Opinions

Iceland, Alaska suffer same afflictions - but Iceland is still a community

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND -- On the surface, this is an idyllic island nation. The people are warm and friendly. The capital city is beautiful. The roads, bike trails and walking paths are wonderfully designed and maintained. The energy that heats home and provides most electricity is renewable and cheap. Everyone you meet seems happy.

Dig a little deeper, though, and the island nation at the edge of the Arctic Circle looks a lot like Alaska.

Icelandic films are dark and full of stories about dysfunctional families. Alcohol abuse is a big a problem, according to the World Health Organization, which reported that more than 40 percent of Icelandic men drink with the main aim of getting drunk. Violence against women is rampant. Every other Icelandic woman has been beaten and a quarter suffer from domestic abuse, the Nordic Council reported in 2010.

And, in Iceland, as in America's 49th state, rural economies, or more accurately the lack thereof, are a huge problem.

"The rural districts and smaller urban centers have been waiting for their jackpot ever since Reykjavik received its most important boost: The arrival of the English and later Americans in WWII,'' reported Magnús Sveinn Helgason in "The Reykjavik Grapevine,'' the capital city's excellent weekly newspaper, during the Arctic Circle Assembly meeting here this month to discuss the region's future.

"The troops doubled the population of the city, creating a building boom and an insatiable demand for labor that greatly sped up the migration of people from the countryside. This is turn led to a very lopsided economic development, which remains an issue to this day.''

Substitute "Texans'' for "English'' and "oil boom" for "WWII,'' and you've got Alaska there. Roll in the problems with booze and beatings, and it's starting to sound even more like home.

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Dig deeper and the parallels only multiply. In another story in the same issue of "Grapevine,'' Jonathan Pattishall writes about the loss of rural fishing economies. Processors are moving away, because they can find greater efficiencies by consolidating in a few larger communities. Fishermen are moving away because they are economically able to do so.

People who stay are faced with tough choices: try to forge a new economy or move. Tourism is the great hope in some places.

"Every year we have more and more tourists," a small-town manager named Gauti Johannesson tells Pattishall. "We're getting tourists at times where we didn't have them a few years ago.

"(But) the idea of transitioning to a tourism economy was met with ambivalence by numerous workers in the Visir (company fish) factory,'' Pattishall writes. Not everyone wants a tourism job. Not everyone is suited to a tourism job.

Crabs in a bucket

It all sounds so familiar, but there are differences. Iceland has a much more cohesive population than Alaska. Most of its residents are of old Viking stock born and reared on the island, though there are increasing numbers of Filipinos and Mexicans who have come here to work in fishing and service businesses.

Nowhere, though, is there any evidence of the sort of racial divide that plagues Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland and to a lesser extent Russia, where Euro-American populations only a couple hundred years ago, or less, overran indigenous populations that only thousands of years earlier had overrun other indigenous populations.

One big difference: Icelanders publicly contemplate their problems in their cinema, books, magazines and newspapers.

Alaskans really don't want to talk about social issues. They'd rather stick to the simplest economic issues, like how much oil money they're going to get, or not.

We don't even want to talk about the socioeconomic issues -- about how the territory became a state only to end up looking a lot like a colony, or how the state founded in large part on the idea of taking the fishing industry back from Outside interests has returned most of the fishing industry to Outside interests.

We certainly don't want to talk about bad parenting -- one of the biggest problems in the state. When Bristol Palin takes her child to a drunken bash, the discussion isn't about a mother leaving a small child behind in a Hummer limousine to go take part in a street fight. Oh no, the discussion is about whether Palin, an aggressor in the affair, was the victim of violence against women.

Real violence against women, violence in which women are innocent victims not willing participants, well, we talk about that with a slogan: "Choose Respect.''

We don't, most especially, talk about the economic problems of rural Alaska that make the violence against women problem worse there than anywhere. No, we'd rather argue over the subsistence "rights'' of rural residents as if somehow living off the land will make the young people of the next generation happy. And there are a lot of young people in rural Alaska today because of the teen birth rate that exploded in rural Alaska in the 1980s.

We didn't talk about that either. Just as nobody talks about how it has left a generation of people now looking for work in a place where there is none.

'Why not Alaska?'

The other day, a former journalism colleague, a one-time New Yorker who worked for the old Anchorage Daily News in its most liberal days, remarked that what rural Alaska really needs most is roads. There should be a road to every village, said this journalist long opposed to development, so the kids could get out if they wanted to leave or, worse, needed to leave.

Roads, of course, are widely opposed in Alaska because along with providing a means for people to get out, they provide a means for people to get in. Roads would bring change, and the one thing on which most in Alaska can agree is that we don't want change.

We don't even need to talk about that because we know we don't want farming, logging, mining, petrochemical production, fish farming or anything that would bring serious change. No, just get us some more oil money and additional government handouts.

Retired Alaska lawmaker Clem Tillion commented at length in these pages a month ago about how it is time for Alaskans to start thinking about "end-of-oil options.'' He almost made me cry. Tillion comes from a generation that wanted to make Alaska prosper. He obviously still believes in that idea.

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"... The open Arctic should be considered an opportunity. Little Finland is self-sufficient in agriculture, why not Alaska?'' he wrote. "Our timber resource if well managed is renewable. The only difference from a hay meadow is that we'd mow it every 40 years instead of once a year."

The sad answer to Tillion's question of "Why not Alaska?" is that the people who live here now lack the collective will. The "end-of-oil option" for many, if not most, is simple: Retreat to the Lower 48. Go back to the Homeland.

Plenty of commercial fishermen and major tourism businesses have already figured things out nicely. Alaska is a great place to visit, but if you can make a lot of money there in the summer, who would want to stay for the long, cold dark?

Agriculture? The acreage agriculture tears up and changes forever makes a Pebble-esque mining development look like nothing, and Alaskans are trying their damnedest to stop Pebble.

Maybe it's time to throw in the towel, declare the whole of the state outside of the oil provinces a park, and live off what can be made on oil, tourism and fisheries -- three industries that send most of the wealth Outside. That might be the best option for the 49th state because although we have a lot in common with Iceland, we're not Iceland.

Iceland has a sense of community. Icelanders understand the need to pull together. They are a small population living in a harsh land cognizant on a broad scale of what American Benjamin Franklin observed back in the our country's revolutionary days: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Alaskans used to hang together. Now a lot of them -- of all races, organizations and occupations -- just want theirs, and screw everybody else. That whole community thing sounds just a little too much like socialism, doesn't it? And we wouldn't want that here in the entitlement state, would we?

Craig Medred is a columnist for Alaska Dispatch News. Contact him at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com

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.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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