PRINCE OF WALES, ISLAND, ALASKA–Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski had few good words to say about Greenpeace activists who harassed the community of Petersburg last week.
Perhaps, Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski could take a lesson or two from his Pacific Northwest neighbor and stand up for timber-dependent communities left behind in recent years. Indeed, several Oregon governors over the last 20 years would have done well to heed his message.
Governor Murkowski said Greenpeace ?spread fear and misinformation throughout the region? and added that in Craig on Prince of Wales Island, ?Greenpeace extremists scared residents at a public meeting by calling for a ?war in the woods? and using other inflamatory and antagonistic language.
Greenpeacers reportedly chained themselves to heavy equipment, hung themselves from cables and found themselves hauled into court in Wrangell and Petersburg.
?We should expose them for what they are, extreme outside environmentalists who want to kill Alaska jobs so they can raise funds from their East Coast friends,? Gov. Murkowski said.
The Tongass National Forest encompasses nearly all of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. About three percent of the forest is managed for allowable timber harvest, a meager percentage by anyone?s standards from an area that once produced more than 400 million board feet of timber per year.
?More timber is cut in New York state for firewood than in the Tongass–so why aren?t these activists protesting there?? Governor Murkowski asked. ?Clearly, it?s easier to raise funds by invoking the wild mystique of Alaska than the smog of New York City.?
Only three community-based, family-owned sawmills remain in Southeast Alaska, according to the governor, even though the Tongass encompasses 17 million acres and is as large as the distance from New York City to Washington, D.C.
Anyone who visits Prince of Wales Island can quickly see there are few jobs available to young persons who might live there. Fishing, when there is an allowable harvest. Working at local restaurants or if, they are lucky, seasonal road construction projects.
Yet, high prices for goods and services remain, as though the state?s economy were booming as in years past. It isn?t and it shows.
In a guest opinion piece in the Ketchikan Daily News, Governor Murkowski concluded, ?The lack of civility Greenpeace has exhibited by coming into our state with their radical agenda and disturbing our peace sinks public discourse to a new low…
But we Alaskans, and our Alaskan response should be just this: Greenpace, go home, we do it better up here.?
We wonder if Governor Murkowski wouldn?t mind visiting Oregon and giving some political leaders a few lessons in standing up for rural Americans and a vanishing way of life.
A.P.