Alaska's Chronic Right Wing Environmental Necrosis

Alaska Governor Sean Parnell formerly Sarah Palin’s Lt. Governor has made two economic proposals to advance energy production construction in the state. The first is a reduction of taxes on oil corporations in order to stimulate exploration and collaterally global warming and the second is to dam the Susitna River-one of the largest rivers per volume of flow in North America.

The Susitna River dam proposal is not just business as usual. It is a retrograde technical project environmentally from the right providing a good example of the disinterest of the right in learning fundamental lessons about environmental conservation from history. Alaska’s environment is chronically degraded on a number of fronts from mining, logging, oil production, over-hunting, over-fishing and damming.

Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage has a policy of shooting rather than relocating wolves callously degrading the gene pool of another threatened species. The right is a tool of global corporatism with a propensity for violence and procuring the loyalty of violent thugs. Reasoning like industrial introverts the right assumes that all opposition to global environmental destruction must be of the left. The concept that independents that are just smarter who support advanced low-entropy economic infrastructure development conducive to environmental recovery of health are in opposition. Such individuals may also have a better interpretation of the best application of capitalism to contemporary society with increased competition through a cap on the size of corporations.

Former Governor Sarah Palin advanced a good progressive taxation policy on Alaska oil producers setting higher taxes as the price per barrel increased. Governor Sean Parnell is seeking to role back that progressive oil tax in order to stimulate oil development. Obviously if the state can do more with less it could afford to be less reliant on federal handouts.

The once salmon rich Columbia and Willamette River drain that were the home for millions and millions of Chinook salmon now allow annual returns of fewer than a thousand per year on occasion as a consequence the history of northwest dam construction and insult to the waterways. The Federal government has spent public money for decades in a mostly failed effort to return health to the rivers.

The Parnell initiative to dam the Susitna River would radically alter in a deleterious way natural relations of water ecosystem interaction such that shoreline and aquatic ecosystems would be instantly degraded. Changes in water oxygen content, river flow patterns and of water temperatures in addition to the end of natural free flow with the ponderous obstruction to natural use would follow imposition of a large dam. River damming is equivalent to removing a human’s lungs and liver. Lung bypasses infusing oxygen directly into arteries may be technically possible, yet salmon and a number of other species may find changes in the ‘flavor’ of water harmful while the waters above the dam would experience substantial adverse affects.

Fundamentally the dam is a gross insult to Alaska ecology. It will accumulate and accelerate the concentration of pollutants behind the dam and of course provide destabilizing transformative environmental effects reducing quantity and quality of salmon fishing in Alaska.

The Yukon River drainage has already experienced an extreme reduction in number of salmon bring radical restructuring of human social use of the region.

Alaska is experiencing several other insults to its environmental quality from the right creating the need for more public spending to attempt to conserve the health of the region.

The right unfortunately have diminished competence in comprehension of America’s and one of the world’s best theologians- Jonathan Edwards ranking with Augustine, Athanasius, Barth and a few others. Edwards believed that aspects of God’s glory are revealed in nature. God is transcendently good, and beauty is good-hence the good and beauty if nature and environmental health may be regarded as a reveling of a quality of God rather than an old shoe to toss and purchase another one made of plastic. If we regard it as possible for human beings to perceive anything of God at all, t should be the good found in nature and in right relationship. Augustine and Calvin each believed that God is the author and sustainer of all things (hence the determinism); therefore humans should seek to let the providence of God develop low-entropy

Human relationships to and uses of the bounty of the environment instead of destroying it. Original sin including ecosystem wastage, despoliation and destruction is an inherent aspect of the fallen sin nature of mankind running like intemperate teen-agers over the ecology of the Earth. Catholics may believe that evil nature is reduced through a gradual becoming more Christ-like while Protestants tend to believe stress that the original sin nature is simultaneously present with grace following salvation by Jesus Christ and sin is only displaced through grace-yet the practical difference are not much if one regards the upstream source writings of Augustine, Calvin or Edwards.

Polar bear are an indicator species of the effects of global warming. As they have existed for quite a long time in Alaska and the northern littoral of the Arctic Ocean their extinction would definitely be an excellent indication that the environment had substantially changed. Obviously in the past human predation on polar bear nearly extirpated the species until they were given circumpolar protection from hunting. Now of course the basic problem to the survival of polar bear has expanded to include anthropogenic climate change. The pervasive increase of onshore and offshore trans-Arctic oil development contributes high latitude carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and additional greenhouse gases to the rarified air.

Another invidious development effort on Alaska’s Bristol Bay river drainage would put a large open pit mine named the Pebble Mine in a position to leach toxic mining and metals chemicals into the Bay as well as adversely impact countless small contributory streams that are the breeding areas for salmon. Sedimentation in waters draining into Bristol Bay and sedimentation, thermal and chemical composition pollutants following the proposed Susitna River Dam may be fiduciary externalities for politicians and developers seeking instant quick profits but they are assaults from the right on the environment they believe is inconsequential-as might those watching cartoons.

The federal government is considering restrictions on select S.E. Alaska fiords in order to protect the local seal population from being spilled from ice rafts on which they reside sometimes in summer in order to raise seal pups. Cruise ships by the thousands produce waves that spill the seal into the water. Surprisingly the body temperature of wildlife such as seals has environmentally adapted to particular conditions pre-existing changes brought on by human development of machines and the environmental changes of machines. Seals for example, if spilled into the water experience food-fuel, heating and energy changes in the season for which they are not adapted and the survival of those seals are endangered. There are other such species in Alaska that require a very narrow thermal habitation range seasonally in order to reproduce that anthropogenic environmental changes endanger.

S.E. Alaska’s fisheries bring in more than a billion dollars of revenue annually and are under assault from mining up rivers in Canada that flow into Alaska and reach waters of the Alexander Archipelago. Like the decrepit State of Washington, the prospects for long term environmental health in Alaska are grim as it shall likely die the death of thousands of cuts over time.