Anchorage Daily News

As I write this, I'm in King Cove, Alaska. Soon I'll board a plane from Cold Bay to Washington, D.C., to support passage of our wilderness/road study/land exchange bill included in the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, pending before Congress.

Aldo Leopold, pioneer of the conservation movement, declared, "When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." As spokesman for Aleuts who have always lived in respectful community with land and water, I commend our position to you in contrast to the extreme environmentalists' rhetoric.

A review of history: A meeting is held in Cold Bay, Alaska, just as fishing season is getting under way in isolated King Cove in May of 1970. The goal is to take public testimony on designating land within the Izembek as "wilderness." No one from King Cove attends, nor is invited or solicited for public comment.

Fast forward 10 years. ANILCA is negotiated in Washington, D.C. Provisions within ANILCA codify the "wilderness" designation and quiet title to private property disputes for lands covered by that legislation. King Cove residents don't know about this until agency personnel destroy local cabins after the law passes. It will be years before King Cove and its Agdaagux Tribe learn that their optimum chance to negotiate a transportation corridor to an all-weather airport has slipped away.

For 20 years, we have battled for a single-lane gravel road so we can drive in safety to an all-weather airport in Cold Bay, where planes can fly, rain or shine. This month, we may finally get a vote by Congress on a bill containing significant and sweeping changes from the original. It includes the requirement that a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be conducted without special consideration given to the needs of the humans who live here. After the EIS is completed, the Secretary of the Interior may still determine the road is not in the public interest. If we get beyond these hurdles, construction will be governed by stringent mitigation procedures to minimize wildlife disruption. Access to the road will be restricted by law to noncommercial use.

Despite these considerable compromises, we still face the distrust and opposition of National Wildlife Refuge Association members. Before Congress, they promote budgets to increase the acreage of refuges, but describe our offer of 61,000 new acres as a poor bargain. They created the myth that Peter Pan Seafood was the shadow force behind the road -- a refuted fabrication. Recently, in a Washington Post article, there were allegations that we're in cahoots with oil and gas developers to push for the road. That's hogwash!

We simply want a road for the safety and health of our citizens. We advocate for a modest project to bring safe transportation to a community isolated by land, which is, without question, awe-inspiring, pristinely beautiful and soaked in Aleut history. Who better to be trusted with a road than the thoughtful, hard-working people who live there and have handed down for generations the ethic of minding the store?

As mayor, I know about extreme positions held by people with whom I may disagree yet still respect. It's my job to fend off and correct the inaccurate volleys from big-city journalists and environmental spokesmen who parade their opinion as fact and wouldn't know a caribou if one dined on their well-landscaped lawns. But it strikes me as extremely hypocritical that the farther away they travel, flying on well-established jet routes or driving down four-lane freeways, the more vehement and off- base their organized objections to a simple gravel road become.

A suggestion: Get into your car. Drive 2.5 miles and look back to where you started. That is the distance from our proposed road to the Izembek Lagoon at its closest point. Continue another 5 miles down your road. That is the entire length of the requested right of way that would traverse the Izembek. That is the undisputed truth. And the truth still matters to the Aleut people of King Cove.

Ernest Weiss is the mayor of the City of King Cove.

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