It is difficult to watch King Cove's decades-long fight for a short medical evacuation road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge and not remember Martin Luther King's admonition, "We should never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal ..."
What Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has done to kill the road is legal too. A federal judge even says so -- but Jewell could not be more wrong.
U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland says Jewell, indeed, met legal requirements of the 2009 Omnibus Public Lands Management Act approving a land swap for the road -- and in siding with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to shelve it because of environmental concerns. Congress, it turns out, left it to the Interior secretary to decide between the proposed road's competing public health and safety concerns and its environmental impacts.
If there is to be a road, Holland says, the law must be changed.
His decision is the latest setback in King Cove's decades-old fight to scrape a 9-mile, single-lane, gravel emergency medical evacuation road -- with barricades on either side, mind you -- through the refuge to the 10,415-foot, all-weather runway at Cold Bay. It would be shorter than the drive from Eagle River to Anchorage and connect to an already-existing network of World War II roads in the refuge.
Holland suggested that "given the sensitive nature of the portion of the Izembek Wildlife Refuge, which the road would cross," including the National Environmental Policy Act requirement for approval "probably doomed the project."
"Perhaps Congress will now think better of its decision to encumber the King Cove Road project with a NEPA requirement," Holland wrote.
The Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove, the Native village of Belkofski, the King Cove Corp., the Aleutians East Borough, the city of King Cove, Etta Kuzakin and Leff Kenezuroff had sued, in part claiming Jewell ignored health and safety issues in her decision. Alaska intervened in the lawsuit later.
Alaska's governor and congressional delegation are steamed about Holland's decision. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, infuriated with Jewell over the road, now heads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and has legislation pending that would approve a land swap and boot Jewell out of the process.
For now, King Cove remains the victim of a bureaucracy that could not care less about federal trust responsibilities to Alaska Natives, a bureaucracy that values migratory ducks and eel grass more than human life.
To head off a road and appease environmentalists, Congress over the years has poured nearly $40 million into the tiny, wind-blown Aleut fishing village of about 1,000 souls in the Aleutians East Borough, about 600 miles southwest of Anchorage -- and cheek-by-jowl with the refuge.
It upgraded the village clinic, improved its airstrip, fired up a $7 million hovercraft in 2007. That plan failed because costs were high, trained crews hard to find and keep, and the region's weather -- which can make boat travel fearsome -- was simply too daunting.
Congress in 2009 approved swapping 61,000 acres offered by Alaska and King Cove Corp. for 206 acres of refuge land for the road. (Murkowski's legislation would make that a one-for-one trade.) It required an environmental assessment. Fish and Wildlife officials objected; Jewell backed them.
Someday there will be a road; it is the only answer, but the effort has been long and frustrating for the village. Nobody checked with villagers when the 300,000-acre refuge was rammed down their throats in 1980. Road opponents seem unconcerned that more than 40 miles of roads already exist in the refuge. Nobody minds that waterfowl hunting is allowed -- encouraged -- in the refuge, even in Izembek Lagoon where the sacrosanct eel grass Jewell frets about is located. Nobody worries about the undercurrent of racism in arguments against the road or that villagers see the environmental assessment process as biased.
Nobody questions the notion of federal officials sentencing somebody to die as sop to the greenies' pathological fear that an emergency track in Izembek somehow would set precedent for six-lane highways and brightly lit convenience stores in the nation's refuges.
The need is clear: 16 medevacs from King Cove so far this year -- four with U.S. Coast Guard assistance; 32 since Jewell killed the road in December 2013.
Village officials say 19 people -- four in a single 1981 crash alone; none since 1994 -- have died during medevacs or waiting for evacuation over the years. Without a road, there will be more; you can bet on it.
You also can bet Holland was right; that what Jewell has done is legal.
But in human terms she could not be more wrong.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.Com, a division of Porcaro Communications.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com