Molly Ivins June 27

ANCHORAGE — Boy, these Alaskans — what a sense of humor! Regard, for example, their congressional delegation. Boffo!

I guess my favorite is Rep. Don Young, who describes environmentalists as "a waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual bunch of idiots." Young, a former trapper, favors the Gib Lewis school of office decor: many dead heads on the wall and a full-length stuffed Kodiak bear that he personally dispatched to the hereafter.

One of the more famous Don Young anti-environmental episodes involves the time he brandished an oosik (the penis bone of a walrus) while berating Mollie Beattie, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I would report on the recent episode in which Young explained homosexual conduct to a local high school audience, but I can't get the f-word into a family newspaper. Suffice it to say that Congressman Young is practically charm personified.

Unfortunately, he's also chairman of the House Resources Committee, which means that his 19th-century attitudes toward the environment affect not only the pristine wilderness of Alaska but the Lower 48 as well. Even more unfortunately, Alaska's Sen. Frank Murkowski heads the twin committee in the Senate, giving this tiny delegation of ruthless pro-developers an enormous amount of power.

To give you an idea of Murkowski's intellectual caliber, he's the one who almost made Sen. Al D'Amato look smart during the Whitewater hearings. At one point, a witness had just testified that then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton refused to become involved in a dispute about whether the state should lease a building owned by James McDougal. Murkowski demanded, "Mr. Chairman, isn't the point here simply to draw a conclusion that the governor played a major role in the selection of this building?"

And to top it all off, Alaska's Sen. Ted Stevens, the one who isn't dumb, runs the Government Affairs Committee, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service. This trio of powerful Alaskans is busily engaged in tearing up 20 years' worth of hard-won environmental protections, shredding the Endangered Species Act, lowering standards for clean air and clean water, and leasing the national forests to lumber companies for a song to clear-cut as they will. Whoopee.

It's that old-time rock-'n'-roll, let-her-rip religion: Open it all to drilling, strip mining, clear-cutting — full speed ahead and forget the consequences, not to mention the rivers.

From the earliest American artists to the westerns of John Ford, we have been given an image of the West as endless, immense, rugged, indestructible. It took us more than a century's worth of irreparable mistakes to figure out that Western land is really quite fragile — so arid that the scars left by wooden wagon wheels along the Oregon trail still mark the earth. In Alaska, as the beloved Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again.

In the breathtaking ghost town of Kennecott in the Wrangell Range, one finds the ruins of an earlier rip-it-out, get-rich-now boom town. Including the remains of the town's Chinese laundry.

In Alaska, it is not only the political leaders who are throwbacks to the Old West. Something about the frontier aura of the place seems to affect corporations as well. Exxon, which presumably has somewhere in its corporate bowels a large number of well-paid public relations specialists, is suing the federal government to allow the Exxon Valdez back into the Alaska coastal trade. The company has changed the ship's name, so of course everyone will feel better about it. Exxon was also recently found trying to cut a deal with the seven major fish processors in Alaska to lower the total compensation package it still owes from the Valdez spill.

Louisiana-Pacific, owner of the Ketchikan Pulp Co., now sitting on the worst rip-off lumber contract in America (subsidized by American taxpayers everywhere), is trying to get its 50-year contract extended another 15 years — with generous assistance from the Alaska delegation. Ketchikan Pulp is the worst polluter in Alaska and is under federal investigation on allegations of tree piracy (logging high-quality trees and lying about it). Last year, Louisiana-Pacific pleaded guilty to one felony count and 13 misdemeanor counts of pollution and agreed to pay up to $6 million in criminal and civil fines for violating clean water and clean air laws. Environmentalists attempting to monitor the plant's pollution are regularly harassed and threatened. Yet Louisiana-Pacific still has the nerve to say that if it doesn't get the 15-year extension, it will shut the pulp plant down! Horrors.

And what's a story of the Old West without Native Americans getting the worst of it somehow? In the Tlingit village of Hoonah, where vast areas have been clear-cut and only hideously eroding slopes are left of a once-gorgeous landscape, general assistance (welfare) is up significantly. With the forests went the deer; with the deer went much of the Tlingits' subsistence living; and now there is only welfare.

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

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