You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith, Too

Aerial view of Ambler and the Kobuk River in the summer.
Photo by the National Park Service.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” is a very old English proverb. You can trace it back at least as far as a letter dated 14 March 1538 from Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, to Thomas Cromwell, where it is set out as “a man can not have his cake and eat his cake”. Songwriters Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman made a pun of the proverb with their song, a hit for the Statler Brothers, “Kate and Edith, Too” but their pun sacrificed some of the sense of the proverb for the pun. For this blog post, WC takes the sense of the proverb as a theme, but cannot resist providing the ear worm as well.

Miles Cleveland penned an opinion piece for the Anchorage Daily News a few days ago. Cleveland is the President of the Native Village of Ambler and an assembly member of the Northwest Arctic Borough, in which Ambler is located. Ambler is at the far end of the proposed Ambler Road, a controversial proposed new Alaska road extending from the existing Dalton Highway to reported mineral deposits near Ambler, on the southwest side of the Brooks Range. WC has written earlier about the very serious drawbacks to that proposed road.

Miles Cleveland is a strong supporter of the proposed road, and a slight acquaintance of WC from WC’s earlier legal career. His opinion essay, while heartfelt and sincere, is so internally inconsistent that WC thinks it’s worth a few minutes to see if we can think this through.

Cleveland opens by saying, “Environmental groups — many of which are from outside of Alaska — are opposed to the Ambler Road.” That’s a Hickelism, and also irrelevant. The late Wally Hickel used to rage about “outside environmentalists” when something got in the way of one of his projects. That attitude gave us the “Hickel Highway,” the permanent scar across the North Slope, and some serious fines imposed on the state for the Wally’s illegal attempt to rebuild the Copper River Highway. That attitude is unfortunate. The other reason Cleveland’s opening line is misguided is that the proposed road crosses public lands, some of it actually a national monument, so the “public” isn’t limited to folks living in the area or Alaskans; it’s all Americans. Environmental groups inside and outside of Alaska are entitled to voice their opinions.

Cleveland then argues the Village of Ambler is disadvantaged by its lack of highway access; all goods have to be barged or flown in. It’s expensive, he says, and makes the cost of living in Ambler too high. There are problems with this claim; simple economics dictate that it’s always expensive to be a tiny community at the far end of a long supply chain. The combination of a tiny market, low demand and high transport costs limit economies of scale. A highway isn’t going to fix that. It might reduce high prices a bit, but it won’t begin to completely fix it. Of course, that also means public access to the road, making the Ambler Road a public road, not exclusively a mining road.

And that’s a problem for Mr. Cleveland, because a little later in the same essay, he says, “We’ve received an assurance that the road will be kept private so that hunters and tourists will not flock to our land.” If it is kept as a private mining road, Ambler can’t use it to transport those groceries and fuel. If some of the public can use it, all of the public can use it. You can’t be a little Bir pregnant; you can’t have a non-public public road. Mr. Cleveland needs to recall that the Dalton Highway – the haul road to Prudhoe Bay – was originally open to the public only as far as Dietrich Camp, and then only for a part of the year. The State of Alaska opened it to the public, over the objections of the North Slope Borough and the Tanana Chiefs Conference carried all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court.¹

Mr. Cleveland can’t have his cake – a private mining road – and eat it too – less expensive transport of groceries and fuel.²

Mr. Cleveland says,

The Red Dog mine has shown that development is possible that improves our way of life while respecting the environment. I have hunted these lands my entire life. The Red Dog mine has not significantly disrupted wildlife and fishing. After 40 years, we all still hunt and fill our freezers.

That’s just not true. For the first decade or so of Red Dog Mine operation, the ore trucks transporting lead and zinc ore concentrate from the mine along 52 miles of roadway to the small port on the shore of the Chukchi Sea, failed to cover or adequately cover the loads. The ore concentrate blew out as dust, and now the road corridor, as far as a mile on either side of the road, is heavily contaminated with lead and cadmium, both neurotoxins. Berries and leaves, and the critters that eat them, take up those heavy metals. You eat them at your peril and, in the case of small children, their extreme peril.

The Red Dog Mine discharges waste water into Red Dog Creek, a tributary of the Wulik River. The Wulik is the water supply for the downstream village of Kivalina. The village had to sue Teck Resources, Red Dog Mine’s operator, to force the mine to treat the water before discharging it into the drainage.

And that’s without talking about the truly massive amounts of mine spoil and waste piled up at the mine site. Those mountains of rock and gravel leach heavy metals, and will require treatment and management forever. If Mr. Cleveland thinks Teck Resources is going to be around a hundred or two hundred years from now to perform that treatment, Cleveland knows nothing about the history of mining in North America.

Mr. Cleveland also says,

Outside groups also don’t understand that we need the income from jobs in the region to continue our subsistence way of life. How else can we afford the snowmachines, gas, guns and bullets that we need to hunt and fish?

WC can’t speak for the Outside groups Mr. Cleveland is talking about, but the environmental groups WC has worked with across the decades are painfully aware of challenges faced by all of Alaska’s Native peoples, as they thread their way through a fully traditional subsistence culture and modern consumerism. And the challenge is much larger than guns, bullets and gas; Ambler has to make itself attractive to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the current residents. That means high speed internet access, good schools and opportunities beyond what are presently available. It means keeping enough residents and school age children to support a school.

What environmentalists ask is whether the permanent, long term damages to the environment associated with development are worth the short-term benefits of some money in the pockets of a comparatively few Alaskans. If you were to ask the Shoshone and Bannock people of the Intermountain West, they’d probably tell you not only “No” but “Hell, No!” The legacy of exploitation of natural resources all too often is toxic, poison in the waters and on the lands, and the pretty, solemn promises from mine developers, road builders and their peers aren’t worth the powder to blow them up.

You cannot rely on the developers. It’s just that simple. When the resource is gone, so are the developers. Only the mess remains.

It’s another example of how you cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

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¹ Turpin v. North Slope Borough, 879 P.2d 1009 (1994).
² Sure the Red Dog Mine Road has been kept private, closed to public use, but it was built and is maintained with private funds and, more importantly, it doesn’t connect with the existing road network. And there’s never been a court challenge to its private status. It’s not really a fair comparison.