Let's see now: sewage dumped into the inlet could be a problem, the noise at the airport could be a problem, oil and gas development, port expansion, and the Knik Arm bridge, just to name a few.
"Virtually every department in the city and every business in the region has a stake in this," Sullivan said, citing potential restrictions on discharges from Anchorage's water and sewer utility, noise limits at Stevens International Airport, air quality issues, oil and gas development, expansion at the Port of Anchorage and a proposed Knik Arm bridge.
"All those things come into effect with this beluga designation," Sullivan said. "Every one of those projects could be in jeopardy, and we cannot allow that to happen."
If all these things cause serious harm to the belugas, what are they doing to the people of Anchorage. We may not be dying off quite yet, but if sewage and oil contaminated salmon and hooligan could be harming the belugas, what might they be doing to humans who also eat them? How might the airport noise be affecting the hypertension levels of people living in Anchorage? How is our cancer rate affected by the oil and gas development that is threatening the belugas? It's true, we aren't swimming in the sewage and oil and gas that is contaminating the inlet and salmon makes up a much bigger proportion of the beluga diet than even the most avid human salmon killer.
But we also know that the collective human garbage is threatening the whole planet. Instead of a mayor who's vision is to continue doing what we have always done, I'd like to see a mayor who recognizes that we can't go on the way we have been. Who's looking for people with imagination to start us working on the economy of the 21st, not the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The mayor did support the Anchorage International Film Festival. I doubt that that he saw the documentary Tapped which examines the bottled water industry and what it is endangering people's inherent rights to water and how the bottles are among the worst international contaminents. Or if he saw A Sea Change, which explores the acidification of the world's oceans and how this threatens the food chain. Or if he saw My Toxic Baby which is a mother's exploration of the chemicals in the foods and other products marketed for her baby.
I know. From the mayor's point of view, these are simply alarmist left wing propaganda. But when I got to Anchorage in 1977, the conservative Anchorage Times was railing against the environmentalist who they saw as holding up the building of the pipeline. But all they did was make sure that there were environmental protections set in place. Protections that didn't stop the Exxon Valdez from spoiling Prince William Sound. And that aren't stopping BP from having spill after spill on the North Slope this year. But today's oil company ads recognize the importance of protecting the environment and BP even changed its logo to be green and gave BP a new meaning - beyond petroleum.
Those pesky liberals also made a big deal about smoking and now smoking and lung cancer rates as well as other smoking related illnesses are down.
But all these issues were strongly fought by those who wanted the status quo to remain. Just as Mayor Sullivan's answer to environmental degradation is to call for full speed ahead. And 30 years from now when the beluga is gone, people will tell their children how, like the canary in the coal mine, the beluga was a warning that human health was also in jeopardy.
Should we shut down and Anchorage and have everyone move back to where they came from? No. But before we spend money on bridge to Matsu, let's put people to work building a sewage plant that actually cleans our sewage before it goes into the inlet. Let's look at the impact of noise pollution on humans too. And let's get Costco and the other big box stores to recycle the plastic and other packaging that can't be recycled in Anchorage and ship it back where it came from. Let's look for jobs cleaning the environment, developing products that are environmentally friendly, business practices that are sustainable. Be a visionary, Dan. Bring Anchorage to a better future. Don't simply prolong a past that plundered our natural beauty for a quick buck and keeps pushing more garbage and noise into our community. Learn why economists call these things externalities and list them as one of the failures of the free market.
Ahab let his white whale drive him crazy. Mayor Sullivan will you handle your white whale better? Let's hope so.
if we keep screwing up the natural world as much as we already have, there will be many more endangered designations to come.
ReplyDeleteas much as i can't stand sullivan, or parnell/palin, they manage to drive a wedge into the debate by suggesting, partly correctly that activities conducted elsewhere, that we in alaska have no control over are partly at fault for the polar bear and beluga's plights. [but that same logic doesn't also make cons suggest that the first world needs to deal with worldwide climate change effectively, and compensate the third world for past polluting.]
anyway, you bring it home by saying we need to clean our own house first.
a lot of people who are more recent arrivals would be pretty surprised to be standing at a rest stop on turnagain arm in the '80s and watching literally scores of belugas going by.