Politics in Alaska

Conservation Movement

Fewer words are more politically charged in Alaska than conservation and preservation. Alaskans of nearly all stripes agree that at least some of the Great Land needs to be "preserved" or "conserved," but what those words actually mean and how much land is involved has been at the heart of heated debates in Alaska for more than a century.

From the first efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt to limit potential mining development in Alaska to the present debate on "roadless areas" in the Tongass National Forest, the question for either development or preservation has always been, "How much is enough?" It's safe to say that most residents feel that the state should be allowed to develop its resources in a manner that it sees fit, taking into account that no one really wants to environmentally foul their own nest. But with 70% of Alaska federally owned, it's not realistic to assume that Alaskans have the final say. And many others in the rest of country realize that they do have a "say" in how Alaska is developed and are not shy in exercising it.

Of course, historically Alaska has often found itself in the unfortunate position of having its major industries (fishing, timber, tourism, oil) controlled elsewhere. Some have called Alaska an economic "colony" throughout most of its history, and it's hard to argue with that characterization.

In response to the lack of "access" to most of its land base, Alaska has accepted instead one of the highest levels of per-capita federal spending in the country. And it has celebrated leaders such as Sen. Ted Stevens, who served for more than 40 years and brought billions of federal dollars back to the state.

In truth, many Alaskans do not see the conservation debate as a zero-sum game, where one side must win and the other lose. Alaska already has more wilderness land and more national parks than any other state, and more land can be preserved without preventing the state from taking charge of its economic future. But there must also be a realization that Alaska cannot survive if the rest of the country demands it "make up" for all the environmental mistakes that America has made elsewhere. There will have to be some sort of economic development, or else Alaska will continue to have to rely on billions of dollars from the federal treasury in order to survive.

Statehood & Native Lands

The fight for Alaska's statehood was a fight for control of land and fishing resources. Except for a few homesteads and tiny towns, all of Alaska remained federally owned. The Statehood Act would transfer 103 million acres to the new state, about a third of its total landmass, to be selected over a 25-year period. Statehood leaders hoped to use these lands to produce the resource boom dreamed about since the gold rush.

The founding of the state in 1959 brought huge celebrations in Alaska cities, but worry in some Native communities. Alaska Natives had never abandoned traditional lifestyles of hunting, fishing, and gathering. Their claims to their land mostly had not been resolved, but as long as Alaska lacked property lines, it hadn't mattered much. The wording of the Statehood Act nodded to their land rights but gave no real assurance they would receive title. The threat of losing their land to the State of Alaska forced Native groups to organize and become militant in the 1960s.

Westward expansion in the rest of the United States had robbed American Indians of land, but in Alaska, they were able to stay on their ancestral land. However, the population was ravaged by disease brought in by the outsiders. Salmon canneries destroyed fish runs and starved villages. Russian fur traders and Yankee whalers depleted marine mammals Natives used for food and clothing. Newcomers introduced alcohol abuse and disease epidemics that wiped out entire villages. Christian missionaries and teachers suppressed Native languages and culture and imposed social practices and ways of life inappropriate to the Alaskan environment. Natives faced official discrimination in their own land, were denied economic opportunity, and were subject to racial segregation.

Alaska's leaders of the 1960s had little interest in a land settlement for the Natives, but new national awareness of American Indian rights had an impact in Washington, D.C. As Alaska Natives filed claims covering almost the entire state, the federal government froze release of land to the state, or to almost anyone else. Then, at the end of the decade, America's largest oil field was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, in northern Alaska, on land owned by the state. Boosters saw that, under the Native land freeze, construction of a pipeline to remove the oil could be indefinitely delayed. With the support of the oil industry, Alaska politicians lined up in support of a generous settlement of Native land claims to get things moving.

Prodevelopment Alaskans had feared that land transferred to the Natives would be used for traditional Native priorities -- hunting and gathering -- not for economic projects such as mining, timber cutting, or oil drilling. But the form of the Native claims settlement addressed that concern. Land was transferred into for-profit corporations owned by Native shareholders -- corporations that would be forced to earn a profit and, therefore, would be motivated to develop their lands.

When the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act passed in 1971, it was the largest indigenous land settlement yet in history, returning 44 million acres of land. And it initiated a new way of Native people relating to their land -- not as tribes or tenants of reservations, but as corporate stockholders. Four decades later, some of these corporations had become the largest and most successful in Alaska.

Big Oil & Big Money

The completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1977 created the biggest boom in Alaska's history, and the billions of dollars of royalty money flowing into the state coffers truly changed everything.

The boom also brought in hundreds of thousands of new residents, all looking to "make it big in Alaska." While the urban areas, most notably Anchorage and Fairbanks, experienced the seedier side of prosperity, high crime, and urban congestion, most of Alaska was initially untouched. That changed when the state decided to spread its wealth around. Soon it seemed like almost every community had new schools and other new infrastructure. Villages that had survived for decades with very limited amenities found themselves recipients of sewer systems and paved streets.

Then the state legislature went one step further by creating an oil wealth dividend program that provided a check (a percentage of the earnings from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which set aside money from the boom years to help get through the eventual lean years) of between $1,000 and $1,500 to every resident. Before the major economic crash in 2008, the Permanent Fund had reached nearly $40 billion, and Alaskans were getting more than $1,500 a year from the state in "free money."

Interestingly enough, the political compromise necessary to build the pipeline also shepherded in one of Alaska's largest conservation events, ANILCA, which puts tens of millions of additional acres into wildernesses and refuges and created several additional mammoth national parks within the state.

Since the mid-1990s, Alaskans have been wrestling with what comes after the Prudhoe Bay oil reserves run out, as they inevitably will. A great political effort has gone into getting federal approval to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploratory drilling, but at press time, those efforts had come to naught. In recent years, the state legislature and the administration have been also attempting to get a natural gas pipeline built south from Prudhoe Bay to deliver that plentiful commodity to market, although no one seems to be stepping up to fund the multibillion-dollar project.

In the meantime, higher-than-expected oil prices are making up for the declining amounts of oil traveling through the pipeline, so the state continues along its generally free-spending path, and the growth and largesse of the government remains a significant portion of the Alaskan economy.