Alaska contains the
largest coastal mountain range in
the world and the highest peak in North America. It has more coastline
than the entire contiguous 48 states combined and is big enough to hold
the state of Texas two and a half times over. It has the largest
population of bald eagles in the country. It has 430 kinds of birds
along with the brown bear, the largest carnivorous land mammal in the
world, and other species ranging from the pygmy shrew that weighs less
than a penny to gray whales that come in at 45 tons. Species that are
classified as “endangered” in other places are often found in abundance
in Alaska.
Now, a dozen years after I left my home state and
landed in Baghdad to begin life as a journalist and nine years after
definitively abandoning Alaska, I find myself back. I wish it was to
climb another mountain, but this time, unfortunately, it’s because I
seem increasingly incapable of escaping the long and destructive reach
of the U.S. military.
That summer in 2003 when my life in Alaska
ended was an unnerving one for me. It followed a winter and spring in
which I found myself protesting the coming invasion of Iraq in the
streets of Anchorage, then impotently watching the televised spectacle
of the Bush administration’s “shock and awe” assault on that country as
Baghdad burned and Iraqis were slaughtered. While on Denali that summer I
listened to news of the beginnings of what would be an occupation from
hell and, in my tent on a glacier at 17,000 thousand feet, wondered what
in the world I could do.
In this way, in a cloud of angst, I
traveled to Iraq as an independent news team of one and found myself
reporting on atrocities that were evident to anyone not embedded with
the U.S. military, which was then laying waste to the country. My early
reporting, some of it for
TomDispatch, warned of
body counts on
a trajectory toward one million, rampant torture in the military’s
detention facilities, and the toxic legacy it had left in the city of
Fallujah thanks to the use of depleted uranium munitions and
white phosphorous.
As I learned, the U.S. military is an industrial-scale killing machine and also the single largest
consumer of fossil fuels on
the planet, which makes it a major source of the greenhouse gas carbon
dioxide. As it happens, distant lands like Iraq sitting atop vast
reservoirs of oil and natural gas are by no means its only
playing fields.
Take the place where I now live, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The U.S. Navy already has plans to conduct
electromagnetic warfare training in
an area close to where I moved to once again seek solace in the
mountains: Olympic National Forest and nearby Olympic National Park. And
this June, it’s scheduling massive war games in the Gulf of Alaska,
including live bombing runs that will mean the detonation of tens of
thousands of pounds of toxic munitions, as well as the use of active
sonar in the most pristine, economically valuable, and sustainable
salmon fishery in the country (arguably in the world). And all of this
is to happen right in the middle of fishing season.
This time, in
other words, the bombs will be falling far closer to home. Whether it’s
war-torn Iraq or “peaceful” Alaska, Sunnis and Shi’ites or salmon and
whales, to me the omnipresent “footprint” of the U.S. military
feels inescapable.
The War Comes Home
In 2013, U.S. Navy researchers
predicted ice-free
summer Arctic waters by 2016 and it looks as if that prediction might
come true. Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA)
reported that
there was less ice in the Arctic this winter than in any other winter
of the satellite era. Given that the Navy has been making plans for
“ice-free” operations in the Arctic since
at least 2001,
their June “Northern Edge” exercises may well prove to be just the
opening salvo in the future northern climate wars, with whales, seals,
and salmon being the first in the line of fire.
In April 2001, a
Navy symposium entitled “Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic” was
mounted to begin to prepare the service for a climate-change-induced
future. Fast forward to June 2015. In what the military refers to as
Alaska’s “premier” joint training exercise, Alaskan Command aims to
conduct “Northern Edge” over 8,429 nautical miles, which include
critical habitat for all five wild Alaskan salmon species and 377 other
species of marine life. The upcoming war games in the Gulf of Alaska
will not be the first such exercises in the region—they have been
conducted, on and off, for the last 30 years—but they will be the
largest by far. In fact, a 360% rise in munitions use is expected,
according to Emily Stolarcyk, the program manager for the Eyak
Preservation Council (EPC).
The waters in the Gulf of Alaska are
some of the most pristine in the world, rivaled only by those in the
Antarctic, and among the purest and most nutrient-rich waters anywhere.
Northern Edge will take place in an Alaskan “marine protected area,” as
well as in a NOAA-designated “fisheries protected area.” These war games
will also coincide with the key breeding and migratory periods of the
marine life in the region as they make their way toward Prince William
Sound, as well as further north into the Arctic.
Species affected
will include blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer
whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there
are only approximately 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No
fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan,
Tlingit, Sun’aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not
to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities.
The Navy is
already permitted to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and
torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in “realistic” war gaming
that is expected to involve the release of as much as 352,000 pounds of
“expended materials” every year. (The Navy’s EIS
lists numerous
things as “expended materials,” including missiles, bombs, torpedoes.)
At present, the Navy is well into the process of securing the necessary
permits for the next five years and has even mentioned making plans for
the next 20. Large numbers of warships and submarines are slated to move
into the area and the potential pollution from this has worried
Alaskans who live nearby.
“We are concerned about expended
materials in addition to the bombs, jet noise, and sonar,” the Eyak
Preservation Council’s Emily Stolarcyk tells me as we sit in her office
in Cordova, Alaska. EPC is an environmental and social-justice-oriented
nonprofit whose primary mission is to protect wild salmon habitat.
“Chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, ammonium
perchlorate, the Navy’s own
environmental impact statement says there is a high risk of chemical exposure to fish.”
Tiny
Cordova, population 2,300, is home to the largest commercial fishing
fleet in the state and consistently ranks among the top 10 busiest U.S.
fishing ports. Since September, when Stolarcyk first became aware of the
Navy’s plans, she has been working tirelessly, calling local, state and
federal officials and alerting virtually every fisherman she runs into
about what she calls “the storm” looming on the horizon. “The
propellants from the Navy’s missiles and some of their other weapons
will release benzene, toluene, xylene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
and naphthalene into the waters of twenty percent of the training area,
according to their own EIS [environmental impact statement],” she
explains as we look down on Cordova’s harbor with salmon fishing season
rapidly approaching. As it happens, most of the chemicals she mentioned
were part of BP’s disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which
I
covered for years, so as I listened to her I had an eerie sense of futuristic
déjà vu.
Here’s
just one example of the kinds of damage that will occur: the cyanide
discharge from a Navy torpedo is in the range of 140-150 parts per
billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s “allowable” limit on
cyanide: one part per billion.
The Navy’s EIS estimates that, in
the five-year period in which these war games are to be conducted, there
will be more than 182,000 “takes”—direct deaths of a marine mammal, or
the disruption of essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or
surfacing. On the deaths of fish, it offers no estimates at all.
Nevertheless, the Navy will be permitted to use at least 352,000 pounds
of expended materials in these games annually. The potential negative
effects could be far-reaching, given species migration and the global
current system in northern waters.
In the meantime, the Navy is
giving Stolarcyk’s efforts the cold shoulder, showing what she calls
“total disregard toward the people making their living from these
waters.” She adds, “They say this is for national security. They are
theoretically defending us, but if they destroy our food source and how
we make our living, while polluting our air and water, what’s left
to defend?”
Stolarcyk has been labeled an “activist” and
“environmentalist,” perhaps because the main organizations she’s managed
to sign on to her efforts are indeed environmental groups like the
Alaska Marine Conservation Council, the
Alaska Center for the Environment, and the
Alaskans First Coalition.
“Why
does wanting to protect wild salmon habitat make me an activist?” she
asks. “How has that caused me to be branded as an environmentalist?”
Given that the Alaska commercial fishing industry could be decimated if
its iconic “wild-caught” salmon turn up with traces of cyanide or any of
the myriad chemicals the Navy will be using, Stolarcyk could as easily
be seen as fighting for the well-being, if not the survival, of the
fishing industry in her state.
War Gaming the Community
The
clock is ticking in Cordova and others in Stolarcyk’s community are
beginning to share her concerns. A few like Alexis Cooper, the executive
director of
Cordova District Fishermen United (CDFU),
a non-profit organization that represents the commercial fishermen in
the area, have begun to speak out. “We’re already seeing reduced numbers
of halibut without the Navy having expanded their operations in the GOA
[Gulf of Alaska],” she says, “and we’re already seeing other decreases
in harvestable species.”
CDFU represents more than 800 commercial
salmon fishermen, an industry that accounts for an estimated 90% of
Cordova’s economy. Without salmon, like many other towns along coastal
southeastern Alaska, it would effectively cease to exist.
Teal
Webber, a lifelong commercial fisherwoman and member of the Native
Village of Eyak, gets visibly upset when the Navy’s plans come up. “You
wouldn’t bomb a bunch of farmland,” she says, “and the salmon run comes
right through this area, so why are they doing this now?” She adds,
“When all of the fishing community in Cordova gets the news about how
much impact the Navy’s war games could have, you’ll see them oppose it
en masse.”
While
I’m in town, Stolarcyk offers a public presentation of the case against
Northern Edge in the elementary school auditorium. As she shows a
slide from the Navy’s environmental impact statement indicating that the
areas affected will take decades to recover, several fishermen quietly
shake their heads.
One of them, James Weiss, who also works for
Alaska’s Fish and Game Department, pulls me aside and quietly says, “My
son is growing up here, eating everything that comes out of the sea. I
know fish travel through that area they plan to bomb and pollute, so of
course I’m concerned. This is too important of a fishing area to put
at risk.”
In the question-and-answer session that follows, Jim Kasch, the
town’s mayor, assures Stolarcyk that he’ll ask the city council to
become involved. “What’s disturbing is that there is no thought about
the fish and marine life,” he tells me later. “It’s a sensitive area and
we live off the ocean. This is just scary.” A Marine veteran, Kasch
acknowledges the Navy’s need to train, then pauses and adds, “But
dropping live ordnance in a sensitive fishery just isn’t a good idea.
The entire coast of Alaska lives and breathes from our resources from
the ocean.”
That evening, with the sun still high in the spring
sky, I walk along the boat docks in the harbor and can’t help but wonder
whether this small, scruffy town has a hope in hell of stopping or
altering Northern Edge. There have been examples of such unlikely
victories in the past. A dozen years ago, the Navy was, for example,
finally
forced to stop using the
Puerto Rican island of Vieques as its own private bombing and test
range, but only after having done so since the 1940s. In the wake of
those six decades of target practice, the island’s population has the
highest cancer and asthma rates in the Caribbean, a phenomenon locals
attribute to the Navy’s activities.
Similarly, earlier this year a
federal court ruled that
Navy war games off the coast of California violated the law. It deemed
an estimated 9.6 million “harms” to whales and dolphins via
high-intensity sonar and underwater detonations improperly assessed as
“negligible” in that service’s EIS.
As a result of Stolarcyk’s work, on May 6th Cordova’s city council
passed a resolution formally opposing the upcoming war games. Unfortunately, the largest seafood processor in Cordova (and Alaska),
Trident Seafoods,
has yet to offer a comment on Northern Edge. Its representatives
wouldn’t even return my phone call on the subject. Nor, for instance,
has Cordova’s
Prince William Sound Science Center,
whose president, Katrina Hoffman, wrote me that “as an organization, we
have no position statement on the matter at this time.” This, despite
their stated aim of supporting “the ability of communities in this
region to maintain socioeconomic resilience among healthy, functioning
ecosystems.” (Of course, it should be noted that at least some of their
funds come from the
Navy.)
Government-to-Government Consultation
At
Kodiak Island, my next stop, I find a stronger sense of the threat on
the horizon in both the fishing and tribal communities and palpable
anger about the Navy’s plans. Take J.J. Marsh, the CEO of the Sun’aq
Tribe, the largest on the island. “I think it’s horrible,” she says the
minute I sit down in her office. “I grew up here. I was raised on
subsistence living. I grew up caring about the environment and the
animals and fishing in a native household living off the land and seeing
my grandpa being a fisherman. So obviously, the need to protect this
is clear.”
What, I ask, is her tribe going to do?
She
responds instantly. “We are going to file for a government-to-government
consultation and so are other Kodiak tribes so that hopefully we can
get this stopped.”
The U.S. government has a unique relationship
with Alaska’s Native tribes, like all other American Indian tribes. It
treats each as if it were an
autonomous government.
If a tribe requests a “consultation,” Washington must respond and
Marsh hopes that such an intervention might help block Northern Edge.
“It’s about the generations to come. We have an opportunity as a
sovereign tribe to go to battle on this with the feds. If we aren’t
going to do it, who is?”
Melissa Borton, the tribal administrator
for the Native Village of Afognak, feels similarly. Like Marsh’s tribe,
hers was, until recently, remarkably unaware of the Navy’s plans.
That’s hardly surprising since that service has essentially made
no effort to
publicize what it is going to do. “We are absolutely going to be part
of this [attempt to stop the Navy],” she tells me. “I’m appalled.”
One reason she’s appalled: she lived through Alaska’s monster
Exxon Valdez oil spill of
1989. “We are still feeling its effects,” she says. “Every time they
make these environmental decisions they affect us… We are already
plagued with cancer and it comes from the military waste already in our
ground or that our fish and deer eat and we eat those… I’ve lost family
to cancer, as most around here have and at some point in time this has
to stop.”
When I meet with Natasha Hayden, an Afognak tribal
council member whose husband is a commercial fisherman, she puts the
matter simply and bluntly. “This is a frontal attack by the Navy on our
cultural identity.”
Gary Knagin, lifelong fisherman and member of
the Sun’aq tribe, is busily preparing his boat and crew for the salmon
season when we talk. “We aren’t going to be able to eat if they do this.
It’s bullshit. It’ll be detrimental to us and it’s obvious why. In
June, when we are out there, salmon are jumping [in the waters] where
they want to bomb as far as you can see in any direction. That’s the
salmon run. So why do they have to do it in June? If our fish are
contaminated, the whole state’s economy is hit. The fishing industry
here supports everyone and every other business here is reliant upon the
fishing industry. So if you take out the fishing, you take out
the town.”
The Navy’s Free Ride
I requested
comment from the U.S. military’s Alaskan Command office, and Captain
Anastasia Wasem responded after I returned home from my trip north. In
our email exchange, I asked her why the Navy had chosen the Gulf of
Alaska, given that it was a critical habitat for all five of the state’s
wild salmon. She replied that the waters where the war games will
occur, which the Navy refers to as the Temporary Maritime Activities
Area, are “strategically significant” and claimed that a recent “Pacific
command study” found that naval training opportunities are declining
everywhere in the Pacific “except Alaska,” which she referred to as “a
true national asset.”
“The Navy’s training activities,” she added,
“are conducted with an extensive set of mitigation measures designed to
minimize the potential risk to marine life.”
In its assessment of
the Navy’s plans, however, the National Marine Fisheries Service
(NMFS), one of the premier federal agencies tasked with protecting
national fisheries, disagreed. “Potential stressors to managed species
and EFH [essential fish habitat],” its
report said,
“include vessel movements (disturbance and collisions), aircraft
overflights (disturbance), fuel spills, ship discharge, explosive
ordnance, sonar training (disturbance), weapons firing/nonexplosive
ordnance use (disturbance and strikes), and expended materials
(ordnance-related materials, targets, sonobuoys, and marine markers).
Navy activities could have direct and indirect impacts on individual
species, modify their habitat, or alter water quality.” According to the
NMFS, effects on habitats and communities from Northern Edge “may
result in damage that could take years to decades from which
to recover.”
Captain Wasem assured me that the Navy made its plans
in consultation with the NMFS, but she failed to add that those
consultations were found to be inadequate by the agency or to
acknowledge that it expressed serious concerns about the coming war
games. In fact, in 2011 it made four conservation recommendations to
avoid, mitigate, or otherwise offset possible adverse effects to
essential fish habitat. Although such recommendations were non-binding,
the Navy was supposed to consider the public interest in its planning.
One
of the recommendations, for instance, was that it develop a plan to
report on fish mortality during the exercises. The Navy rejected this,
claiming that
such reporting would “not provide much, if any, valuable data.” As
Stolarcyk told me, “The Navy declined to do three of their four
recommendations, and NMFS just rolled over.”
I asked Captain Wasem why the Navy choose to hold the exercise in the middle of salmon fishing season.
“The
Northern Edge exercise is scheduled when weather is most conducive for
training,” she explained vaguely, pointing out that “the Northern Edge
exercise is a big investment for DoD [the Department of Defense] in
terms of funding, use of equipment/fuels, strategic transportation,
and personnel.”
Arctic Nightmares
The
bottom line on all this is simple, if brutal. The Navy is increasingly
focused on possible future climate-change conflicts in the melting
waters of the north and, in that context, has little or no intention of
caretaking the environment when it comes to military exercises. In
addition, the federal agencies tasked with overseeing any war-gaming
plans have neither the legal ability nor the will to enforce
environmental regulations when what’s at stake, at least according to
the Pentagon, is “national security.”
Needless to say, when it
comes to the safety of locals in the Navy’s expanding area of operation,
there is no obvious recourse. Alaskans can’t turn to NMFS or the
Environmental Protection Agency or NOAA. If you want to stop the U.S.
military from dropping live munitions, or blasting electromagnetic
radiation into national forests and marine sanctuaries, or poisoning
your environment, you’d better figure out how to file a major lawsuit
or, if you belong to a Native tribe, demand a government-to-government
consultation and hope it works. And both of those are long shots,
at best.
Meanwhile, as the race heats up for reserves of oil and
gas in the melting Arctic that shouldn’t be extracted and burned in the
first place, so do the Navy’s war games. From southern California to
Alaska, if you live in a coastal town or city, odds are that the Navy is
coming your way, if it’s not already there.
Nevertheless, Emily
Stolarcyk shows no signs of throwing in the towel, despite the way the
deck is stacked against her efforts. “It’s supposedly our constitutional
right that control of the military is in the hands of the citizens,”
she told me in our last session together. At one point, she paused and
asked, “Haven’t we learned from our past mistakes around not protecting
salmon? Look at California, Oregon, and Washington’s salmon. They’ve
been decimated. We have the best and most pristine salmon left on the
planet, and the Navy wants to do these exercises. You can’t have both.”
Stolarcyk
and I share a bond common among people who have lived in our
northernmost state, a place whose wilderness is so vast and beautiful as
to make your head spin. Those of us who have experienced its rivers and
mountains, have been awed by the northern lights, and are regularly
reminded of our own insignificance (even as we gained a new appreciation
for how precious life really is) tend to want to protect the place as
well as share it with others.
“Everyone has been telling me from
the start that I’m fighting a lost cause and I will not win,” Stolarcyk
said as our time together wound down. “No other non-profit in Alaska
will touch this. But I actually believe we can fight this and we can
stop them. I believe in the power of one. If I can convince someone to
join me, it spreads from there. It takes a spark to start a fire, and I
refuse to believe that nothing can be done.”
Three decades ago, in his book
Arctic Dreams,
Barry Lopez suggested that, when it came to exploiting the Arctic
versus living sustainably in it, the ecosystems of the region were too
vulnerable to absorb attempts to “accommodate both sides.” In the years
since, whether it’s been the Navy, Big Energy, or the increasingly
catastrophic impacts of human-caused climate disruption, only one side
has been accommodated and the results have been dismal.
In Iraq
in wartime, I saw what the U.S. military was capable of in a distant
ravaged land. In June, I’ll see what that military is capable of in what
still passes for peacetime and close to home indeed. As I sit at my
desk writing this story on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the roar of
Navy jets periodically rumbles in from across Puget Sound where a
massive naval air station is located. I can’t help but wonder whether,
years from now, I’ll still be writing pieces with titles like
“Destroying What Remains,” as the Navy continues its war-gaming in an
ice-free summer Arctic amid a sea of off-shore oil drilling platforms.
