For the residents of King Cove, Alaska, this is a matter of life and death.
King Cove is an Aleut Alaskan fishing village of about 400 people. It is adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which was designated a wilderness area in 1980.
This presented a lethal problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport, meaning that very ill or badly injured people are unable to get to Anchorage during inclement weather.
A town called Cold Bay — only 20 miles away — does have an all-weather airport, so the people of King Cove came up with a commonsense solution, first proposed in 1997: Build a simple, one-lane gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge to Cold Bay so that those who need urgent care can be driven to the airport there. The proposed evacuation road would require only about 450 of the 330,000 acres in the wilderness zone, and any impact on the refuge would be de minimis. Later, to sweeten the pot, King Cove offered a land swap that would add ecologically delicate wetlands to the Izembek Refuge in return for the road.
This is an issue of life and death for the people of King Cove. Nineteen people have died over the years, either in accidents while trying to evacuate sick and injured people during bad weather or because patients were unable to get to Anchorage in time.
In 2013, the Obama administration refused to allow the road to be built. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell even visited King Cove and told people at a town meeting, “I’ve listened to your stories, now I have to listen to the animals.” Wow. During his first term, Donald Trump reversed that decision and allowed the construction of the road, but that decision was also later reversed, by Joe Biden. During litigation at the time, the late Jimmy Carter — usually a humanitarian — submitted an amicus brief arguing that helping the people of King Cove was “dangerous.” The second Trump administration’s Department of the Interior reversed course once again. At last, I thought, all was well that ended well.
I should have known better. In a move illustrating the anti-humanism that now infects elements of the environmentalist movement, the nonprofit organization Defenders of Wildlife and others sued to stop the construction of the road, claiming ludicrously that the people of King Cove could instead use hovercraft for transportation. (This was previously tried, but hovercraft are unusable on high seas or during 100-knot windstorms. And Cold Bay’s harbor sometimes freezes, making it inaccessible.)
So far, the environmentalists’ litigation has succeeded in thwarting the plan. A judge threw out the land swap proposal and refused permission to build the road. The case is currently on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
This is a potentially lethal mess. I asked King Cove’s mayor, Warren Wilson, to come on my Humanize podcast to explain the decades-long controversy. It’s an infuriating story that made my teeth grind. If you are interested, hit this link. The people of King Cove need all the support they can get.