TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94HT0020> <title> Jul. 27, 1970: The Great Land: Boom or Doom </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1970s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> The Great Land: Boom or Doom July 27, 1970 </hdr> <body> Only a few years ago, much of the earth still seemed as desolate and inaccessible as the moon. Now the wastes of Antarctica have been surveyed and found replete with coal; modern cities are sprouting in Siberia. Roads penetrate Africa's rain forests, leading to lodes of tin, bauxite and uranium. Arabian deserts are crisscrossed with oil pipelines; even the ocean depths may soon be farmed and mined. Yet as men use more and more of the earth's bounty, troubling questions arise. Is it worth cutting the hardwood reserves of the Amazon River Basin if the price is the destruction of the thin jungle soil? Should the oil under the North Sea be drilled at the risk of gravely endangering the beaches and wildlife of six nations? Can civilization's need for fuel and other materials be satisfied without despoiling the few wild areas left on earth? The Lure of Rebirth Today a dramatic conflict between man and nature is being staged in Alaska. Wild, virtually unspoiled and fabulously rich in natural resources, the 49th state is a testing ground of American values. The Aleuts aptly named the place Alakshak, or "Great Land," and modern Alaskans just as properly think of it as America's last frontier. Everything about Alaska is extreme. It is physically as big as Texas, California and Montana combined--586,000 sq. mi. Just one of Alaska's scores of blue-green glaciers is the size of Holland; one wildlife preserve could hold Hungary. Alaska's 33,000-mile coastline doubles that of all the coterminous U.S. While Port Walter in the southern panhandle is flooded by 18 feet of annual rainfall, the wind-dried North Slope is an Arctic desert that gets only four inches of precipitation a year. At Fort Yukon in the vast central plateau region, temperatures plummet from 100 degrees in the summer to 75 degrees below zero in the winter. To travel from the state capital of Juneau to the outermost Aleutian island of Attu is to span 2,000 miles and four time zones. Yet Alaska has fewer people than any other state: 293,000, the equivalent of Akron. To conservationists, Alaska's most precious resource is its natural grandeur. The place has twice as many caribou (600,000) as it has people, plus 160,000 moose, 40,000 Dall sheep and 36,000 reindeer. No one who has watched spring come to the Brooks Range is ever quite the same again. After three dark months of frozen silence, the sun reappears as a long, slanting shaft that illuminates only the highest peaks. Each day the light descends, until finally even the deepest valley is bathed in warmth. The ice breaks, roaring like cannon fire, and the ground explodes with color as flowers bloom. Big bears stagger out of hibernation. Rivers teem with salmon, grayling and chad. Caribou march in long single files toward new feeding grounds. Glacial ice glitters like emeralds and sapphires. The world seems reborn. Rebirth is the great Alaskan lure; the state is full of escapees from the crowds and pressures of the "Lower 48" states. The frontier spirit is implicit in dozens of fetching place names: Big Fritz, Mary's Igloo, White Eye, Tin City, Hungry, Cripple, Stampede, Eureka, Paradise and Purgatory. It is clear in the state's forgiving customs. There is no death penalty, for example, and if a first-time murderer is a man, he rarely spends more than a few years in prison. For a woman, the usual sentence is six months, suspended. Alaskans see the great land as a gate to self-renewal, freshness, confidence and independence. Says Celia Hunter, a conservationist who lives near Fairbanks: "Life on the outside is not only too crowded but too dull. In Alaska, people feel that what they do and say counts. You don't have quite that in the States. You're individuals here." Rugged individualism is unavoidable in a roadless land where people routinely fly in frail float planes across massive glaciers, where serious earthquakes regularly rumble and smoking Aleutian volcanoes testify that creation is still in progress. The land's impermanence is matched by its transient population of military men and assorted seekers of fortune in gold, uranium and similar riches. Home-grown leaders like Alaska-born Elmer Rasmusson, Chairman of the National Bank of Alaska, are still relatively rare. More typical is Kansas-born Walter J. Hickel, who arrived penniless in 1940, carved a real estate fortune, became Alaska's Governor, and is now U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Those who stay, whether as bankers, merchants or fishermen, share a common pride in having overcome adversity; most dislike "the Outside." Buy Texas Alaskan politics is highly individualistic; character is far more important that party affiliation. Jay Hammond, a full-time fisherman and part-time Republican leader of the state senate, comes from a 5-to-1 Democratic district. His fishermen constituents admire his strong personality as well as his fishing skill. H.A. ("Red") Boucher retired from the Navy as a chief petty officer, won $25,000 on TV's Name That Tune, married an Icelandic girl he met on the show, and headed for Alaska. Because of his drive and charm, he is now mayor of Fairbanks, the state's second biggest city (pop. 18,000). Alaska has its share of militant conservatives. This year an officer of the John Birch Society is running for the state's single Congressional seat. Yet Alaska's right-wingers are not easily classified. Channel Pilot Clem Tillion, for instance, is an ultraconservative state legislator who voted to liberalize abortion, and shunned the Birchers because "they tried to tell me what to think." Boundlessly optimistic, Alaskans have fought and subdued a raw wilderness. Now they must decide how to use Alaska for decades to come; whether to turn it into a vast industrial colony, or preserve its natural grandeur--or somehow do enough of both to improve the lot of it all. In ten years, Alaska could conceivably be just another paved and polluted corner of the U.S. With rational planning, it could be something dramatically different; a unique blend of wealth and wilderness. To environmentalists, the challenge is clear; this is the last chance for the last frontier. The catalyst that turned Alaska into what Ecologist Barry Commoner calls "a living microcosm of the whole environmental issue" is oil. For centuries, Eskimos had noticed seepages in the North Slope; but after World War II, oil companies searched the Slope in vain. By early 1966, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) alone had spent $4,500,000 drilling one dry hole. When ARCO Chairman Robert O. Anderson decided to try just one more time, he was mindful that the U.S. now relies on foreign sources for 20% of its domestic oil supplies. By 1980, if no new oil is found in the U.S., that dependency may rise to 45%--at a time when assorted wars and political crises may well engulf foreign resources. Avid to seize the initiative, ARCO joined Humble Oil in pushing ahead on the North Slope. In March of 1968, the drillers struck oil near Prudhoe Bay within the Arctic Circle, and Alaska's future lit up like a pinball machine. Now Prudhoe Bay's reserves are estimated at 15 billion bbl., three times those of East Texas, the previous giant of U.S. oil. Estimates of Alaska's potential reserves go as high as 100 billion bbl. The strike was a triumph over the harsh adversary of climate. In winter, the North Slope is so cold that men work at one-third of their normal efficiency. When one roustabout took off his face mask to shout at a friend, his windpipe froze. Metal equipment snaps like icicles; helicopters are grounded at -30 degrees lest their rotors break. In summer, the ground above the permafrost (frozen subsoil) thaws and turns the Arctic north into a spongy bog that hampers land transportation and defies sewage disposal. Despite all this, ARCO and seven other companies quickly set out to build the Trans Alaska Pipeline System. A mammoth conduit 4 ft. in diameter, TAPS was to run 773 miles south from Prudhoe to the ice-free port of Valdez, where tankers would load the oil for delivery in the continental U.S. Humble's icebreaking supertanker, Manhattan, also bulled through the Northwest Passage to test the feasibility of shipping North Slope oil across the top of North America to East Coast markets. Last September the potential bonanza spurred 15 major oil companies to pay the state $900 million to lease another 434,000 acres of its North Slope land. The state ecstatically deposited the cash in a savings account (interest: $199,320.52 a day) until the legislature could decide what to do with it. One early suggestion: buy Texas. What oil could do for Alaska, a pauper state, is almost incalculable. The first $900 million is enough to cover all state government expenses for 4 1/2 years. At a flow of 2,000,000 bbl. a day. the pipeline could net the state as much as $200 million a year in royalties and severance taxes. To those Alaskans who proudly call themselves "boomers" and scorn conservationists, the oil rush promised immense personal gain. Building the pipeline and a 370-mile access road would pump $1.5 billion into the Alaska economy. Boomers predicted that service industries would proliferate like snowshoe rabbits. The state would need more houses, schools, roads, airports and factories. Demand for unskilled as well as skilled workers would soar. What Went Wrong? But the confident forecasts have withered; the pipeline has been postponed temporarily. In Fairbanks, the North Slope staging area, heavy construction equipment worth $45 million stands idle. With Alaskan unemployment at a high 13% (and 25% in Fairbanks), the state has put up information booths in U.S. airports to warn job seekers not to come north. Scores of small businesses, from auto agencies to gift shops, swelled their inventories in preparation for the impending boom. With no customers, many cannot repay loans. Banks are not foreclosing--yet. What went wrong? Boomers blame "hysterical preservationists," who insistently warned that TAPS could ruin the state's natural wonders. The pipeline would occupy less than 15 sq. mi. of Alaska. Still, it would cross 4,800-ft. mountains, 23 rivers, 124 streams and three active earthquake zones. A single rupture could dump as much as 20,000 bbl. of oil, killing all wildlife for miles around. Moreover, tanker spills off Valdez could irreparably harm Alaska's fishing industry. In Arctic waters, where the cold prevents oil molecules from breaking down, the damage could be drastic. The biggest TAPS problem would come from burying the pipeline in permafrost; no one really knows how the soil would behave. Oil would enter the pipeline at a geothermal temperature of more than 100 degrees; pumping and friction would boost that to 180 degrees. As a result, critics charge, the hot oil might create a "thaw bulb" in the permafrost as deep as 50 ft. If the pipe broke, wither by sagging into the mush or by being jolted by an earthquake, the aftermath would make the Santa Barbara spill look like a picnic. Critics also fear breaks at the pipe's lowest points: riverbeds. They paint a stark scenario of rivers, black with crude oil, flowing to the sea with dead fish, birds and animals. TAPS officials argue that special safeguards, including 73 cutoff valves and aerial surveillance, would prevent any disaster. Even so, last April, conservation groups persuaded a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to enjoin both the pipeline and the access road. Neither can be built, the court ruled, until the Interior Department heeds the National Environment Policy of 1969, which requires a detailed reports on the pipeline's ecological effects before the department can issue a building permit. Even without the court order, says Interior Secretary Hickel, his department will block the line until it is proved safe. Hickel, though, is still an Alaskan and well aware of his state's economic anguish. With his tacit blessing, Alaska Governor Keith Miller clumsily tried to move ahead on the $120 million access road. He first got his legislature to approve a bill that would allow the state to build the road and then be repaid by the pipeline consortium, Not wishing to risk stockholder suits, the consortium turned down the idea. In order to reintroduce his plan, Miller asked the legislature to return to Juneau early this month for a special session. But when the legislators discovered that the Governor had no new alternatives for them to debate, they stayed home. Such a defeat for the boom psychology has rarely occurred in Alaska's history, which is a monument to the rugged philosophy that "if you're going to be raped, relax." The first white explorer to see the place was Vitus Bering, a Dane sailing in the service of Czar Peter the Great. His 1741 voyage was soon followed by Peter's promyshleniki (explorer- colonizers), who swept eastward through the gale-tormented Aleutian Islands with the rapacity of conquistadors. Though Peter yearned for an empire, his colonizers found only humble Aleuts and thick-furred sea otters. By 1801, the Aleuts had been decimated by harsh servitude and the animals virtually wiped out by overhunting. In 1867, Russia decided to sell Alaska in order to raise funds for wars with England. To Secretary of State WIlliam H. Seward, the land seemed a steal at $7.2 million, or 2c per acre. To most Americans, a few "wretched fish" could not justify the price of what Seward's critics labeled "Icebergia," "Polaria," or "Walrussia." Delivery Into Thralldom They changed their tune when reports of gold filtered down south from Nome and Fairbanks at the turn of the century. Some prospectors came with a pack and left with a bundle. The 1916 copper rush in Cordova was equally ruthless. The mines closed 20 years alter, depleted. Only the fish--salmon, herring and halibut--kept the local economy going. World War II changed the pattern. With the construction of big military bases at Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska became more than a massive map sprinkled with names full of harsh ks and ts. Americans actually had to stay there. On Attu, they fought the second bloodiest battle of the Pacific war (549 American, 2,350 Japanese dead), and the only one on U.S. soil. Nor did peace close the bases. Because Alaska lay close to Russia, the Arctic shore soon sprouted heavily instrumented DEW line stations. The huge defense investment delivered Alaska into Washington's thrall. Although the fishing and wood-pulp industries were greatly strengthened in the mid-1950s, they did little to alter the flimsy, somewhat colonial economy. Even the discovery of medium-sized oilfields around the Kenai Peninsula and the achievement of statehood in 1959 barely made a difference. Among the few changes was the rising influence of Japan, which now takes 95% of Alaska's exports of minerals, wood and liquified natural gas. Japan is also investing heavily in Alaska fisheries, pulp mills and mines. But Washington maintains the military bases, accounts for almost 50% of civilian employment, and controls 97% of the land. The U.S. Forest Service, for example, still sells off timbering rights, most recently in the Tonhass and Chugach National Forests. The Bureau of Land Management fights Alaska's grim forest fires; four years ago, one fire consumed a tract as large as Massachusetts. The Coast Guard protects the Alaskan fishing industry from constantly marauding Japanese, Russian and South Korean fishermen. As if to symbolize Washington's dominance, the Federal Building in Juneau is a high glass-and-steel cube that literally overshadows the rambling old stone statehouse. Though Alaskans pay lip service to free enterprise, they take government handouts for granted. Perhaps only in Alaska would a Governor confidently ask his legislature to spend $120 million to build a road for a private industry. Besides, Washington has helped to solve some of Alaska's persistent problems. Unfortunately, far more remains to be done. Who Really Owns It? One pressing problem involves Alaska's 57,000 Aleuts, Eskimos and Indians--one-fifth of the population. These natives are probably the U.S.'s poorest citizens. Their average life expectancy is 35 years; the village schools go no higher than the eighth grade. Spread over the state in 200 filthy, littered villages, they have little to do with the economy. Instead, they are patronized. "The typical Eskimo family," a joke runs, "consists of one father, one mother, three children, two anthropologists, one social worker, one economic-development specialist and two counselors." What the natives need for survival and dignity is land, and Congress must soon resolve the legal intricacies of their claims to Alaska. Back in 1867, the U.S. actually only bought the right to tax and govern Alaska, leaving ownership of its 365 million acres in the hands of the natives. Such a fine legal point did not trouble early settlers, who took possession of their stakes under homesteading or mineral- exploitation laws that are still in effect. To complicate matters further, the Statehood Act of 1958 entitled Alaska to withdraw 103 million acres from the federal domain. Naturally, the state wanted the land with the richest resources. It first picked 2,000,000 acres on the oil-soaked North Slope and claimed that it was free of aboriginal use and occupancy. In fact, most of the land lay under existing native villages or their hunting and fishing grounds. But the state merely published a legal notice in a obscure newspaper that few natives read. When no claimants appeared, the state took over. Word of that land grab and others spread from village to village. Banding together as the Alaskan Federation of Natives, which represents 18 organizations, the natives elected delegates who took their case to Washington. In 1966, then Interior Secretary Stuart Udall declared a total "land freeze," which expires this December. The natives are asking Congress for 40 million acres, $500 million in compensation for the rest of Alaska and royalty payments for mineral exploitation. Last week the Senate voted overwhelmingly to offer $1 billion (over a twelve-year period), but only 10 million acres. The next step is the House, which seems to give the natives the land they want but not as much money. Meantime, both federal and state governments are jockeying for special areas of the state. Washington, which might be wisely managing the land, so far has acted merely as caretaker. State policy is crasser. Depending on the Federal Government to preserve parks, wilderness and forests, Alaska is trying to select the prime mineral-rich areas as state land. "The land is the value," says Tom Kelly, Alaska's commissioner of natural resources. Reason: the state gets 100% of revenues and royalties from mineral leases on its own land, but lesser yields from leases on federal land. Victor Fischer, director of the University of Alaska's Institute of Social, Economic and Government Research, has a word for current land- use planning: "Horrendous." The natives can, of course, tie up the land in court battles if they are not treated fairly. Already there is some talk in Juneau of a coalition between environmentalists and the natives. "I see no reason why the natives cold not make a common cause with the conservationists, fishermen and teachers," says Willie Hensley, a young Eskimo legislator. "The only decision we cannot make," says Alaskan Ecologist Robert B. Weeden, "is to stay aloof from change." Wherever man has settled on the great land, he has left an ugly mark. Anchorage, rimmed on three sides by mountains, has air pollution problems like those of Los Angeles. In Fairbanks, ice fogs mix with smoke and auto exhaust to produce a particularly noxious result, and the Chena River, which splits the city, is a sewer. In the desolate village of Eek (pop. 182), sewage disposal is impossible because the water table is practically level with the ground. The only flush toilet in town is disconnected. Human excrement flows in little rivulets down the street. The Goddamn Fragile Tundra Man's impact is worst in the frozen Arctic Circle, where nature's recuperative powers, in effect, go into hibernation. In Barrow, the state's northernmost town, the streets are littered with crippled Volkswagens, discarded tires, bits of limber and old 50-gallon oil drums. Even on the vast tundra, the tracks of World War II bulldozers are still plainly visible. Scars from 30-year-old seismic tests are unhealed. Debris remains and remains, its decay slowed by the cold. A piece of wood was recently retrieved from a depth of 1,400 feet, where it had been lodged between two coal seams many millions of years old. It looked like a fresh chip. In 1968, a search party dug up the body of Charles Francis Hall, an explorer who was buried in a shallow grave at Greenland in 1871. He was almost recognizable. In the slow-motion rhythms of Arctic life, a crop of simple lichen may take 100 years to grow to maturity--a few inches high. Arctic char, a staple Eskimo food, keeps on growing for 18 years. Migratory birds--lesser Canada geese, eider ducks, American pintails, whistling swans, Brant geese- -must time their breeding to the day. If winter is unusually long, a whole species may achieve zero population growth because it lacks time to hatch and rear its young before the ice begins to return in late August. The far north is a simple ecosystem with a few distinct species. While a lake in California may contain several hundred species of phytoplankton, an Arctic lake has only a dozen. This lack of diversity, in ecological terms, is tantamount to vulnerability. Any species can be wiped out and no other species will take its place. The result is expressed in a word that many Alaskans have come to hate: fragility. Says Walter Hickel: "It used to be the hostile, frozen north; now it's the goddamn fragile tundra." Into this delicate if hostile world, man has burst as a stranger. "There is a new urgency for knowledge of the tundra," says Zoologist Frank Pitelka of Berkeley. "We know have a Texas-size threat to a land doubtfully able to take it." In the past two years, however, the major oil companies have compiled an excellent record. They have hired Arctic ecologists to help minimize the effects of their presence, even going so far as to develop hardy strains of grass to protect the tundra. Helicopters move whole drilling rigs to avoid ripping up the topsoil. Three companies have built their own highly advanced sewage-disposal units to prevent pollution of the ground water supply. No Alaskan city, in fact, can yet match those units. But the real test--moving the oil--has not yet been met. TAPS has spent, its officials say, $16.5 millon so far on soil tests and aerial photographic surveys of the line's route across Alaska. "If we embarrass the Administration with any sort of ecology problem," says a Humble executive, "we will be crucified." Plans call for the "best pipe ever used by the oil industry," he adds. Electronic monitoring devices and 30-ton safety locks would turn off the pipeline's pressure five minutes after a leak was spotted. An Uncertain Future Despite all this, the U.S. Geological Survey has still not approved TAPS' plans. The key issue is how much of the pipe will be buried in the permafrost and how much will be elevated above it. The Geological Survey feels that 50% of the line should be raised on stilts over the unstable ground. TAPS wants to bury 90% of the line where it will be safe from vandals. Besides, lifting the pipe on stilts costs about 25% to 60% more per mile than burying it--quite an increment on a $1.7 billion job. Details clearly have to be worked out. Ray Morris of the Federal Water Quality Administration describes that first plans that he saw last year: "We reviewed cartoons. That's what they were--cartoons." Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that the oil companies still talk of sending icebreaking supertankers to butt through the Northwest Passage. "The very idea of transporting oil through the Arctic peaks in 250,000-ton tankers causes ecologists to go green at the gills," says Zoologist Douglas Pimlott of the University of Toronto, "because sooner or later one will sink" and oil and icy water clearly do not mix. To some people, the Alaskan environment is far more precious than the oil. Conservationist David Brower, President of Friends of the Earth, argues that oil withdrawals should be rationed for several centuries. Others feel that the environment is secondary to more pressing priorities. Oil executives, for example, point out that as long as the U.S. insists in its cars and all the other machines requiring fuel, oil companies will have to supply the demand. As one oil man puts it: "We are a high-energy society, and oil generates 75% of our energy." Politicians talk of "national security"-- meaning both the economic well-being of Americans and the ability of the U.S. to stand firm against foreign threats to cut the international flow of oil. The fact is that even with the North Slope strike, the U.S. will never again be self-sufficient in oil. When Prudhoe Bay crude starts flowing to the lower 48 states, it will satisfy only 5% of the U.S.'s annual demand. The rest will continue to come from Texas, Louisiana, California--and foreign producers. Beyond that, there are other potential oil sources, although admittedly uncertain and still in the far future. Some experts envision a North American energy market that would tap Canada's vast, undeveloped supplies. When the world's oil wells are fully depleted, there will still be immense reserves locked away on tar sands and shale. By then, nuclear energy will help to supply the "high-energy society." All this does not mean that Alaskan oil is unnecessary to the U.S. It does mean that it can be developed gradually and with suitable environmental controls. Its impact should be judged primarily in relation to the needs of Alaska. If the oil boom is regenerated, it may not directly affect two persistent areas of poverty--seasonal unemployment in the fishing and wood-pulp industries, and the exclusion of the natives from the economy. But it would obviously benefit the economy generally, especially the real estate, construction, retail-trade and mineral-exploration industries. The key question is what Alaska will do with the cash that oil pays the state in leases and royalties. Alaskan Economist Arlon R. Tussing suggests that "the only way to guarantee that the money does any good to most of us is to hand it out to the people. The state should form an investment company, something like a mutual fund, and distribute the stock to Alaskans on the basis of one share for every year of residence in the past 15 years." In this way, a family of five could expect an annual income of about $2,500 from the first $900 million lease sale alone. Though Tussing is only half serious, the bet is that Alaskans will not repeat the mistakes of this year's postponed boom. The state legislature can surely do better. In its last session, which ran a record 147 days, precious little was accomplished in long-term planning. The lawmakers had a "Blueprint for the Future" prepared by the Brookings Institute in Washington. Governor Miller preferred to order up his own study by the Stanford Research Institute. Result: ineffectual bickering about differences between the two versions. Still, one of the charms of the Alaskan legislators is that they have a particularly close relationship with their constituents. Since most Alaskans were either burned or scarred by the boom's failure, both the lawmakers and the Governor are now determined to control the state's future. Many citizens already have high hopes. John A. Carlson, Borough Chairman of the Fairbanks area, yearns for new industry to come to his city and make it truly the "golden heart" of Alaska. He is not thinking of the jobs that will result, but of the taxes he desperately needs to clean up the appalling mess in Fairbanks. "You cannot fight pollution without money," he says. Anchorage, which is in much better condition, needs strong planning controls. "We have grown so fast that the land can no longer absorb us," says John Asplund, Chairman of the Greater Anchorage Area Borough, a form of urban supergovernment. "We've got to reverse the entire American pioneer act," State Senator Jay Hammond says. The great--and fragile--land is patently incapable of holding an unlimited number of people. Most planners believe that twice as many people as now may well be quite enough. The old theory that Alaska's sheer size and emptiness can absorb any insult without ill effect has by now been disproved by all too many examples. Instead, new growth must be selective and controlled. A vital first step would be to establish a federal-state land commission to plan and zone all of Alaska. This can be done because the 49th state is still mainly wilderness, most of it controlled by the state and federal governments. The old mining and homesteading laws should be reformed to prevent continuation of the present system of irrational first-come, first-served claims. In addition, a partial freeze should be continued until present surveying and assessing programs by federal agencies can be completed. With 20 more planners, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management estimates, it can classify all Alaska by 1980. Frontier Mythology Unlike the radical conservationists and doomsday ecologists in the lower 48 states, Alaska's environmentalists do not object to growth--as long as it is controlled. Thus ecologist Robert Weeden asks for a "land ethic" that would avoid urban America's pollution, develop recreation areas and "help defend those delightfully 'useless' animals, plants and empty miles that might be the ultimate salvation of man." Nor is Weeden's vision unrealistic. Alaska could absorb some more settlers and many more tourists than the 100,000 who now visit the state each year, mainly the southern panhandle. But the state badly needs highways, railroads, hotels, ski areas and more public parks--new lures for urban Americans as well as Japanese, who are relatively near. With rational resource planning to pay the bills for such development, Alaska should face a magnificent future. As Weeden suggests, "The world needs an embodiment of the frontier mythology, a sense of horizons unexplored, the mystery of uninhabited miles. It needs a place where wolves stalk the strand lines, because a land that can produce a wolf is a healthy, robust and perfect land. But more than these things, the world needs to know that there is a place where men live amid a balanced interplay of the goods of technology and the fruits of nature." In this sense, Alaska is not so much the last frontier as the new frontier; the place to prove that Americans can live in harmony with the environment, not abuse it. </body> </article> </text>