and gas
committee voted to ask Congress to halt the sale of federal oil
leases in Bristol Bay, near the Aleutian Islands. "The spill is
making all the difference," said Alaska's senate president, Tim
Kelly, a self-described pro-development Republican. Kelly and other
politicians are not just angry at Exxon but also at themselves for
believing the oil industry's assurances that spills could be
readily handled. "We all wanted to protect the mystique of Alaska
and the wilderness," he laments. "We feel we have let Alaska down.
We feel betrayed."
The next major battleground will be the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Oil companies suspect that this 19
million-acre preserve, lying between the Brooks Range and the
Beaufort Sea on the North Slope, just east of Prudhoe Bay, may
contain some 9 billion bbl. of oil, and they are eager to drill
there. President Bush and the U.S. Interior Department favor
opening up the area to exploration and development. Unlike Bristol
Bay, where powerful fishing interests have always fought drilling,
the land adjacent to this preserve is home only to a handful of
Inupiat. Alaskan politicians thus have had little to lose and much
to gain by pushing for exploration -- even the usually
pro-environment Governor Cowper, who favors the plan.
But anti-drilling activists argue that the area is just too
sensitive to stand the strain of oil production, even if a spill
never occurs. A few roads and airstrips in this seemingly vast
wilderness, they say, could cause permanent harm to the habitats
of caribou, musk-oxen, polar bears, golden eagles and wolves. For
evidence to back their argument, the preservationists point to
Prudhoe Bay. The weight of trucks atop temporary roads has cut into
the mat of vegetation that makes up the tundra, allowing sunlight
to weaken the top layer of permafrost beneath. The result: ever
deepening ruts that erode into gullies. And oily wastes have
leached out of supposedly secure dumps. The consequences of the
contamination are unclear, but some scientists believe that since
the permafrost confines biological activity to a layer of earth
just a couple of feet thick, and because its flora is so fragile,
small spills can have large effects.
The oil companies downplay the potential problem in the ANWR,
claiming that modern construction and containment techniques will
minimize the impact of exploration. But environmentalists doubt it,
and even pro-drilling politicians concede that the idea of
developing the ANWR is suddenly facing stiff opposition. Says
Cowper: "There's only an indirect connection between the spill and
ANWR. But it will be much more difficult to convince Congress that
the oil industry can develop the Arctic in a responsible way."
In Washington the feeling is much the same. Interior Secretary
Manuel Lujan told oil-industry representatives last week that they
had suddenly acquired a serious image problem, and EPA chief Reilly
asserted that "we will not move forward if we have any significant
concerns that have not been resolved." Anti-drilling lobbyists are
increasingly hopeful. Says Sierra Club conservation director
Douglas Scott: "This is much bigger than syringes on the shores of
New Jersey. It's an important political event."
Environmentalists are not even suggesting that existing wells
and pipelines should be shut down. But there is a broad consensus
in the state and in Washington that current operations must be made
fail-safe and that the oil companies should not be trusted to do
this on their own. Immediately after the Exxon Valdez incident,
senate President Kelly began to draw up plans for what he calls a
Spill Response Corps, to be organized by the state but paid for by
the oil companies "as part of the cost of doing business here." And
Governor Cowper insisted on a credible plan by the Alyeska
consortium, which runs the pipeline, to deal with spills: "There's
going to have to be a plan that satisfies our specialists. And if
it is not complied with, we don't have any remedy except to shut
down the pipeline terminal (at Valdez), and we'll do it."
Experts like Clifton Curtis, executive director of the
Washington-based Oceanic Society, say state and federal officials
should be stricter about enforcing the safety laws that already
exist for handling oil, require tankers to be equipped with double
hulls for added leakage protection, and impose tough personnel
rules that would ban convicted drunken drivers from tanker
commands. Other reasonable proposals include updating the training
standards for tanker pilots and crews, and requiring oil companies
to test employees for drug and alcohol abuse on the job.
While oil is the hottest issue, the Prince William spill could
also help the environmental cause in a dispute that has nothing to
do with crude: the battle over Alaska's Tongass National Forest,
a woodland bigger than West Virginia, located in the southeastern
panhandle. Unlike parks, national forests are available for
lumbering. But conservationists have protested that the Tongass,
one of the few remaining temperate rain forests, should be largely
protected from logging, especially considering that the industry
is heavily subsidized by the U.S. Forest Service. Says Larry
Edwards, founder of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Society: "We
have a saying about the timber industry: `They take the best. Then
they take the best of the rest. And they leave us, the public and
the nature lovers and the Alaskans, the scraps.' "
It would be nice to add more acreage to Alaska's national
preserves, but that is neither practical nor fair to the state.
More than a third of its 368 million acres are already designated
as national parks, wildlife refuges and forests, and thus protected
from development to varying degrees. But it is practical to
increase the size of official wilderness areas, where development
of any kind is prohibited, since most of these areas already lie
within existing parks and forests.
The primary argument in favor of proceeding apace with Alaskan
development is that the U.S. desperately needs energy. "Prohibiting
development of ANWR will not eliminate the risk of future spills,"
says the American Petroleum Institute. "It will only ensure that
the country is deprived of a potentially large source of petroleum
vital to its economy and its energy security." That same argument
was used by President Bush in his budget message to Congress.
But finding more oil is not the answer to energy needs; a
coherent policy encouraging fuel conservation is. The pressure to
drill more wells in Alaska stems in large part from the recent
relapse into energy profligacy. During the Reagan years, speed
limits rose, more stringent fuel-efficiency standards for new cars
were postponed, and alternative-energy research programs were
slashed. As a result, the U.S. appetite for oil rose from 5.6
billion bbl. in 1983 to 6.3 billion last year.
Scarce resources and increasing dependence on foreign oil are
only part of the reason to push for fuel conservation. Scientists
are increasingly convinced that the burning of fossil fuels is
contributing to the greenhouse effect, a potentially dangerous
warming of the globe caused by carbon dioxide and other exhaust
gases. Unless the growth of fuel consumption is slowed dramatically
or nonfossil energy sources, including solar and nuclear, are
expanded rapidly, the world could face climatic changes leading to
widespread flooding and famine.
Thus the time has come to get tough about conservation. The
first step should be an immediate increase in the federal gasoline
tax. Each 1 cents rise would discourage unnecessary driving and add
$1 billion to the U.S. Treasury, part of which could in turn be
used to develop nonfossil energy sources. The second obvious step
is to raise the auto industry's fuel-economy requirements. That,
says Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum, "could save twice the amount
of oil in the Prince William Sound spill every day."
Conservation will not be easy, but the public's sense of horror
over fouled beaches and dying animals could provide new motivation
to save energy. If that happens, the wreck of the Exxon Valdez will
not be an unmitigated disaster. It would be unrealistic to halt
Alaska's oil business and unfair to demand that the state's people
spend none of their wealth. But exploration and production can be
carefully limited, and better environmental safeguards can be put
in place. In the end, the battle for Alaska's future may be decided
in the other 49 states. If Americans can abandon wasteful habits,
Alaska will be under much less pressure to squander its precious
wilderness.
-- Jordan Bonfante and David Postman/Juneau and Paul A.
