Molly Ivins June 25

ANCHORAGE — Alaska is fabulous! People have been telling me that for years, and I always said: Yeah, sure, I'll get there someday. And now that I have, like any convert, I want to proselytize madly.

Alaska is so beautiful, so big, so funny, so amazing! It's full of all these astonishing Animatronic animals, and whenever a tour guide pushes a button, eagles swoop down to catch fish, whales spout and breach, and sea otters pop up cradling their babies on their breasts. And all the unemployed Alaskans are paid to wander around the woods in bear suits in the summertime to thrill the tourists. It's much better than Disneyland. And they accept American currency.

Alaskans themselves are charming, fluent in English and quite patient with tourists. They seem to regard us as a species of musk ox (a primitive bovine with a brain the size of a walnut) and calmly counsel us not to stand under calving glaciers or feed ham sandwiches to the grizzly bears. It's scarcely dangerous at all, although I was severely mauled by an attack crab. Later, I ate it, with great satisfaction.

There are fortunes to be made here. For example, many Alaskans love to garden, but they have a hard time keeping moose out of their gardens. Keeping a moose from doing whatever it wants, including chowing down on your romaine and arugula, is notoriously difficult. One thing that works is spraying wolf pee around your garden. Naturally, some enterprising Alaskan is already selling wolf pee at $40 a quart. But no one has yet thought of selling free-range wolf pee, milked from wolves in the wild, so superior to mere domestic wolf pee. We're thinking of calling our free-range pee Moose-Away, or perhaps Vamoose.

Alaska is so wild, beautiful and pure, so like the American West of 50 or 100 years ago — except for a thin veneer of franchise restaurants, yogurt shops and T-shirt stands — that one's protective instincts come out immediately. One wants to plead, "Please, puh-leeze, don't screw this up the way we did our states." Alaskans, quite naturally, are not interested in advice from Lower 48ers about how to manage their resources. An independent (not to say slightly cussed-minded) lot, they resent the federal gummint, environmentalists and other forms of bossy do-gooders who tell them how many fish they can catch, crabs they can pot, seals they can shoot, and so forth.

Their legislature, on which I have impeccable sources, is a collection of greed-heads, gazooneys and garbanzo-brains that would be a credit to Texas.

And their congressional delegation! Their only representative, Don Young, once said: "Perseverance will overcome intelligence every time, and I'm going to stick to it." This guy makes Steve Stockman look like Albert Einstein. I have a strong sympathy for Alaskans' aversion to being told what to do and not do, except for this one thing. The worst case of environmental rape in America is being conducted on our nickel: Tax dollars from the Lower 48 are subsidizing something that would be a disgrace in a Third World country.

The Tongass National Forest is the last temperate rain forest left in North America. Unfortunately, it's under a 50-year logging contract to Ketchikan Pulp Co., a subsidiary of the giant, multinational Louisiana-Pacific Corp. The contract, which runs until 2004, was made when Alaska was desperate for industry and had nothing to offer but its natural resources. The contract stank then, and it reeks now, and Louisiana-Pacific actually has the nerve to ask for a 15-year extension on the contract — and has the support of Alaska's delegation. Louisiana-Pacific is paying well below market value (try $1.45 a tree, including 500-year-old Sitka spruce, sent straight to Japan), while the taxpayers are footing the bill to the tune of $102 million over three years, according to a 1995 General Accounting Office report.

Now get this: Alaska's Sen. Frank Murkowski, who introduced the bill for the 15-year extension, owned between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in Louisiana-Pacific until publicity forced him to sell it last year. He also owns stock valued at more than $1 million in the First Bank of Ketchikan and received between $50,000 and $100,000 in dividends from the bank in 1994. As Mr. Rogers would ask, "Can you say 'conflict of interest,' children?"

There is much more to this amazing tale. There's something about a frontier that seems to make corporations revert to their robber-baron instincts. Exxon and Louisiana Pacific are just two of the most notable. More true tales of life on the wild frontier coming soon. Just remember, folks: You're paying for them.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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