On the Alaska Peninsula, near the Aleutian Islands, the 800-or-so Aleut residents of King Cove have “pleaded for safe and reliable road access” to the neighboring community of Cold Bay for decades. There is no hospital in King Cove, and it’s only accessible by air or water, weather permitting. Bad weather delaying flights out of the town’s gravel airstrip has led to over 217 medical evacuations since 2013. An 18-mile, single-lane, unpaved road to Cold Bay, winding through a corner of the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, would allow residents to get to Cold Bay’s all-weather airstrip and get lifesaving medical care.
After decades of ping-pong between administrations, construction was finally set to begin this summer. Yet in August, a federal judge vacated a necessary land exchange between the federal government and an Alaska Native corporation, ruling the Interior Department had violated federal law, including the Endangered Species Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).
Since they’re so remote, I’ve never been to King Cove or Cold Bay. But I left my birthplace of Wasilla, Alaska, for college in 2018, and I haven’t yet come home. I’m far from alone: of the high school class of 2005 who got their college degrees outside of Alaska, only 25 percent were living in-state in 2021. The state has lost more residents to migration than it has gained for thirteen straight years.
Alaska’s fourth governor, Jay Hammond, served between 1974 and 1982, and championed the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which he intended to give all Alaskans an ownership stake in the state’s resources. He evaluated proposed projects during his governorship under four criteria that he “felt crucial to assure healthy resource development.”
Is it environmentally sound? Do most Alaskans want it? Can it pay its own way and not require state subsidies? And does it provide maximum benefit to the people?
That last principle is in Alaska’s state constitution, Article VIII, which requires the legislature to manage the “utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources” for “the maximum benefit of its people.” Yet the state struggles to develop the projects that would fix problems and bring economic opportunity to its residents, despite utilization and development ranking just as highly as conservation in the state’s founding documents.
Hammond’s rubric also doesn’t prioritize the opinions of national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Defenders of Wildlife (Washington, D.C.) and Wilderness Watch (Missoula, MT) — two of the organizations that successfully got the King Cove land exchange squashed. Alaska is worth a great deal to people who will never live here, as a fundraising icon that has to stay untouched and argued about in conference rooms on K Street and the corridors of federal agencies.
These organizations do not have to live with the consequences of these decisions, and they tend to flatten the serious debates over natural resource projects, treating the people who live in Alaska as a monolith when it is convenient to their priorities. Consider the Ambler Road, a proposed 211-mile industrial road to a copper and zinc mining area in the Northwest Arctic Borough. In 1980, Alaska agreed to set aside 10 federal parks, preserves, and monuments spanning more than 100 million acres of Alaska wilderness. In a great compromise, ANILCA guarantees that “The [Interior] Secretary shall permit such access” to the mining district for resource development.
After initial approval by the first Trump administration in 2020, and the Biden administration suspending the permits and denying the right-of-way, the Trump administration last year cleared the project to proceed. The Wilderness Society called the federal government’s decision a “betrayal of Alaska’s overwhelming local opposition to the project.”
But it’s not unanimous in the slightest. When the Biden Administration blocked the Ambler Road, PJ Simon, first chief of the Allakaket Tribal Council, said, “We need this road access to feed our families and allow for more affordable goods… as well as the jobs and investment it would provide for our village.” Miles Cleveland, president of the Native Village of Ambler, said that the road is “the only way our villages will survive,” and offers “a path forward for my grandchildren and my people.”
The Ambler road is only more urgent as the Northwest Arctic Borough’s largest employer, the Red Dog zinc mine, stares down a dwindling supply expected to deplete around 2031. The Borough has seen a 1.43 percent average annual decline in population over the last five years as young people move away.
I could go on about the proposed projects delayed for years, or even decades, in Alaska — from the Alaska liquefied natural gas pipeline (AK LNG) and oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to the Susitna-Watana hydroelectric dam — and why I, and others, think these projects can be pursued in an environmentally sound way and bring “maximum benefit” to the people of Alaska.
Yet the broader point is this: Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of different projects. In cases like King Cove, where Alaskans are dying for lack of medical care, the answers to Hammond’s questions seem to tilt in favor. For the Ambler Road, the calculus is more nuanced. But every Alaskan has a stake in these projects that employees at far-away NGOs will never be able to match, through ownership in the Permanent Fund Dividend and through careful stewardship of the land they fish, hunt, mine, drill, and recreate in.
Gov. Hammond, when asked if he was an environmentalist, responded, “Of course. Isn’t everyone?” But, he continues, “there are also social, economic, and spiritual dimensions to the environment.” Those are too often ignored. Without responsible economic development, young Alaskans move away, and the state suffers when its next generation of caretakers is driven away by lack of economic opportunities and necessary infrastructure.
The people of King Cove are no closer to the road they need than when I was a little kid. Someday, I’d like to come home to an Alaska that makes opportunities for the people who live there.
Sarah Montalbano is energy policy analyst at Always On Energy Research and the Independence Institute, and a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Center for Energy and Conservation. She writes on Substack at Montalbano Mondays.