Why Brent Scarpo Switched From Casting to Inspiring

Brent Scarpo was a casting director for The Shawshank Redemption and other Hollywood films, but switched to what he calls 'transformational' engagements on the topic of hate and how to end it.

He's coming to Anchorage Nov. 7-11.  I talked to him via Skype last Monday and video taped our conversation and intend to post excerpts from that conversation this week.  Note: I've never tried to record from Skype before and this time I did it by taping the screen with my camera.  The picture on the screen wasn't that good to start with, so I played with the special effects to make it not as obvious.  A friend who saw this said the original would have been better.  Sorry.  We learn by experimenting and I found out there's software out there to record directly from Skype and that is probably part of my future.

In the meantime, find out why Brent took a year off.  And the chance phone call he got from a college student that changed the direction of his life.  

Monday, Nov. 7, 2011  (You have a week left, put it on your calendar)

East High Auditorium 7pm

Free Public Presentation

I've said in a previous post about Brent that I'm on the Healing Racism in Anchorage Steering Committee, so, yes, this is a blatant plug for people to come when he's here. But I wouldn't post this if I didn't think it was a good thing to do. There's also a smaller workshop on Tuesday night from 5:30 - 9:00 for $50 for people who want more time with him and tips for working with other people on combating hate and racism.

And, as you'll hear in the video, he still has his fingers in a lot of pies.

Oedipus Wrecks Tree or the Sweeny Todd of Anchorage Tree Trimmers

Men of London went into Sweeny Todd's barber shop for a trim, and left the shop through a trap door with their throats slit and into Mrs. Lovett's famous pies.

Images from Blue-In-AK's Democratic Underground post

Blue_In_AK suggests at Democratic Underground a few days ago that Carlos Tree Trimmers of Anchorage, on contract with an Anchorage utility to trim trees around power lines, has a Sweeny in their employ.  (Well, she didn't mention Sweeny.)

"We had an absolutely beautiful Mayday tree in our front yard [BEFORE] that was probably at least 40 or 50 years old. It was already huge when I moved in here 22 years ago. Here's a picture of it last spring in full bloom. The blossoms were so fragrant, you could smell the tree all along our streert [sic].

"This morning the tree trimmers who the electric utility hires to cut out branches around the lines came by and asked us if they could trim the tree up. We said sure, they've done it many times before when the branches go up in the wires. We then went downtown to buy me some shoes, and when we got home, the tree looked like this [AFTER].

(The trouble buying shoes gets one into.)

I learned about this because comment 148 has a link to my post on May Day trees being an invasive species in Anchorage.  Lots of people have May Day trees here, so that's not my issue in this story.  


This sort of trim is completely inexcusable.  If the utility contracts out with tree trimmers, there should be a huge penalty clause for situations like this.  What kind of a person does this?  Someone, like Sweeny Todd, who has been badly warped by past ill treatment and now takes it out on poor trees and their unsuspecting admirers?


Blue_in_AK writes (comment 171) in response to comments about a company rep's visit:

He just kept saying I'm sorry, I'm sorry,

as if that was going to make any difference. And as it turns out, he is the owner's son who we later learned from a different supervisor had taken out someone else's ornamental earlier this week. The second supervisor who came to talk to us said he had worked on that tree many times, loved it himself and was very sorry that this had happened. The guy in charge of "danger trees" at the electric company said there are some things he wants to talk to us about that he didn't want to discuss while he was at work, which leads me to believe that they may be having many complaints about Carlos Tree Service. He and Carlos himself are coming out here tomorrow to discuss what can be done.

Oedipus was beyond sorry when he learned he'd killed his father.  He blinds himself in despair.  And Freud's most famous diagnosis was named after Oedipus. What sort of father-son stories underlie this defoliation?  Maybe he really doesn't want to work in the family business and sometimes he takes out his frustration on the trees.  Of course this is pure speculation with no factual basis whatsoever, but no one who loves trees would have done this.


I have to say that Carlos' company trimmed trees in our yard once - also on contract to the utility - clearing branches around the wires to our house from the utility pole.  They carefully trimmed - at our request and with us watching - the trees in our yard and while they left no branches leaning against the wires, you wouldn't have known they'd been there.  


So this wasn't what they normally do.  This goes back to a trimmer with a problem.  


If the mountain ash in front of our house were to be reduced to naked trunks overnight, I'd be upset as well.  And it's worse if something like this happens due to someone's recklessness than natural causes.


My heart goes out to Blue-in-AK and I hope you quickly find new opportunities to enjoy the yard.  Perhaps you can grow some vegies in the added sunshine until a new tree takes hold.  Or, as others have said in your comments, the tree may surprise you with thick regrowth in a year or two.  I know rose bushes need to be severely trimmed, and I've seen other trees come back quickly from such radical trimming. 

First Snow

It's not an impressive snow. Just a very thin covering. But it's here and there will be more.

What The Joker Can Tell us About Occupy Wall Street -

First, I'm the kind of person who can separate the idea from the person who said it. And even take the good ideas and leave the bad ones behind. I'm taking some ideas from a crazy, freaky character, because even he, sometimes, touched on the truth.

But I'm  NOT suggesting the Occupy Wall Street people share, in any way, the Joker's crazy freakiness. Heath Ledger, in this role, made this evil character, somehow human, somehow necessary.

I am suggesting that some of what he said can help us understand why the Occupy Wall Street folks are occupying, why many Americans support them, and why some people are freaking out over it. And why some of them are trying to portray the Occupiers as low-lifes, as lazy malcontents, and in the extreme case, as agents of the Joker's brand of craziness.


 It's about control, about planning. (And I don't for a second believe the Joker when he says he doesn't plan. You couldn't have bombs in all the right places without planning.)

Here's my take on what the Occupiers are saying,

"Whoa, the banks and other corporations and their lobbyists have planned and schemed so they now control the people who make the rules, the supposedly democratically made rules, so that the rules more and more favor the rich over everyone else. 
"The rules now legitimately take money from the middle class and the poor, and legally transfer it to the rich.

"The increasing gap between the poor and the rich isn't because the rich are deserving and the poor are lazy and unmotivated, but because the rules have been corrupted. We only have the facade of democracy. It's now time to disrupt those plans."

Of course those who have worked so hard to put the plans into place - to the point where they control five of the nine Supreme Court seats so they can validate or invalidate any law they need or need to destroy - aren't happy about disruptions. 

They don't like chaos. But the occupiers are, at least unconsciously, aware of the Joker's conclusion. Some chaos in an unfair system is the means to returning fairness. But chaos, not in the Joker's terms of destroying people and property in spectacular fashion,  but small disruptions of daily life. Blocked traffic. Some flowers trampled.  Third world sanitary conditions. Confronting business as usual.  Making people stop their normal merry-go-round lives and pay attention to what is going on. 

Support among the powerful for the Arab spring was muted. "What if the radical Muslims take over?"  they worried.  They are much less interested in fairness and human rights than predictable governments with whom they can make deals. They've never been concerned that Saudi women couldn't drive or vote as long as they got their oil deals.  And they're certain that they know what is best for everyone.  They can break laws spectacularly, but Occupiers must be held tightly to the laws.

And they are now acting as if the occupiers around the country were no different from the Joker, because underneath his freakiness, he understood what made them nervous - any challenge to their plans, any spontaneity, disruption of their normal way of doing business, and the possibility that other people might begin to question their plans.  Have you noticed the complaints about the Occupiers not having a plan?  That's what really disturbs them.  They can understand plans.  They can't understand or predict this though.

And so mayors around the country are coming up with excuses to send in the police, with batons blazing.  But people like veteran Scott Olsen who served in Iraq and had a good job and place to live are the faces of the Occupy movements.  Even though the planners want us to think that the Occupiers are more like the Joker.  [I have no illusion that there are some malcontents among the occupiers.  They always show up when something is happening.  But they aren't the face of the occupation any more than the corrupt business execs are the . . .well, hold that thought.  In today's USA I'm not so sure about the business executives.]

Read the small print from the script.  "Nobody panics when the expected people get killed.  Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.  If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics.  Because it's all part of the plan.  But when I say that one little old mayor will die, everybody loses their minds!"
Do I buy into everything the Joker says?  Of course not.  I'm not really a fan of chaos, except when the controllers have way too much control.  Remember all the Republicans who complained about the chaos demonstrators created in the Soviet bloc in 1989?  Me neither.   And the Tea Party folks use the chaos of the Boston Tea Party as their mascot.  Rebellion and revolution are good or bad depending on whose side you are on.



This is serious stuff going on.  Is the US going to be like Syria or Tunisia? 


[The excerpts from The Dark Knight script come from here.  And the video clip I did from a Blockbuster copy of the Dark Knight I rented.  Thanks Warner Brothers.  I have no ads here and I promise not to sell it or make any money off of it.]

First Play, Then Eat - The Vegetable Orchestra

Watch them make and the play their instruments.  They don't show them later eating them unfortunately.  Local foods people - certainly a vegie orchestra should perform at your farmers' markets! A more recent video shows them recording their album - Onionoise.

And on the vegetable orchestra website I found that eating is, indeed, part of the concert experience:

A concert of the Vegetable Orchestra appeals to all the senses. As an encore at the end of the concert and the video performance, the audience is offered fresh vegetable soup.

But I have to mention that hundreds of millions of people (actually more than three times the population of the USA)  around the world are going to bed hungry, even starving. Such orchestras can only exist where there is plenty of food.

Lingering Signs of Fall as Winter Approaches

Rain drops washing fallen mountain ash leaves the other day, 

but the sun's out again. 

Not all Canadian geese have left for warmer climes.

 And the water flows freely along Campbell Creek as it tumbles wildly under one of Anchorage's most busy roads - the New Seward Highway.   Cyclists have to negotiate the rocky banks to get past this spot still,  but a memo from Rep. Berta Gardner tells us that a real bike path is scheduled here by September 2013.

 The Seward Highway Upgrade Project, Dowling to Tudor, will also go to bid in October with groundbreaking in spring 2012 and scheduled completion in September 2013.  We continue to confirm that sound barriers along the freeway are included in the plan, as well as the long-awaited connection of the Campbell Creek Bike Trail under the Seward Highway.   This connection will give neighborhoods safe and easy access between east and west portions of the trail, opening up miles of trail to surrounding neighborhoods.

"We continue to confirm" sounds less than certain.  And I've ducked my head negotiating my bike over the rocky and sometimes wet path under the highway often enough that I might just miss it when it's paved and civilized here.  And will it be open the year they are building?  Who knows?

But we can be certain that winter is on the way.   It's the end of October and so far the snow's stayed in the mountains.  But the word is creeping into the weather forecasts for us lowlanders.

Translation Problems - Thailand's Flood "Holidays"

Translation from one language to another is complicated. Many words don't translate exactly.

• A word in one language may not exist in another language.  In German, for instance,  there is a formal and informal word for "you"  (Sie and Du.)  You address people close to you with Du, and use Sie for others.  If you use 'you' in a translation, English language readers won't immediately catch the nature of the relationship the way a German would.  (Germans today are more casual about using Du than they were in the past.)
• A word in one language may have a totally different implication because the cultural context is so different.  "Dan wei" is usually translated from Mandarin into English as "Work unit." When I spent some time in China in the early 90s a "dan wei" was not merely a place where you worked, but a place that pretty much defined your whole life - where you lived, where your kids went to school, how you got your food and other goods, and even whether you could get permission to get married.  Translating that as 'work unit' into English simply didn't carry all that meaning for readers unfamiliar with the cultural context.   
• And words often have overlapping meanings;  if you look up a foreign word in the dictionary and there are several choices in your language, you may pick the wrong word.  That seems to have happened in this headline below.

The headline at ThaiVisa was:

Thailand declares holidays to cope with flood crisis

BANGKOK, October 25, 2011 (AFP) - Thailand on Tuesday declared a three-day holiday in Bangkok and other flood-affected areas as high tides are forecast to flow up the city's main river and worsen floods creeping into the city.

ThaiVisa is a website for ex-pats living in Thailand.  Some of those commenting responded to the word 'holidays' by making snide comments about the Thai government:

"Only in thailand do they call disaster a holiday,,,land of smiles"

"a 5 day holiday is just what the people need
No food on the store shelves
No money in the bank machines" 

"Holidays?????
Companies and the economy is falling to pieces as we struggle to keep things going despite the chaos around us
Maybe Yingluck needs a holiday! The rest of us have to work to fix the mess they make... "

It's easy to be smug and put down others.  Often it reflects more on the speaker than on the object of derision. [So, one might ask, am I putting down those commenters?  Perhaps one could read it that way, though my intent is to give an example of translation problems and where they can lead. But perhaps I'm not completely innocent here myself.]
The word the Thai government probably used was วันหยุด (wan yut.) This means, literally, 'day' + 'stop'.   It's commonly used to mean a day off, a day when you don't work.  One might say, "Let's go out Tuesday because it is 'wan yut.'"   It could be a holiday, it could be a day after exams and there are no classes, or it could be an emergency.  A day off.


It's an appropriate word to use in Thai for this instance.  They were stopping business as usual. If they explicitly wanted to say holiday or festival day they could have used วันฉลอง (wan chalaawng) which means, literally, 'day' + 'festival'. (I double checked my Thai at ThaiLanguage.com)


Meanwhile, Friends of Thailand, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer group, is accepting donations that will go to the Thai Red Cross for flood victims.  If you'd like to help out, go to the Friends of Thailand website and in the lower left is a donate button.  Carolyn who runs the group asks that after you donate

". . . you send me an E-Mail message saying you have made a donation to Thai Flood Relief. The E-Mail address is: email carolynnickels[AT]earthlink.net" ;
3. As I receive notice of your donations from Google and your messages, I will send you a thank you letter you can use for your 2011 Federal, State and Local tax returns
4. At the end of two weeks, I will send the full amount the FoT Community has donated to the Thai Embassy with a list of donor names
5. The Embassy will immediately send the funds to Thailand via diplomatic pouch as they have been doing since the crisis began
6. Upon arrival in Bangkok, they will immediately transfer the money to the Thai Red Cross, which they have been doing with donations since the crisis began"

 Nothing is guaranteed perfect when you donate, but this is probably as reliable as you will find for this.

Meanwhile, here's a video (which I found at Bangkok Pundit) explaining the flood situation in Thailand.  It's in Thai, but it has English subtitles, though it's pretty fast.  But it's an interesting example of explaining a disaster to the public and what they should do.  There are more at Rusuflood's Youtube page. 

 

From Combat Girls [Kriegerin] to An African Election - The Anchorage International Film Festival 2011, First Peek

With over a month before the 2011 Anchorage International Film Festival opens, we can at least start to savor all the films we'll get to see.  The pre-screening committees have chosen the official selections (films that were selected to be in the festival from all the ones that were submitted) and the films in competition (the ones deemed best and thus in the running for the  prizes.)

It's a bit early, but I thought I'd post the feature and documentary films (a lot of the festival jargon and process is explained here) in competition  now for three reasons:

1. To remind folks in Anchorage that the Festival starts December 2.  Start thinking about whether you want a festival pass or you just want to drop in to see a few of the films.  
2. There is still time to volunteer at the festival.  This is a great way to see things from the inside.  Check out volunteer options here.
3. There's something delicious about getting to see the names of the films for the first time.  They mean nothing.  They're just titles, names of directors, and countries.  It's like getting the name of your blind date.  Over the next five weeks, I'll be doing homework on the films in competition and slowly putting up what I find on the blog.  We'll get to know which ones we hit it off with and which we don't.   By mid-December some films will be favorites and Anchorage will have met many of the directors.  And Anchorage is small enough and the festival casual enough, that if the director is here and you want to meet her, you can. 

So, look through the list of names.  Pick ones that sound good.  Imagine the possibilities.  And in six weeks we can look back at this page and remember this day when they were nothing but names, potential blind dates, and how much we've learned about them since. I've put in screenshots from trailers of three of the movies listed.  Can you match them to their titles?  If you click on them you'll be linked to their trailers. 

Features
Title	Director(s)	Country	Runtime	In Competition
Combat Girls [Kriegerin] [Combat Girls was pulled, not sure why.]	David Wendt	Germany	102m	✓
Inuk	Mike Magidson	France, Greenland	89m	✓
Kinyarwanda	Alrick Brown	USA/Rwanda	100m	✓
Mabul	Guy Nativ	Israel, Canada, France, Germany	101m	✓
The Casserole Club	Steve Balderson	USA	95m	✓
The Dead Inside	Travis Betz	USA	98m	✓
The Dish & The Spoon	Alison Bagnall	USA	93m	✓

Documentaries
Title	Director(s)	Country	Runtime	In Competition
Allentsteig	Nikolaus Geyhalter	Austria	79m	✓
An African Election	Jarreth Merz	Ghana	89m	✓
Give Up Tomorrow	Michael Collins	USA/UK	95m	✓
Goold’s Gold	Tucker Capps / Ryan Sevy	USA	76m	✓
The Green Wave	Ali Samadi Ahadi	Germany/Iran	80m	✓
We Were Here	David Weissman	USA	90m	✓
With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story	Will Hess	USA	80m	✓

We Were There is no longer listed on the program

[UPDATE Nov. 15:  I got word that there was a mixup and now African Election, The Green Wave, and We Were Here are no longer listed on list.  I will try to get the details and fill you in.  In their place now are on the updated website page are:
Beatboxing–The Fifth Element of Hip-Hop 
and
Locked Out.]


Go to the Anchorage International Film Festival website for all the entries in these categories and the others.

I have a film festival tab up on top from last year. It was my first use of tabs and I need to update it soon, but it gives you some background on the festival in general and some of the films and directors from 2010.

And remember, this is the long time legitimate Anchorage (not Alaska) International Film Festival. If you have any questions about the two different names, especially if you are a film maker, you can see my comparison of the two events here.

Apparently Phony Buffett Email Chain Letter To Strip Congress of Pension and Health Care

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.  Hey folks, read stuff before you pass it on.  Here's an email I got from a friend today:  [My comments in brackets]

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the
    best quotes about the debt ceiling:

['recent' turns out to be a July 7, 2011 Idaho mountainside interview with Becky Quick on the impending Congressional default on the national debt. ]

 

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a  law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of  GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election."

[He doesn't say this until 5 minutes and 24 seconds into the 8 minute interview.  While I'm guessing he'd thought about it before the interview, I don't think he had any thoughts of this being a constitutional amendment when he said it.]

 

 The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified!  Why? Simple!  The people demanded it. That was in 1971 - before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

 

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took one (1) year or less to become the law of the land - all because of public pressure.

 

Warren Buffet [sic] is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

[I looked online to see if I could find any evidence that Buffett was asking. I couldn't.  I did find my way to  Rumor Has It which says there was a similar email, without the Buffet introductory reference in 2009.  It then goes on to fact check the rest of this.]

 

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message.  This is one idea that really should be passed around.

 

 _*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*_

[An "Act" tends to be something passed by Congress, not a Constitutional Amendment. More evidence that this was cut and pasted onto an older document, that was a Constitutional Amendment.]

 

  1. No  Tenure / No Pension.

 A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.

[This sounds more like the  governor of Wisconsin who ended collective bargaining for public employees and Koch brothers sponsored ALEC - who have all kinds of proposals for defunding government including cutting public pensions.]

 

 2.  Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

[The Snopes link says they are part of Social Security as of 1984.  Here's a link on this from the US Senate. that says members of Congress DO pay the same Social Security everyone else does.]

 3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan,  just as all Americans do.

 

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.  Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

 

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

 

 6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

 

 7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.

Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

[Not sure what contracts this refers to.  But the 1/1/12 date - less than three months away - adds credence to the idea that this isn't a new proposal.  There's no way this could become effective that soon.  Besides, stereotypes of Congress members are like all stereotypes - there are enough examples to make them believable, but you have to judge each person individually and not because of the class they're lumped in.  When it comes to public pensions, people like me, who have made career decisions that traded higher salaries for secure pensions, breaking those contracts is unthinkable.  It's a legal contract that we entered into and performed our end of the bargain.   Changing future conditions is more acceptable if there truly is an impending crisis.  But we know that Alaska legislators made such changes based on faulty contractor predictions which led to a $500 million settlement paid to the state by Mercer.  So let's be careful here when we make these kinds of decisions.]

 

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message.  Don't you think it's time?

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

 

If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.

You are one of my 20+ - Please keep it going, and thanks.

[A couple more comments.

1.  This proposal never actually addresses what Buffett proposed - ending the terms if they get the deficit is over 3%. 
2. The judges in the Alaska Court system have their pay withheld if they have have any decisions uncompleted or undecided for more than six months.  (See this memo for details.)  That seems like a much better option.  This could be used, particularly for important Congressional functions like passing the annual budget on time.  Though the pressure would be less on wealthy members of Congress and there might be incentive here for lobbyists to make up the salary.
3. In general Constitutional Amendments should be reserved for important general principles, not for details that then become very difficult to fix as unanticipated consequences show up.  And in this case Constitutional Amendment and Act seem to be mixed up.  There's no way Congress would pass this.]

Putting the Plundering of Alaska's Resources Into Context

I'm still reading Charles Wohlforth's The Fate of Nature.  After my initial post on the first chapters of the book,  I began to wonder if, like chocolate, the rich prose would be too much to keep reading.  But it suddenly shifted and we watched Carol Treadwell's brain tumor illustrate the question "When do you stop being human?"  We visited experts on animal language.  A blind professor who specializes in how mollusks adapt.  And then we explored Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet with its namesake, Captain Cook.

But given the struggle to wrest Alaska's natural resources going on today - the struggle between those for and against Pebble Mine, for example - I was particularly struck by these passages of early destruction of Alaska's natural resources. 

Russian frontiersmen dismantled Alaska's marine ecosystems amazingly rapidly.  The first to arrive at the unpopulated Pribilof Islands found rafts of sea otters so numerous they impeded vessels trying to land.  Animals were easy to approach and kill.  Int heir first year a Russian expedition took 40,000 fur seal skins, 2,000 otter pelts, 14,400 pounds of walrus ivory, and more whale baleen than a ship could carry.  Within six years, no otters were seen on the Pribilofs.  Fur traders exterminated the region's most extraordinary marine mammal before Captain Cook arrived.  The Steller sea cow grew up to forty feet long grazing on seaweed.  A single pelt stretched over a wooden frame made a large boat.  The tasty meat - 7,000 pounds from one animal - could be eaten fresh or dried and used like bread.  The thick fat layer provided oil to drink, cook with, or use for light and heat.  In 1742 the first Russian expedition to reach Alaska discovered the sea cow;  in 1755 a Russian government engineer noted sea cows were getting scarce and said hunting should be reduced;  by the 1780's the sea cow was extinct.  (p. 94)

The Russian American population peaked at 823 people, all on the coast, leaving large swaths of Native Alaska untouched.  A drunken and undisciplined U.S. Army detachment assumed control in the former Russian capital of Sitka, sexually assaulting Native women and meting out retribution for perceived crimes by individual Tlingit Indians with indiscriminate killings and burnings of entire villages - acts similar to the first Russian fur traders' behavior of a century earlier.   .  . (p. 102)

Like the Russians, Americans never displaced most Alaska Native peoples.  The conquest was ecological rather than geographical:  they took the food.  New Englanders and Californians slaughtered whales for baleen and walruses for ivory on the western and northern coasts, wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of meat and inflicting starvation on the Iñupiat.  Fur traders acquired the last of the otter pelts and depleted other valuable furbearing animals.  As wild furs ran out, fox farmers appropriated islands as natural enclosures, especially in the sound, the foxes running free and fattening up in part by eliminating nesting geese.  Salmon canneries began cropping up next to rivers in southeast Alaska in 1878 and quickly spread up the coast, competing without regulation, competition sometimes causing gunfights - Alaska had no civil law at all until 1884 and little practical law enforcement for decades more.  An entrepreneur could steam in from San Francisco or Seattle  with his equipment and Chinese manpower, block a stream with a barricade to scoop up every fish, and maybe make back his investment in a year.  Preventing any fish from from escaping to spawn wiped out the run over time, but there were always more rivers with seemingly unlimited fish farther along the coast.  .   . (pp. 102 -103)

Copying these paragraphs reminded me of the letter to the editor I read Tuesday morning.  A woman from Wasilla was 'disheartened' that Rep. Don Young told the crowd at AFN (Alaska Federation of Natives) that he hoped his replacement would be an Alaskan Native.  She took this as unconstitutional racial favoritism and couldn't see it as the kind of flattery politicians use on their audiences whether they be soldiers, union members, retailers, Catholics, etc.  He wasn't giving someone a job simply based on Native blood.  He was voicing an opinion, perhaps influenced by his deceased Native wife of many years.  Why wouldn't Young tell his audience this, especially when talking to the people who have lived in Alaska for thousands of years, but never had one of their own representing the state in Washington DC.  I understand her point, but her letter seemed to take the comment way out of context.  Especially when I read the next sentence - and in light of the previous quote from Wohlforth:

"It seems to me that few villages would survive without the federal/state government  - our tax dollars - subsidizing their 'way of life/culture.'"

Whoa!  Let's see.  After killing off their food and clothing and resources as described above, and killing off much of the population and cultural wisdom through disease, and imposing Western religion and schooling (leave your languages and customs outside thank you), she begrudges them the relatively small amount of assistance they get?  You think I exaggerate?  It's telling when you recognize that after ten thousand years of survival, it's only after less than 300 years of Western contact that Alaska Natives are no longer totally self sufficient.  I'm sure there were crises over the millennia where survival was tenuous, but they were always self sufficient.

And what about 'our tax dollars?'  Unless this writer runs a business, she pays no state taxes.  And Alaska gets back nearly $2 for every dollar Alaskans pay in US taxes.  So presumably she's benefiting from this too.  And, let's not forget, most of Alaska's wealth is from what had been Alaska Natives' land until the Russians decided it was theirs and then later sold it to the US.  So, maybe she should consider all her PFD checks as largess stolen from Alaskan Natives. 

Perspective.  It's all about context and perspective.  

But back to Wohlforth to get more perspective on the plundering of Alaska that is worth keeping in mind today.  

The cannery owners must have felt like they had won the sweepstakes, the prize to grab as much cash as they could hold.  Conservation wasn't on their minds.  They would have needed to leave behind only a fraction of a salmon run to spawn each year for the abundance to continue indefinitely.  But they didn't plan to stay indefinitely.  Competition ruled out long-term considerations.  Like found money, Alaska salmon were yours only if you grabbed them first.  A cannery operator who abstained from fishing to allow for the next year's harvest might not be in the same business when the fish came back.  (p. 103)

The best private economic decision might be to destroy a salmon run - or wipe out a marine mammal population - if you could thereby obtain a profit quickly and invest it somewhere else, in Alaska or on Wall Street.  Unsustainable practices often make sense when you're free to move and take your profits with you.  Our economic lives depend on this fact.  Nothing made of plastic or metal or manufactured and shipped with fossil fuels is sustainable.  Look around you.  We buy these things as cheaply as possible - technology, vehicles, energy - knowing we will discard them after we've exhausted their value.  (pp. 103-104)

But people didn't know about ecology back then, right?  Maybe they didn't know the word, but they weren't stupid. 

An illusion protects us:  the illusion that those who depleted fisheries and drove marine mammals to extinction didn't know what they were doing.  It's not true.  Even Russian America had voices of conservation.  The herring fisherman in Kachemak Bay were told they were overfishing, but instead of restraining themselves they tried to stop the Natives from eating roe on kelp.  Members of the salmon industry recognized fish were rapidly diminishing before 1900 at the same time they were saying salmon were inexhaustible. (p. 110) 

The oil companies and mining companies offer jobs for Alaskans.  So did the Russians offer jobs for Aleuts.  The deal is a lot sweeter today, but it seems a very similar structure.  Temporary occupation and control until they get what they can, then off for greener pastures.  You can clean up the mess after we leave.

Wohlforth's book endeavors to do a lot.  It's trying to tie together many, seemingly disparate subjects and synthesizing them into one big integrated explanation of how and why humans impact nature and whether we can control ourselves.  I have to confess, the synthesis is the sort of thing I like to attempt.  It's hard to put all your exhibits out for the readers who have to remember them when they get to the point where you tie them all together.  I'm still not much more than one quarter of the way through the book, so I can't tell you yet how well he succeeds.  But so far it's good reading each of the pieces by themselves.  If he pulls them all together, that will be frosting.

And, yes, he does cite sources at the back for the claims he makes.