I’ve questions for our legislators concerning the Ambler Highway, however they begin with a query concerning the Alaska Industrial Growth and Export Authority: Why are you acquiescing to a state company subsidizing a international company in league with a Native company to construct a 200-plus mile highway throughout the Brooks Vary? AIDEA’s board is simply consultant of company and enterprise pursuits, and is pushing to subsidize a highway for company pursuits that locals aren’t demanding. It’s well-documented that AIDEA has misplaced cash on half of its “investments,” and many of the employees on AIDEA-funded initiatives within the Inside don’t even reside in Alaska, so why are you acquiescing to a boondoggle-prone company going at it once more?
AIDEA’s guarantees concerning the Ambler Highway being restricted to an industrial highway are vaporous. Gov. Wally Hickel’s misguided perception that oil wouldn’t come out of the North Slope until the state constructed the highway to Prudhoe was proved a fallacy when the Hickel Freeway was deserted, as a result of Alyeska had constructed a unique highway — which, it was promised, would at all times be an industrial highway. That promise lasted till Invoice Sheffield was governor, after which it was forgotten. At present, the Hickel Freeway continues to be there as a protracted, insidious scar 400 miles throughout the Brooks Vary, and the pipeline highway is a public highway. Do any of you significantly doubt that every one such guarantees can be forgotten as soon as the Ambler Highway is constructed?
So, what concerning the mission itself? One revered economist who has studied AIDEA extensively advised me that the Ambler claims “won’t ever, ever, meet market situations,” until, that’s, the state subsidizes their growth. In fact. We’ve seen all of it earlier than, and the scheme to take action is the highway, which might bridge as many as 11 main rivers and almost 3,000 smaller streams, and obliterate 1,700 acres of wetlands, relying on the ultimate route chosen. That alone must be sufficient to kill the entire mission.
I do know some argue that native folks from Kobuk River villages need the highway for jobs, however is that true? I spent years serving the Inupiaq folks of the Northwest Arctic as a lawyer, have adopted carefully what everyone seems to be saying, and it appears to be like to me like company pursuits are aligning otherwise from what the folks need. And the Kobuk villages are solely a part of it, as a result of the proposed highway would comply with historic commerce routes between the Inupiaq and the Koyukon and Gwich’in of the Inside, all throughout the southern slope of the Brooks Vary. The overwhelming majority of Athabascan villages seemingly impacted alongside the route don’t need the highway. It’s not laborious to determine why. You solely have to have a look at what occurred after the Steese and Taylor highways have been constructed within the early 1900s. Migrating bands of the Forty Mile caribou herd have been decimated by highway hunters, and the herd has by no means recovered. Why are legislators permitting AIDEA to impose that very same destiny on individuals who nonetheless depend upon caribou for meals?
To me, a 200-mile highway on state credit score throughout the southern slope of the Brooks Vary, in an effort to entry company mining claims, is a proclamation by our state that our northern civilization, which invaded a land already peopled below European justifications of discovery and conquest, will maintain subsidizing non-public pursuits to push west and north till it’s lastly stopped solely by the ocean. Nothing in the best way of that push is sacred. No land can go unexploited. We’ll do it as a result of we are able to. So, this results in the existential questions. I do know we are able to construct roads in lots of virgin valleys, however ought to we? If there’s a highway there, doesn’t that by definition imply it’s now not a frontier? Are we actually able to have a state company run by conflicted businessmen who’ve by no means been elected to something retract the declare that Alaska is the Final Frontier?
Doug Pope is a longtime Anchorage-based lawyer. He represented John Sturgeon earlier than the U.S. Supreme Courtroom and has argued many different instances associated to the stewardship of Alaska’s assets. He was additionally the prime sponsor of the initiative to ban same-day aerial searching of wolves and the initiative to ban billboards on the state’s highways.
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