The Plot to Strangle Alaska

BY ERNEST GRUENING

WITH Paul Brooks’s aspiration to preserve the wonderful wilderness values, the fabulous scenic and other natural resources of Alaska, I am in complete sympathy, as my writings and utterances have long attested. When his “Alaska: Last Frontier” appeared in the September, 1962, Atlantic, I inserted it in the Congressional Record for September 7, 1962, with the eulogistic comments I felt it deserved. To those who are Alaskans by deliberate choice, as I am, this priceless natural heritage, unequaled anywhere under the flag, with its togetherness of high mountains and sea, virgin forests, fjords, waterfalls, riotous flora, abundant wildlife these, and the frontier friendliness of the people — proves irresistibly alluring.

Perhaps at this point I should qualify myself as a conservationist, and a fervent one. When I came to Alaska as governor in 1939, I found that there was a bounty on the bald eagle. The fishermen’s fear of its predation on salmon was reflected in this legislative bounty act. In my first message to the biennial legislature (1941), I urged its repeal, and on my third try, in 1945, I succeeded, securing thereafter that noble bird’s protection. In the U.S. Senate I have strongly supported the wilderness bill and the impressive galaxy of national seashores and parks created by the 87th and 88th Congresses.

I am a co-sponsor of the wild rivers bill.

Where I differ with some of my fellow conservationists is that in their zeal for the preservation of every feathered, furred, or scaled creature, they sometimes overlook the requirements of people. Man, too, requires a habitat, and unless it has an economy that will enable him to subsist, it is not a viable one. Let me amplify by saying, by way of example, that we should not preserve moose (or any other wildlife) for its own sake, but so that man may continue to see moose, photograph moose, hunt moose, always in perpetual supply. Wise utilization, not mere preservation, is the essence of sane conservation.

Rampart Canyon Dam, I believe, is an important, desirable, and needed project and does not merit the active opposition which has been mobilized against it. The alternatives mentioned by its opponents do not remotely meet Alaska’s needs. Rampart would bring in the wide diversity of industries which only its low-cost power can attract. In the controversy over Rampart, Mr. Brooks has swallowed the whole extremist conservationist line; we have been hearing these exact figures, the verysame laments and alarums, from the same sources which successfully indoctrinated him.

Mr. Brooks is quite correct in reporting that Alaska has economic problems, that gold mining and fisheries have been on the downgrade, that “the defense boom has tapered off.” In short, Alaska needs a statewide economy to support its present and growing population.

To put Rampart in its proper perspective in relation to Alaska’s overshadowing problem, some history is pertinent. Twenty-five years ago, Alaska, with a population of 72,225, was getting along comfortably with its two economic props: fisheries, principally salmon, and mining, principally gold.

World War II measures (Order L-208 of the War Production Board) compelled the nation’s gold miners to shut down their operations, a restriction not adopted by any other of our allied nations engaged in gold mining; and thereafter federal action compelled the industry — the only instance in our free enterprise economy — to hold to a price established in 1934 and to sell only to the federal government. With the rising costs of labor and equipment, these restrictions make continued operation impossible.

In 1940 under a government reorganization, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the Department of Commerce was merged with the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture and transferred to the Interior Department as the Fish and Wildlife Service. Ira N. Gabrielson, who had headed the Biological Survey, became the new agency’s director. It had complete control of the management of Alaska’s fisheries and wildlife. As a result of the colonialist imposition wrought by Alaska’s absentee-owned canning interests and their political power in Washington, the Organic Act of 1912 deprived Alaska — alone among the earlier territories — of the right to manage its own natural resources.

Mr. Gabrielson, though a nationally known conservationist, proved ill equipped for his Alaskan responsibility. An ornithologist, not an ichthyologist, he permitted the principal Alaskan resource and the nation’s greatest fishery resource, the Pacific salmon, to decline steadily. He disregarded the unceasing protests and remedial recommendations of Alaskans, who despairingly watched the salmon, and the dependent livelihood of the coastal communities, shrink steadily. From an annual pack of some seven million cases production dropped in the six years of Gabrielson’s incumbency to half that quantity, a decline continued under the sequent management of Albert Day, Gabrielson’s assistant, so that in the last year of federal control, 1959, the pack reached the lowest point in sixty years, some 1,600,000 cases. Meanwhile, in neighboring British Columbia, the same resource, though far less abundant, was adequately conserved.

As Ira N. Gabrielson is the principal factor in Alaska’s plight and problem, past, present, and future, it is necessary to follow his activities further. One of his first acts as director of the fish and Wildlife Service was to persuade Interior’s Secretary Harold L. Ickes to withdraw two million acres, approximately two thirds of the Kenai Peninsula not occupied by the Chugach National Forest, to establish the Kenai National Moose Range. Alaskans were denied a hearing. The figures indicated a moose population of 4000, or 500 acres for each bull, cow, or calf. But along the thin fringe of land left for human habitat, between the Moose Range and the sea, only 160 acres were permitted to the homesteader with wife and children.

With gold mining nearing extinction and the fisheries disappearing—both the result of action by a distant federal government — Alaskans in 1957 sought a remedy in oil, which, it was believed, underlay the Kenai Peninsula, and invited some of the leading oil companies to begin exploration.

The proposal was savagely fought by the Wildlife Management Institute, whose director, since his retirement from the public service, was none other than Ira Gabrielson. The institute’s bulletins unsparingly denounced the Alaskans — including me — who denied the institute’s allegations that oil exploration would destroy the moose. Opposition was likewise voiced on the same grounds by the National Wildlife Federation. Those of us with a concern for Alaska’s economic welfare knew that the incidental timber clearing would enhance, not diminish, the moose herd. One conservation society, the Isaak Walton League, dissented from its fellows, and after much hesitation, Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton opened up a little less than half of the range to oil exploration. The result has been over sixty producing wells, three vast gas fields, extensive filings throughout Alaska, an oil refinery, an investment of over $300 million, and substantial revenues to the state. In short, the oil strikes saved Alaska from bankruptcy, a disaster which the extremist conservationists would have wrought had they prevailed.

As for the moose, they have multiplied and spread all over Alaska, becoming a problem in the Matanuska Valley, where they are eating the farmers’ crops. They have reached Barrow at Alaska’s northern tip and Kotzebue on Bering Strait. In fact, according to the knowledgeable Jim Brooks, head of the game division of the State Department of Fish and Game, they are now too numerous. So the hunting season has been lengthened, and cows as well as bulls may be taken.

Though oil proved a lifesaver, Alaska still needed a statewide economy. For although under the wise management of the State Department of Fish and Game the salmon runs are being slowly rebuilt, and in the four years of state control have more than doubled, reaching 3.5 million cases in 1964, the population of Alaska has more than tripled since 1940, and is now estimated at 250,000.

The logical economic prop to which Alaskans could turn was hydro, of which only one quarter of one percent of Alaska’s potential is harnessed. As in the exclusion of Alaska under territorialism from the federal highway aid, so in much else: while the older states have seen extensive hydro development, the only federal project in Alaska is the 30,000 kilowatt installation at Lake Eklutna, which supplies electricity for Anchorage and a nearby R.E.A. cooperative.

The Rampart site on the Yukon in the geographical center of Alaska was long known as a great potential power site, probably the greatest under the American flag, with an installed capacity of 5 million kilowatts, two and a half times that of Grand Coulee. Rampart was estimated to generate electricity at the bus bar at two mills, which would at the time of its completion be the lowest-cost power on the North American continent.

IN MY first term in the Senate in 1959, I sought, and the Public Works Committee, of which I am a member, approved, a $100,000 authorization for the beginning of studies by the Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army. These inevitably must precede any attempt at authorization of such a project—engineering studies, marketability studies, fish and wildlife studies, and so forth. The studies included one let by the Corps to the Development and Resources Corporation of New York, nationally and internationally known hydro consultants. The firm was headed by David Lilienthal and others who organized and directed the Tennessee Valley Authority in its earlier days — probably the outstanding authorities in their field. They found that not only would all of Rampart’s power be spoken for within Alaska as soon as generated, but that the demand would by 1990 exceed Rampart’s capacity and require a whole river development.

While the studies were proceeding routinely, out of the blue came a condemnatory blast by Ira Gabrielson, which ushered in a nationwide campaign against Rampart. Conservation societies’ bulletins inveighed against it and solicited funds to fight it. State Fish and Game commissioners were pressed to pass resolutions against it, and some did. Outdoor and sports magazines sprouted articles such as Paul Brooks’s. Newspaper editorials repeated the message, all parading the same “facts.” Fish and Wildlife officials proclaimed their opposition in public addresses.

So it was scarcely a surprise that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s report, issued in April, 1964, rehearsed, with amplification, the same chorus. The report echoes its concern for the already superabundant moose. Of course, it is conceivable that these intelligent mammals would not wait eighteen years till rising lake waters submerged them but would amble out into Alaska’s remaining 576,000 square miles. The small furbearers would probably do likewise. There is no certainty that the salmon — never before deemed important would be destroyed. Indeed, the report expresses the belief that “a portion of the run could be perpetuated.” However, in its place, or in addition to it, a great freshwater fishery — commercial and sport, of lake trout, whitefish, and such other species as a truly creative and resourceful agency personnel could implant in the great lake — would far exceed the present “subsistence fishery,” as the Wildlife report characterizes it. As for the birds, there is ample duck nesting ground in the vast swamps of northern, central, and western Alaska.

“Last, but certainly not least,” Mr. Brooks worries about the people who live along the river. “Seven villages in the Flats would be drowned,” he writes. Part of the campaign against Rampart is a persistent effort to convince the Indian inhabitants that Rampart would uproot them and worsen their fate. Representatives of the opposition have prepared a letter for distribution to the Congress signed by the village residents protesting against Rampart which repeats all the Fish and Wildlife allegations in words not utterable by these natives.

No informed person can sincerely contend that these allegations of injury to the river dwellers if Rampart is built are valid. (Let me say, in passing, that as governor I sponsored and secured the antidiscrimination legislation needed to protect Alaskan Indians and Eskimos against their previous exclusion from various public places.)

Most of these villages exist on a bare subsistence economy supplemented by relief. Their children do not have a future such as every American child should rightfully expect. Rampart would benefit these villagers more than any other group of Alaskans. It would furnish ample varied employment: in the clearing of the timber from the area to be flooded and its processing in sawmill and manufacturing; in the guiding, boating, and fishing on the lake. Mr. Brooks complains that “no technical training program has been established for the native people.” Quite right, and regrettably so. Neither federal nor state funds have been sufficiently available, and President Johnson’s antipoverty program is in its infancy. Rampart should and will supply the funds for the necessary training, but hardly before it has been authorized and the resulting work prospects are foreseeable.

In the relocated villages, at a location of the villagers’ choice — either on the edge of the lake or on the river somewhere below the dam — because of the resulting flood control they will be free from the periodic flooding and will have better homes, better community facilities, a decent human habitat, and a livelihood which they have never enjoyed. Mr. Brooks probably does not know that no fewer than twenty native villages have moved voluntarily from their aboriginal location to secure a better environment.

The slanted and biased sensationalism of the Atlantic’s presentation and the corresponding unjustified editorial verdict that Rampart is “an ill-conceived project” reflect little credit on the objectivity of Mr. Brooks and of his editor. The announcement in the April issue of the article “The Plot to Drown Alaska” shows a photograph of a cow moose swimming. The implication is clearly that the moose is drowning! There is of course no “plot,” and Mr. Brooks is unable to cite any evidence that the approach to the Rampart project differs from that which preceded the Tennessee Valley Authority, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, or any of the nation’s other great hydro projects. To create a lake which will occupy less than 2 percent of Alaska’s 586,000 square miles is scarcely “drowning.” Mr. Brooks should know that the cost of these hydro projects is repayable, both principal and interest, from the revenues of the generated electric current. If there is indeed a plot, it is a “plot to strangle Alaska” economically.

What is needed, and is so lacking in Mr. Brooks’s last Atlantic article and in the attitude of Rampart’s bitter-end opponents, is a sense of proportion between benefits and possible losses. It is pertinent to note that Alaska has done well in the preservation of values that Mr. Brooks and I cherish. Our three superb national parks, Katmai, Glacier Bay, and Mount McKinley, approximate one third of the total national park area in the rest of the nation. Each is different, and I rejoice in them. Even more striking is the fact that Alaska’s wildlife ranges and refuges occupy an area more than double those of all the other forty-nine states, while our national forest area is the largest of any state. But the Yukon Flats — a mammoth swamp — from the standpoint of human habitability is about as worthless and useless an area as can be found in the path of any hydroelectric development. Scenically it is zero. In fact, it is one of the few really ugly areas in a land prodigal with sensational beauty. I believe that the great lake which would cover the Flats would mark a rare man-made improvement. But in the view of Mr. Brooks and his mentors, its present animal life renders it sacrosanct. The better opportunities for the residents of that area and of all Alaska are of no concern to them. The need and striving of a brave and gallant segment of the American people who have had to face unparalleled obstacles of both natural and man-made origin to work out their destiny are merely sneered at and traduced.

There is the true issue between us conservationists.

PAUL BROOKS REPLIES

I am happy to see that Senator Gruening docs not question any of the facts in my article. Flc questions only the conclusions that I draw from them: conclusions that, I regret to say, still seem to me inescapable.

I have no reason to doubt the senator’s appreciation of the wilderness values of the area with which he has been so long and so loyally associated, nor his claim to be a fervent conservationist — though some of his statements show less than complete understanding of what conservation is all about. His account of the decline of the salmon fishery, his attack on Ira N. Gabrielson, and his story of the Kenai National Moose Range are interesting but irrelevant. The question is simple: Would or would not Rampart Dam beneiit Alaska and the United States as a whole?

Such points as the senator does raise about Rampart and its critics have already been answered in my article. I hough I do not happen to agree with him that no wildlife is worth preserving for its own sake, this is not the issue. It is not a matter of people versus wildlife. Wildlife is itself a vital part of the state economy. Hydropower may be another part. As I have stated, it is available elsewhere with minimum destruction of natural resources and without invading the rights or destroying the way of life ol any native inhabitants.

Nowhere does the senator even attempt to prove that Rampart Dam will accomplish any of the specific things claimed for it by its promoters— other, of course, than spending federal money. There is no proof that it will attract the aluminum or any other industry to Alaska. The price of electricity of two mills at the bus bar assumes lull-capacity use, which in this case is extremely unlikely, for reasons I have given. Glorying in “the largest hydro project in the free world,” the senator fails to mention that less spectacular projects may be not only less costly but more efficient.

A few points need clarification: (1) it is not a question of moose or ducks drowning, but of the destruction of their habitat, (2) equivalent habitat does not exist in Alaska’s “remaining 576,000 square miles,” (3) experts agree that the salmon run would be destroyed above the dam, (4) the timber in the flooded area cannot be economically marketed, (5) any mineral resources in the area would be lost forever, (6) the recreational values of the lake would be minimal, (7) the sale of the electric current will not pay for the dam unless there is a market for the current. As the report from the leading industrial consultants, Arthur D. Little, Incorporated, makes clear, Rampart would “produce a quantity of power many times the ability of present Alaskan industry, commerce and population to absorb.”

Those of us who question the wisdom of Rampart Dam are not trying to strangle Alaska. We are trying to preserve the very values on which its future depends.