Big Miracle (8 page)

By the second half of the nineteenth century, commercial whaling had become the world's first major global industry and it was dominated by the United States. From heating oil to cosmetic products, the whale was a veritable gold mine to any group of men intrepid enough to hunt and kill one. Giant fleets of whaling vessels incorporating then state-of-the-art seafaring technology plied the high seas in search of fortunes for captain and crew. They enriched the New England towns which they built, housed, and maintained these great fleets.

The whales' last great sanctuary was under attack almost as fast as the sleek new vessels could make it up Alaska's uncharted coast. Its waters were the richest yet. They proved so fertile, in fact, that some companies established whaling stations along isolated stretches of Alaska's northern coast to service their fleets with fresh food and fuel. These stations would serve as the first permanent inroad into Eskimo life. The isolated depots quickly grew in importance to natives and to whalers. For the first time, the Eskimos began to trade for goods.

The whalers introduced the Eskimos to unheard-of luxuries like wood and textiles. The white man quickly learned the Eskimos' strengths and weaknesses. Their strength was their uncanny ability to survive in the Arctic. Their weakness could be summed up in one word: alcohol. The damage was both instant and catastrophic. The white man was destroying not only the great whales, but the people who depended on them.

Almost immediately after the whalers arrived, Eskimos contracted alien diseases and died from them. Early on, it was not unusual for hundreds to die of disease every year. Scores of Eskimos went to work for the whaling crews anxious to exploit their skills. Countless others were murdered by competing whalers—not because they were Inuit but because they helped competitors.

We have to feel guilty about something if we are going to count ourselves among the modern sophisticates, don't we? Surely, we must atone for one tragedy or another at all times—be it colonialism, trans fats, slavery, or secondhand smoke. So why not whales? Public confessions of guilt are well and good but guilt about the past without worry for the future makes the guilt offering incomplete. Thus public-issue worrying is tantamount to flaunting moral virtue. Besides, worrying works; it edifies and ennobles the worrier. Not to mention that worrying is both easier and cheaper than actually doing something.

Even though more whales were now being hunted due to surging global demand, because the Eskimos were catching fewer themselves, more started dying from starvation, although no one has real or reliable numbers. Too many of their able-bodied hunters were too drunk to hunt. To make matters worse, the town's anxious elders, unsure how to make their way in this new and unfamiliar world of enterprise and barter, offered to give American whalers the servitude of their best whalers in exchange for molasses to make liquor.

In less than a generation, the long self-sustaining Eskimo community Thomas Elson discovered had been devastated. The changes came too fast for too many to adjust to. In less than two decades, both the Eskimos and the whales had been nearly wiped out. But one thing that had not yet changed was the Eskimos' dependence upon the whale.

The discovery and commercialization of crude oil that ended large-scale commercial whaling did not arrive until the first third of the twentieth century; too late to prevent much of the dislocation that devastated Alaska's native populations. Barrow plunged into abject poverty—or so the narrative went. “Facts are stubborn things,” famously said John Adams, and there were just not enough facts about Barrow before time arrived to sustain any of the before-and-after poverty statistics. After all, the portrait of nineteenth-century Britain drawn by Charles Dickens is one of overcrowding, squalor, and grinding poverty. But where is the image of what came before Dickens?

Why was London so crowded? Did the untold hordes flock to such a crowded, poor, and filthy place in order to make their lives still more miserable? Or did they come because they thought conditions we now think of as appalling, would be in fact better than those they left? So, probably, it went with Barrow. No matter how you slice it, Barrow's population tripled in a century and a half after its discovery. The invisible living conditions before Elson were likely much worse than the poor but visible conditions seen after him.

To survive, the Eskimos tried to resume their subsistence hunting ways. But the whales and the skills to capture them had atrophied. Barrow listed, even though its population continued to climb. It remained unknown to all but a handful of missionaries and white traders until shortly after World War II. The cold war gave Barrow and its location a sudden burst of strategic importance. By the early 1950s, Barrow's northern periphery was the perfect site for the U.S. Air Force to build its Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) radar station to alert against Soviet bombers flying overhead on their way to drop nuclear bombs on the United States or Canadian mainland.

At its peak in the mid to late 1950s, DEW Line employed hundreds of locals before being made obsolete in the 1960s by the intercontinental ballistic missile that flew too high and too fast to stop. The rest of the town continued their age-old hunt for bowhead whales, whose population was recovering from the days of unrestricted commercial whaling.

On February 18, 1968, Barrow's fortunes changed again. After $125 million of fruitless drilling on the tundra 270 miles east of Barrow at a desolate place called Prudhoe Bay, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) finally struck what was the then the single largest single oil and natural gas field ever found. Geologists in the late 1960s' estimated there might be 15 billion barrels of oil and up to 26 trillion cubic feet of natural gas just two miles beneath the surface. To see just how far the science of oil and gas drilling has advanced since then, projections published by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 2009 estimates that the Barrow/North Slope coast contains 83 billion barrels of oil and 1,600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in recoverable untapped reserves.

The Eskimo always thought that the black liquid they called Uqsruq that oozed from the surface of their frozen land was a poison of an angry spirit, not that different to what medieval Arabs thought oozed from their lands. They watched as Uqsruq killed people, strong birds, and mighty animals. But the white man seemed to find great value in it. Soon the Inuit would see the benefits and want his share of them. So anxious were outsiders to use this plentiful and powerful resource, they would commit the largest private capital investment up to its time—$20 billion—to designing and building the massive infrastructure needed to safely and efficiently get the oil out of the ground and through 825 miles of pipeline stretched across some of the world's most treacherous terrain and onto super massive supertankers at the Southeastern Alaskan port city of Valdez waiting to transport it around the world to be refined into gasoline to power our cars, trucks, and airplanes we rely on to get us where we need to go.

The fields at Prudhoe Bay would provide, at their peak in the mid-1980s, nearly a quarter of all the oil consumed in the United States, or nearly 2.2 million barrels of oil per day. Alaska's three-dollars-per-barrel tax on state-produced crude generated enough revenue to fund 90 percent of Alaska's state government. Alaskans of all kinds seemed only too delighted. Good thing for Alaskans that the oil companies were as greedy as they were. The state taxes paid on their profits were so great, that Alaskans themselves paid no state sales, property, or income taxes. By the late 1980s, Alaska was not only America's least taxed state, it was also its fastest growing state. A coincidence?

By 2011, just two North Slope oil fields, Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk, had delivered more than 16 billion barrels of high quality American produced oil to the Lower 48. But by 2011, production had declined by nearly two-thirds, causing the oil pushed through the pipeline to travel much more slowly and at lower pressures, dramatically increasing the problems of clogging and rapid freezing, threatening the long-term viability of the multibillion dollar pipeline—precisely as environmentalists had been hoping for all along. If the pipeline is forced to close, Alaska laws require that it be dismantled.

As productive as Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk have been, the potential of these fields is dwarfed by untapped resources lying below federal land nearby. To the west sits the 23-million-acre Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, established back in the 1920s by President Warren G. Harding, where recent surveys estimate 15 billion barrels of easily recoverable oil. Just east, on only two thousand of the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), lies another 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Look north out to the vast sea and there are another 30 billion barrels of oil equivalent—twice as much oil as forty years worth of oil produced at Prudhoe Bay.

Yet there the oil sits. Keeping ANWR off limits has been an environmental cause célèbre for decades. While filing suit against every attempt to open up new federal or state lands is the newer tactic, it took almost twenty years until additional lease sales in the Chukchi Sea could even get provisional approval in 2008. But even then, once the rights to nearly three million new acres were auctioned off, environmental groups filed suit to prevent the deal, which a judge halted in July 2010.

By 2010, it took more than thirty separate permits from various federal and state agencies before one could even start exploratory drilling in Alaska. This caused companies like Shell Oil, that had spent years running the regulatory gauntlet, to close up shop in Alaska altogether. Even President Barack Obama's approval of new lease sales in Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve in 2011—proposed in response to record high gas prices—has fallen on deaf ears inside his own Army Corps of Engineers, which denied ConocoPhillips's request to drill in an area it already owns inside the Petroleum Reserve.

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Few people in the Lower 48 knew much about their fellow countrymen settling America's last, harshest, and potentially richest frontier. America's forty-ninth state was a giant paradox: a land of contrasts, contradictions, and immeasurable beauty. Unlike other Americans, late-twentieth-century Alaskans continued to think of themselves and their great land as a separate, distinct place—almost its own country. Alaskans called people who lived elsewhere “outsiders.” Any place outside the expansive borders of America's biggest state was referred to as “The Outside.” Separated from the Lower 48 by thousands of miles, Alaskans were also separated by an ethic long lost down south: the ethic of nation building.

What a place it was. At more than half a million square miles, Alaska was one-fifth the size of the continental United States; nearly as big as Western Europe. Alaska spanned two continents and three distinct climatic zones. Reaching deep into Asia, Alaska held the distinction of being both America's eastern- and westernmost state. Seventeen of North America's twenty highest mountains were in Alaska, as were more than 100,000 glaciers. Alaska encompassed an island chain—the Aleutians—that was longer than the continental United States was wide. Despite being America's least settled territory, Alaska, by virtue of being the first stop off the primordial Asian land-bridge, was also America's first settled territory.

By 1988, less than thirty years after its admission as America's forty-ninth state, Alaska was America's least densely populated state: less than one person per square mile, one of the world's lowest man-to-land ratios. In the late 1980s, Alaskan caribou outnumbered Alaskan humans ten to one. By 2010, the ratio jumped to twelve to one.

While Alaska had the highest per capita income of any state, Alaskans could hardly have been called the richest Americans because Alaska also had the highest cost of living. And then there was the weather. Always the weather. Outsiders weren't the only ones who considered life in Alaska brutal, backward, and harsh. So, too, did Alaskans; which is why many of them loved it. Nearly as many Alaskans had private pilot licenses as they did driving licenses. Still more lived quite happily—so they said—without plumbing or electricity. It was the rugged spirit of adventure that drew many to the Last Frontier; economic opportunity drew more.

But of all the adjectives used over the centuries to describe America's “last frontier,” the one that has kept most of its relevance over that time is remote.” The state had only one major road, the two-lane George Parks Highway connecting Anchorage and Fairbanks, which was regularly closed in winter, a nine-month season in Alaska. Half the state's population lived outside those two cities, meaning the only way they could get around was by air, sea, or dogsled. In an age of space shuttles and instant satellite communications, Alaska still remained remarkably uncharted. In 1988, less than one-twentieth of 1 percent of Alaska's magnificent terrain had ever even been visited.

For the rest of the country, Alaska meant cold and ice, and for good reason. Outsiders knew Alaska was big, but few had any idea of how big or how remote it really was. Outsiders knew that Alaska was home to exotic creatures like polar bears and moose, but few understood both the fragility and resiliency of its magnificent ecosystem until the infamous March 1989 spill of the
Exxon Valdez
that devastated southeastern Alaska's Prince William Sound. Fortunately, the dire predictions of the most alarmist of environmentalists did not come to pass. The most studied environmental disaster of all time revealed that species were not wiped out; that the biologically diverse Prince William Sound did not become a dead zone. The region, thought to be so fragile, in fact revealed itself to be remarkably resilient. It recovered far faster and much more vibrantly than anyone thought possible—not that disgorging half a million gallons of tar-thick crude oil in a sensitive and isolated marine rich environment is ever recommended.

But in a very real sense, it was environmental activism that caused the
Exxon Valdez
disaster. If it were up to the oil industry, there never would have been a ship called the
Exxon Valdez
in the first place. The oil industry wants to transport their crude by pipeline where and whenever possible because pipelines are cheaper, safer, and much easier to control. A consortium of Alaska drillers wanted to extend the Trans-Alaska Pipeline across Canada and down into the Lower 48. They were prevented from doing so by opponents who said that a pipeline would be too environmentally destructive. But as everyone found out in 1989 (and forgot quickly thereafter), supertankers are much more environmentally dangerous and disruptive than overland pipelines. Oil spills on land are infinitely easier to stop, contain, and clean up than those at sea.