TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041789/04178900.009

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                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 56

COVER STORIES:  The Two Alaskas


One is wild, one is industrial, and they existed in harmony
until the oil spill set off a raging debate over the future of
the largest state

By 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.
Witteman/Valdez