Big hairy deal. The Miami Herald reports on the international megamarket in human hair, visiting a Florida City warehouse packed with about 15 tons of the topgrowth, imported from China, “neatly pressed into mats and ready to ship to farmers and nursery growers who swear by the horticultural benefits” of Blair Blacker’s hairy wares. Most of Blacker’s hair – not on his own head – comes from China and India, which combined to export more than $154 million worth of human hair last year. That’s not just because there are millions of heads there, Blacker says: “It’s not processed or dyed like a lot of hair we have here.”

Blacker’s start in the business came in no small part thanks to Alaska’s Exxon Valdez oil spill. Turns out an Alabama hairdresser was watching the black, gunky disaster on TV in 1989 and saw footage of oil-covered otters swimming to shore. “I noticed how their fur soaked up the oil, and it just clicked,” Phil McCrory tells the Herald. He made a prototype from his customers’ clippings and his wife’s pantyhose and took it to Blacker, a retired Army helicopter pilot who was in the oil remediation biz.

Blacker bought the patent, then found the oil industry wasn’t interested. But nursery growers wanted his product in bulk, and he shifted gears and now produces SmartGrow, a weed barrier that may even help increase yields in crops such as tomatoes. Wal-Mart sells smaller hair mats for home gardeners.

You may not want to know: Human hair is also sold as a source of I-cysteine, an amino acid used in pizza dough, bagels and other baked goods.

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Speaking of oil in the water. On this date in January 2000, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines agreed to pay Alaska $3.5 million for dumping toxic chemicals — including dry-cleaning fluid — and oil-contaminated water into the state's waters. Cruisejunkie.com has a listing of large environmental fines ($100,000 or more) assessed against ships or cruise lines.

ALSO:

South Korean Oil Spill will affect Delta’s birds (Delta Discovery)

A day in the life of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Hickory (Homer Tribune), in which Greg Tlapa, the Hickory’s commanding officer, explains that oil-skimming capabilities became critical after 1989. “These ships were designed and built to respond to future Exxon Valdezes,” he told the Tribune.

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Hammond saw lack of ‘maximum benefit’ from Pebble: The Bristol Bay Times and other Alaska Newspapers have published the first part of a two-part transcript from a ‘lost interview’ with former Gov. Jay Hammond, recorded shortly before his death in 2005. In this installment, Hammond laments that Pebble (and other mining ventures in Alaska) contribute nothing to the Permanent Fund and compares mining’s relationship with the state unfavorably with the oil industry’s.

Hammond posed four criteria that Pebble and all development projects should live up to:

1. Is it environmentally sound?

2. Is it something that people want?

3. Is it something that can pay its own way, or will it simply benefit a select few at the expense of many?

4. Does it meet our constitution’s mandate that we manage our resources for the maximum benefit of the people?

Hammond also talked about his post-governorship work with Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “and his fish czar” to increase the market share and promote the health benefits of wild Alaska salmon – stealing a page from the playbook of California wine promoters.

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The cold standard. Saranac Lake, N.Y., is the latest place to be uttering the phrase “colder than Alaska,” and last week things were indeed pitiful, as NPR reported Saturday. Below-zero temps are nothing new there in winter, but it got down to 33 below there one morning last week. One takeaway tip from the story: Think Swedish army underwear.

Don’t cry for us, Saranac Lake: The overnight low was minus 42 at Nuiqsut today.

ALSO:

Mysteries of snow revealed: NPR’s All Things Considered also chatted over the weekend with Matthew Sturm, a senior research scientist and snow expert with the Army’s Cold Regions Research Laboratory in Fairbanks. Among the gee-whiz items: Snow is a mineral, like diamonds or salt, Sturm says.

Life-and-death drama of winter: A future program of “When Weather Changed History,” a Weather Channel Sunday feature, will report on the 1925 diphtheria epidemic near Nome, when temperatures of 50 degrees below zero threatened dog sled drivers delivering lifesaving medicine. Another episode looks at the severe weather that hampered troops in World War II's Battle of the Bulge.

Getting steamed up, Yup’ik style: Yes, NPR really binged on Alaska over the weekend. Saturday’s Weekend Edition included a fun piece on the Native steam-bath culture from Angela Denning-Barnes at KYUK in Bethel.

Canada is colder than thou, too: The Toronto Globe and Mail has a profile of Yellowknife marathoner Lore-ann Krysko and her minus-40 training regimen.

***

Six decades later, the Inupiaq songs come home. A report in The Arctic Sounder describes how recordings made by folk-music collector Laura Boulton in 1946 are returning to the Native communities in Barrow and Point Hope.

The story by Aaron Fox, the director of Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology (the curator of Bolton’s collection), worked with cultural geographer Chie Sakakibara to not only make the music available to the original communities in Alaska but to identify descendants of the recorded artists and make individivual copies of the music for them. The Sounder story includes a winsome photo of young Tagiugmiut Dancers rehearsing to songs from the Bolton recordings in November, during a visit by Fox and Sakakibara, and a 1946 photo of some original performers.

The visitors savored the fact that young people were as enthusiastic about the music as elders and educators in the community. “We even met teenagers with songs from the Boulton recordings on their iPods, mixed in with hip-hop and pop songs,” writes Fox, who plans to return to Barrow this year in March and again in June.

Boulton traveled around the world from the 1920s to the 1970s to capture traditional music on tape, and in 1955 released a commercial recording now distributed by the Smithsonian Institution, “The Eskimos of Hudson Bay and Alaska." She also wrote of her extended visits to the Arctic in her 1968 autobiography, “The Music Hunter,” which is now out of print, the Sounder says.

Also: Fox and Sakakibara discuss the music repatriation project on KBRW in December.

***

Cow moose: Use ’em or lose ’em? That’s what Fairbanks-area biologist Don Young tells the News Miner in the face of critics who want to stop large-scale hunts in the Tanana Flats and the Alaska Range foothills. Game managers like Young say the harvests are needed to thin the population, which is too large for the nutrition available and showing signs of stress.

“If hunters don’t kill the moose, wolves or winters will,” says Young, who adds that reducing the density will improve the range and the health of the remaining moose and will put “an incredible number of moose in people's freezers instead of losing them to predation and hard winters. That’s exactly what we want to do.”

Not everyone agrees. Wayne Walters, 70, has gathered almost 400 signatures from people who say the moose population is declining and want the antlerless hunts stopped in Unit 20A. Testimony from Walters and others pushed the Denali Borough to OK a resolution asking the state Board of Game to stop the hunt. “It’s a ridiculous deal,” says Fairbanks hunter Bill Larry, who says pregnant cows are also being killed.

***

Clampdown on wood stoves. The Juneau Empire reports that the capital city will ban burning in wood stoves for varying periods as needed to help curb air pollution. Such bans would only apply to Mendenhall Valley residents, who live between the airport and the Mendenhall Glacier. The move was prompted by new EPA regulations that reduce the allowable particulate size by 75 percent and restrict the daily exposure of people to wood and diesel soot by 50 percent. During a cold snap last month, the particulate count exceeded the new standards, prompting the city’s action.

***

Mentasta Lake kids relate to teacher’s ‘small’ hometown. In her first year teaching in the village 47 miles from Tok, 24-year-old Mallory Cooper has connected the 11 students she teaches to the Outside community where she grew up: Fort Gibson, Okla. The senior class at Fort Gibson High, 130 strong, has become pen pals with the Alaska kids (there are 17 in grades K-12 at Mentasta Lake), exchanging letters and sending Halloween candy and Christmas gifts to Alaska.

“We sent little scarves we had made, and toys — tons of toys — and we filled up a little stocking for each one and we wrote their names on the stockings in glitter,” Fort Gibson senior Katie Smith told the News-Miner. “And we sent pencils and pens and mittens and hats and stuff.”

***

6,572 miles of biking in Alaska. That’s how much ground Jill Homer calculates she covered in 2007. Homer, whose training for the human run on the Iditarod course is being followed in a series of NPR reports, took a break last week when an old knee injury flared up. Today’s report includes a link to her blog and an amazing photo of Homer resting at the base of blue glacier ice that looks almost … confectionary.

***

MORE ALASKA HEADLINES:

State-occupied buildings in downtown Juneau sold (Juneau Empire)

Alaska is where U.S. should get oil (LA Times letters page)

Pebble awaiting OK of $100M budget (Alaska Journal of Commerce)

Climate change task forces zero in on erosion issues (Alaska Journal of Commerce)

Coastal erosion problems receive new federal funding (The Arctic Sounder)

Funding approved for Coast Guard projects in rural Alaska (Cordova Times)