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Reviews
Frigid Embrace: Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska
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By Stephen Haycox
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2002. Culture and Environment in the Pacific West series. Photographs, maps, bibliography, index. 192 pages. $21.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Hal Rothman
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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| Alaska has always been the environmental historian's paradox, the place that reflects every trend that historians assess yet confounds any generalization that applies to the lower forty-eight states. Alaska's issues are the same — environmental degradation, Native land rights, the impact of industrial development, and others — but they take place on a stage so much larger and with consequences so much greater that the very nature of the debate takes on epic proportions. Alaska is so large and holds such an enormous place in the environmental imagination that it has long confounded environmental historians. |
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In Frigid Embrace: Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska, Stephen Haycox goes further toward resolving this conundrum than anyone in recent memory. In this cogent and direct look at the complicated nature of the transition he aptly describes as going from "last frontier" to "last wilderness," Haycox follows Alaska chronologically, providing a contextual history of human relationships to the physical world in the United States' most northern state. |
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What emerges is a story more typical in the American West than many would care to admit. Haycox's Alaska is an economic colony, an exporter of raw materials and an importer of finished goods. Non-natives flocked to it in an effort to re-create the frontier and its opportunities, but most came at a time when that very construction of American history lost much of its potency. In this, Alaska mirrors other western states such as Wyoming, whose visions of their own success run counter to the demands of the future. Yet, the issue is more pronounced in Alaska, Haycox avers, precisely because its resources are so abundant. The concept of scarcity is real, Haycox seems to say. It is just that it is very hard for Alaskans to accept. |
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Oil is the crucial example in this process, its production as transformative as the Gold Rush nearly a century before. Oil modernized Alaska's civilian infrastructure, brought its own pilgrims, and ultimately challenged the laissez-faire environmental attitudes of the state. Most Alaskans thought the restrictions on the Alaska pipeline and other environmental regulations far too strict. They opposed them, demonizing the very idea of environmental regulation. Then came a catalytic circumstance that seemed destined to change perception but did not. Haycox's use of the Exxon Valdez case establishes this with clarity and insight. Even as the national press trumpeted the perfidy of a major corporation, Alaskans lined up to share in the opportunities that cleanup created. Nor did the Valdez inspire debate about whether oil should continue to be the primary source of fuel in our era. Instead, it merely ignited talk of ways to assure the safety of oil production and transportation. |
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Haycox simultaneously offers a logical narrative and an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the Alaskan relationship to the physical world. Arguing that the change in perception of Alaska reflects a national rather than regional trend, he suggests that Alaska's tradition and its future may be juxtaposed against one another in powerful ways. This volume is an essential starting point for historians who want to study Alaska, a seminal place to begin to explore the many dimensions of Alaskan environmental history. |
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