image credit-U.S. Forest Service (map of Tongass National Forest in S.E. Alaska)
S.E. Alaska’s Lynn Canal is America’s largest fjord in wilderness condition. Isolated individuals in Juneau with little to do in winters have attempted for decades to get the state to build a road nearly a hundred miles north along the Lynn Canal (fjord) to reach Haines and the continental highway system. Plainly the need for a highway is virtually non-existent. State population projections for the next three decades actually anticipate that the region will lose population as development moves north. The Tongass Forest wilderness area and Americans are actually lucky in that respect, for tourism, fishing and wilderness values benefit from the wilderness condition.
http://aktransportation.org/mega-projects/the-juneau-road-ferry-mega-project
The Navaho First Nations People the Navaho were evicted from their ancestral land and made to go on the Long Walk East before the civil war. Their lands in New Mexico and Arizona were viewed as resource rich. Today we are glad that President U.S. Grant returned the navaho to thei homelands in 1868 perhaps realizing that they would take better care of the environment than migrating resideual ex-confederates. Lynn Canal (fjiord) must be conserved as well for the sake of the American tribe and all of the wildlife depending upon it.
www.state.gov/documents/organization/38821.pdf
http://lynncanalconservation.org/
The development of a gold mine by a global corporation called the Kensington mine about halfway to Haines has stimulated the drive to build a road close to the fjord and on to Haines. The greed for gold drove countless First Nations peoples from their ancestral lands in America’s past. The desire to not only build a road to allow in hordes of RV’s, criminals, drug traffickers and easy ingression opportunities for terrorists with weapons of mass destruction from Canada’s headwaters of the Yukon District to the America will destroy the quality of life of Juneauites as well as the wilderness. Ten thousand prospectors and mining access roads will be built off the main road. Countless plinking of whales, illegal harvesting of grizzly bear for hamburger, skinning of marten, sables, mink, otter and torturing of bald eagles will occur. Fish producing streams will become polluted-in short the wilderness will be killed because of the quest for gold by global corporations flying in employees from Australia, Mexico and elsewhere.
Conservation of remaining fjords and wilderness areas in S.E. Alaska may be advanced with a Presidential Wilderness Legacy series wherein each President is encouraged to select a wilderness area in his or her name to add to America’s monumental conservation legacy. The Lynn Canal ought to become the Obama National Roadless Wilderness Fjord, and all roads within 15 miles of the fjord banned perennially.
President Theodore Roosevelt quote on the security of S.E. Alaska and concern about mining development in his 1903 State of the Union address. president Roosevelt was of course the founder of the national park system and a conservor of American wilderness as well as a President that confirmed boundary and administrative lines.
"As long as public plunderers when detected can find a haven of refuge in any foreign land and avoid punishment, just so long encouragement is given them to continue their practices. If we fail to do all that in us lies to stamp out corruption we can not escape our share of responsibility for the guilt. The first requisite of successful self-government is unflinching enforcement of the law and the cutting out of corruption.
For several years past the rapid development of Alaska and the establishment of growing American interests in regions theretofore unsurveyed and imperfectly known brought into prominence the urgent necessity of a practical demarcation of the boundaries between the jurisdictions of the United States and Great Britain. Although the treaty of 1825 between Great Britain and Russia, the provisions of which were copied in the treaty of 1867, whereby Russia conveyed Alaska to the United States, was positive as to the control, first by Russia and later by the United States, of a strip of territory along the continental mainland from the western shore of Portland Canal to Mount St. Elias, following and surrounding the indentations of the coast and including the islands to the westward, its description of the landward margin of the strip was indefinite, resting on the supposed existence of a continuous ridge or range of mountains skirting the coast, as figured in the charts of the early navigators. It had at no time been possible for either party in interest to lay down, under the authority of the treaty, a line so obviously exact according to its provisions as to command the assent of the other. For nearly three-fourths of a century the absence of tangible local interests demanding the exercise of positive jurisdiction on either side of the border left the question dormant. In 1878 questions of revenue administration on the Stikine River led to the establishment of a provisional demarcation, crossing the channel between two high peaks on either side about twenty-four miles above the river mouth. In 1899 similar questions growing out of the extraordinary development of mining interests in the region about the head of Lynn Canal brought about a temporary modus vivendi, by which a convenient separation was made at the watershed divides of the White and Chilkoot passes and to the north of Klukwan, on the Klehini River. These partial and tentative adjustments could not, in the very nature of things, be satisfactory or lasting. A permanent disposition of the matter became imperative."
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