The Two Alaskas

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.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante and David Postman/Juneau and Paul A. Witteman/Valdez