Editorial 2.7, July 2000, by Deirdre Helfferich Where Progress Is Our Least Important Product Somewhere in the murky past, that romanticized and exaggerated time of brutish indelicacies and truly awful diseases, some horrible curse was laid upon those of the present era. We here in the Fairbanks North Star Borough are probably paying for the sins of introducing tuberculosis, distilled alcohol, and purified radioactive isotopes to the northlands, but the worst of it is that we are doing it to ourselves. Or at least, our governmental representatives are doing it to us. No fancy ancient mojo-manipulator did it, that’s for sure. Who back then would have had the hideous turn of mind to imagine the prepackaged, mass-produced sterility of our current daily living environment? Several recent letters to the editor in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner from tourists have decried the generic quality of the city of Fairbanks. Just like Sandusky, Ohio. Or maybe L.A., or perhaps Renton. Somewhere with lots of asphalt and chain link fences and boxy frame houses with aluminum siding that all look just like every other house built after 1960. The borough assembly recently voted to rezone a residential area by the Parks Highway bridge over the Chena to commercial status, over the Planning Commission’s unanimous rejection of the proposal due to the local residents’ objections. A buffer zone was mandated to mollify the residents, and this is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Intangibles such as "quality of life" and "aesthetic appeal" are a significant part of our lives, and like it or not, they have real impact on the economy--and vice versa. It’s difficult to measure them, and so too often they are ignored by our public officials. The problem of the commons is that not enough people take responsibility for the welfare of public spaces, and so they deteriorate with time. It is the duty of the borough assembly and other governmental bodies to nurture our commons, such as our rivers, and to help us find solutions, not just compromises, when conflicts arise. The Assembly is forgetting that tourists come here because Alaska is supposedly "The Last Frontier." This description might have been true 20 years ago, but certainly isn’t anymore, not with the soul-destroying Urge To Progress causing supposedly thoughtful borough assembly members and like public officials to rip up the frontier in the name of greenbacks as fast as they possibly can get away with it. When the riverfront is nothing but resorts and businesses, who is going to want to visit it? They’ll all go out of town to see forests and wild critters and hear silence. Of course, this isn’t anything new. The gold rushes led to all sorts of ripping and rending of the frontier--witness the giant valley-sized holes where the dredges went through. The trees are only just now beginning to get back to a decent size, forty years later. Also note that the descendants of the people who used to live here before all the miners came up are pretty sparse and few between, and the language that their grandparents or great-grandparents used is now only spoken by a few linguists at the University of Alaska. So Progress, at least in Alaska, has been going along at its ruthless pace for quite a while. The curious thing is that some people actually want Alaska to look just like the Lower 48’s worst, because it represents money. The contiguous United States has lost a lot of beautiful spaces and quiet acreage due to population pressure and the driving force of corporate greed. It got that way because people thought first about the dollar and the immediate present and not about the things that make life worth living in a particular place. Tourists do not come to Alaska because it looks like where they came from. People visit because Alaska is a special place with special people, and they move here and stay here not because they can get a job and get out (we saw plenty of that during the pipeline boom, and it was ugly) but because they realize that we still have what the rest of the country has lost, and it is precious. You have to be willing to endure hard times to live here, because we still don’t have a stable economy. Which brings us back to the rationalization for the rapine that the powers that be keep indulging in. "Let’s boost the economy!" they say, forgetting that using up Alaska is not the same as building it up, and that building done foolishly can destroy. Everyone has heard the story of the goose that laid the golden egg, and the moral is quite clear: slaughter the goose and you will have no more eggs. But somehow those who do the zoning around here can’t apply this simple fable to real life. To take another example: the rumor mill has it that Princess Tours has seven more hotels planned for the state. I’ve seen the herds of tourists that Princess rushes around, and no one can miss the giant blue barracks looming over the Chena River. Why anyone who knew what they were getting into would stay there is beyond me. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a good look. Even Pike’s has decided to follow their lead, judging by the size of Pike’s Lodge (although their architecture is marginally better in appearence than Princess’s). This is the look of the future. This is Progress, folks. Proceeding onward is not the same thing as improvement, and although both describe progress in the dictionary, it is important to remember the distinction between them. We live here. Our lives are our most important product, and we can build crappy towns that depress us or beautiful ones that lift us up and inspire us. Here in Ester there are a lot of building projects, some which dismay the neighbors and some which delight them. But pretty much everyone, even those of us with piles of stuff in our yards, tries to consider the neighbor’s wishes somewhere along the line. This principle can go a long way, because, as they say, what goes around comes around. True progress is a betterment of life, a spiritually fulfilling journey. It is not the destruction of what we love and the prostitution of our state. How we live and conduct ourselves and what we create around us are the most telling things we do. I think that the borough assembly and the local developers should start looking hard at what they are telling us all, and I think they should listen to what the people affected by their actions are telling them. But then again, maybe all they want out of Alaska--and maybe all they want out of their lives--is simply a quick and vapid buck, and to hell with the consequences. And the rest of us. | ||
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