Golly, Wally!
Alaska's governor thinks big--but a wild and pristine state is the last thing on his mind.Remember the good old days--back before environmental impact reports, endangered species acts, and global-warming whiners? Back when visionary guys with ideas big enough to tame the brawny wilderness weren't held back by nit-picking bureaucrats?
Alaska Governor Wally Hickel remembers those days with fondness. In fact, he seems to think he's still living in them.
Last summer Hickel tried to punch an 82-mile road along an abandoned railroad on the sheer cliffs of the Copper River to the isolated coastal town of Cordova--without benefit of tedious formalities like environmental assessments or permits. The state had attempted the project 20 years ago, but was stopped by a Sierra Club lawsuit. This time the Club's worst fears were realized when state bulldozers plowed near Native burial grounds and dumped gravel and debris into the Copper River and its tributaries, fouling important salmon habitat and violating the Clean Water Act. Hickel defied a cease-and-desist order from the Army Corps of Engineers, and work stopped only when the "highway maintenance" funds he had appropriated for the project ran out. While he later admitted that "mistakes were made," Hickel vows to resume the roadwork this summer, using National Guard troops if necessary.
On the Paul Bunyan scale of "Wally World," as wags call his administration, the Copper River Highway is strictly small potatoes. "Big projects define a civilization," the governor is fond of saying, and he has an inexhaustible supply of them. Last August found him in Los Angeles, pushing his pipe dream of a 2,000-mile, $110-billion undersea aqueduct to bring fresh water from Alaska to thirsty Southern California. He also talks of a road over the North Pole to Norway, and has been pushing a second Alaska Pipeline, this one to carry natural gas from the North Slope to the port of Valdez.
The latter bubble burst when independent environmental activist Chip Thoma pointed out that it involved Hickel in a blatant conflict of interest: The governor owned a 12-percent share of Yukon Pacific, the corporation angling to build the pipeline. A subsequent state ethics investigation confirmed the charge, and Hickel was forced to donate his stock to a charity for the homeless. (They could use some help, as the governor recently slashed funding for social services in order to bankroll his pet megalo-measures. Not a penny will be realized from the stock, of course, unless the pipeline is actually built.) Unfazed, Hickel is still pushing what he calls the state's "most important" development priority.
Wally Hickel is what's known in Alaska as a "boomer," a True Believer in the redemptive power of unbridled natural-resource development. He long ago sloughed off the reputation as an environmental populist he gained after Richard Nixon plucked him out of the governor's office in 1969 and made him Interior Secretary. A year later he was fired for questioning the attack on antiwar students at Kent State. Returning to Alaska, he made multimillions in real-estate development, but was frustrated in three attempts to return to the statehouse.
Hickel appeared to be sitting out the 1990 race until minutes before the registration deadline, when he unexpectedly filed as a candidate for the fringe Alaska Independence Party (AIP). With his own fortune funding the campaign and the electorate split three ways (four, counting the fledgling Green Party), Hickel won, with only 39 percent of the vote.
The traditional centerpiece of the AIP's platform is a demand that Alaska secede from the Union, the better to exploit its natural resources. While Hickel disavowed this aim in his campaign, the federal government (which owns 60 percent of the state) remains the Great Satan of his administration. Congressional refusal to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge he calls "a crime against Christianity." He doesn't think Alaska should be required to ship all its North Slope oil to the Lower 48, and says he will sue to gain the right to sell oil directly to Japan and other foreign countries. "What the United States has done to Alaska is a scandal," he said in his January State of the State address. "If a Third World country were similarly abused, the United Nations would step in."
While Hickel is not supporting secession per se, his agenda might not look much different if he were. Allen Smith, Alaska regional director of The Wilderness Society, sees in Hickel's actions a concerted plan to crack open the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which preserved more than 100 million acres of wild Alaska in 13 national parks and 16 national wildlife refuges.
"Hickel's revenge for ANILCA," as Smith calls it, starts with his assertion of state ownership of the beds of all "navigable" Alaskan rivers, which he construes as anything on the map with "river" in its name, whether you can float a boat on it or not. Since this claim includes rivers flowing through federal lands, it could serve as a wedge for the industrial development of currently protected areas. Early test cases, says Smith, may be a placer mine at Moose Creek in Denali National Park, and oil and gas exploration on the Jago River in the Arctic Refuge.
Hickel also imagines a latticework of railroads and highways opening up the interior. He has directed his Department of Natural Resources to assert the state's right-of-way over 1,400 tracks, trails, and dog-sled paths across federal lands, which Alaska could then seek to develop a la the Copper River Highway, leading to state roads crisscrossing Denali, the Arctic Refuge, and other wilderness areas. The result, Smith predicts, will be "a major confrontation over who really owns and manages Alaska's federal lands."
Given this backdrop, it's easy to understand why many Alaska environmentalists eagerly signed on to the campaign to recall the governor. Begun by members of the Alaska Independence Party disgruntled over Hickel's failure to cut taxes, the effort has been endorsed by the Alaska Chapter of the Sierra Club, the largest organization in Alaska to do so. "Hickel's a lot like Ronald Reagan," says the Club's Associate Alaska Representative, Pamela Brodie. "He's been giving the same speech for years, and then he got elected. He has a radical development agenda, and if he can't get his way through normal democratic procedures, he goes around them."
Joe Vogler, AIP party chair, is blaming the "damned, dirty, filthy hands" of the CIA for the recall, the motive supposedly being the governor's opposition to federal policy. Hickel is choosing to blame "elitist" organizations like the Sierra Club. "What has the Sierra Club ever done for the hungry, homeless, the unemployed?" he asks.
Environmental activists in Alaska spent the spring standing in the snow, collecting signatures for their recall petitions. "Hickel seems to be conducting the recall for us," grins Chip Thoma, now a recall-campaign coordinator. "The multitude of scandals in the last 14 months have convinced a lot of people that this is not the government we want for the next three years." At presstime, recall organizers were close to the 20,000 signatures it takes to certify the recall petition. If they reach that mark, they will still need to gather a further 50,000 signatures to give Alaska voters a chance to bring Wally World back to earth.
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| Title Annotation: | Alaska Governor Walter Hickel's lack of environmental concern |
|---|---|
| Author: | Rauber, Paul |
| Publication: | Sierra |
| Date: | May 1, 1992 |
| Words: | 1220 |
| Previous Article: | Illusions of wilderness. |
| Next Article: | Pigs in the parlor: in re Supreme Court vs. the environment. |
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