Twentieth-Century development stimulated the use of coal, resulting in both positive and negative effects on the environment. Found in small deposits of varying quality in widely scattered locations around Alaska, coal served the Natives, Russians, prospectors, and settlers. Most frequently burned for resi-dential and mining purposes, it also helped fuel steamships offshore and on the Yukon River. Discovery of large deposits in the Matanuska Valley and south of Nenana appeared to justify building an Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fair-banks, completed in 1923. The railroad, intended to support mining in the interior for economic development, could burn the coal as well as deliver it. Lo-comotives utilized coal until the late 1940s when they converted to diesel fuel.
Coal heated some buildings throughout the territorial period and generated electricity for civilian and military use. Only the Usibelli coal mine at Healy operated after 1971.64 Coal had taken the pressure off interior forests, and, to a large degree, oil and natural gas replaced coal. Marginal deposits and moderate exploitation of coal permitted Alaska to avoid the pervasive land scarring and water poisoning typical of coal mining regions in the Lower 48.
Next to gold, copper accounted for the most mining activity in Alaska.
Natives had used it for centuries, and white prospectors began to look for it in the late 1890s. They found the most productive and accessible lodes in south-central Alaska near Prince William Sound. Among 200 sites along the sound, 8 produced substantial volumes of ore. In 1900, prospectors Clarence Warner and Jack Smith discovered what became the Kennecott Company’s Bonanza mine 50 miles up the Copper River from Cordova. The Guggenheim group and oth-ers tried to build a railroad to it from Valdez and Katalla, but mountainous ter-ritory foiled the attempts. A railway from Cordova, constructed between 1906 and 1911, succeeded. Mining rapidly exhausted the most valuable deposits.
Bonanza, the last large mine, closed in 1938. Between 1900 and 1930, Alaska had produced $212 million of copper compared to $400 million of gold.
Copper mining had minimally affected the Alaskan environment, consid-ering that most of the ore went to Washington for smelting. Boosters had hoped the Copper River and Northwestern Railway would be extended into the inte-rior and open it up to settlement and economic development. But the railway folded in 1938 when the mine closed. Copper had not set off a rush as gold did, and the small towns it created either withered away or turned to enterprises such as fishing.65
Agriculture, the primary source of environmental degradation in the States, bore far less economic potential in Alaska. Aided by federal funds during the Depression, settlers established commercial farms in the relatively small Mata-nuska Valley north of Anchorage. Similarly, the Tanana River Valley near Fair-banks produced some commercial crops. Suitable land existed along the west coast of the Kenai Peninsula. Kodiak Island and parts of the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands could support cattle or sheep grazing to a degree. A few types of vegetables for personal use could be grown in many areas, including the lower Arctic. But commercially viable farming faced numerous obstacles: cool air and ground temperatures; short growing seasons; unfavorable soils; high op-erating costs including land preparation, processing, transportation, and winter maintenance of livestock; and price competition from food shipped from the States.66
Notwithstanding the limits imposed by location, Alaska boosters insisted that the territory possessed the agricultural potential to support large numbers of people, millions by some calculations. If only the federal government would subsidize farm settlement, they believed, agriculture would open up the ter-ritory to development. The American pioneer spirit would conquer the wil-derness in the name of progress. Besides underwriting the Matanuska Colony, government policy resulted in scattered settlement elsewhere. But agriculture attained only a weak and uncertain position in Alaska’s economy (Table 4.2). As historian Orlando Miller described the workings of the frontier myth,
Local pride, a belief that growth and size mean progress, and an awareness of the gains to be made from rising property values and increased retail trade explain the boosting activities, but in addition promoters, journalists, and politicians swayed to their own incantations. . . . [T]hey eagerly awaited the urban and industrial development that Americans outside sometimes nos-talgically regretted and hoped to escape in Alaska. . . . In the postwar period continued frontierism was a means of blinking away complex economic and social problems that could not be escaped in the wilderness. For all but an eccentric or unusual few, pioneer settlement meant not opportunity but poverty.67
tabLe 4.2. Agricultural Activity in Alaska, 1940–1969
Year Farms (full- and part-time) Acres Products Sold ($ million)
1940 623 11,000 n.d.
1959 367 14,500 3.2
1964 382 16,500 3.8
1969 332 13,000 3.6
Source: Orlando W. Miller, The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, 223–224.
By the time of statehood only 367 farms, most worked by part-time farmers, produced 14,500 acres of crops, much of it grasses for livestock. A handful of families from the Matanuska Colony still farmed full-time. The Matanuska Val-ley and its environs produced 70 percent of Alaskan agricultural value. Few, if any, of the conditions inhibiting agriculture improved after statehood.68
John Muir committed an oft-to-be-repeated error in assuming that the Gold Rush and related settlement could not hurt Alaska’s environment. One dramatic example suggested otherwise: in 1898, prospectors endured weeks or months of the most exhausting and dangerous trials of their lives to reach the remote goldfields of the Klondike. By mid-1900, thanks to the White Pass and Yukon Railway and steamboats in Canada, one could ride in comfort from Se-attle to Dawson in less than a week.69 Other stimuli as powerful as gold—such as war or oil—might similarly break down the barriers to Alaskan wilderness.
Followers of John Muir and other advocates of wilderness preservation have often perceived wilderness as a state of Nature unaltered by humans. The fact that many wildlands have been lastingly influenced by set fires or other human activities has suggested the need for a more flexible concept of wilderness. But Matanuska Colony farm, Palmer, 1937. Drawbaugh coll. 89-128-151, University of Alas-ka Fairbanks, AlasAlas-ka and Polar Regions Archives. Agriculture made limited inroads into wildlife habitat because of cold, unsuitable soils, and transportation costs.
what degree of temporary or permanent disruption should make a wild area unworthy of protection? Does the constant change in Nature, with or without human intervention, render the notion of “preservation” meaningless? Should consumptive uses, such as those claimed as subsistence rights, be considered natural or be allowed in protected ecosystems? These questions became part of the debates over disposal of natural resources in Alaska.