Editorial 4.4, May/June 2002, by Deirdre Helfferich Imaginary Jobs, Wild Fish, and the Value of Professionalism 693,000 Non-Jobs Hey, Frank, what happened? First you told us that opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration would create 700,000 jobs. Then we heard that opening up the refuge would create, um, WOW! 7000 jobs! Anybody hear the sound of hot air whooshing? Where’d all those jobs go? Could it be that they never were there in the first place? Makes me ponder the reality of the remaining 1%--perhaps they’re figments of somebody’s imagination, too. Funny how our congressional delegation keeps getting believed, by somebody anyway (maybe all those out-of-state campaign contributors?), even when the most outrageous hooey gets sputtered out of their kissers. Wonder who they’re kissing? Or what? Not Truth, certainly. I think that poor lady has been slapped around, stepped on, and utterly ignored after she’s been thoroughly messed up--but definitely not embraced. At least the United States Senate finally decided that this bit of folderol wasn’t good for political careers, and voted against opening up the refuge. I suppose, however, that it still makes a good gubenatorial campaign line: I fought to get you thousands of jobs! Just leave the ‘imaginary’ out and it should work fine. I think it would have been a moot point, however, even if the area had been opened up: I predict that the price of oil is going to go down--a rather large oil field is going to go on line in a year or two over in Siberia, making North Slope oil an even more expensive proposition by comparison. But I bet that even over there, the Siberian pipeline won’t be creating any 700,000 jobs… Those ‘Organic’ Wild Fish: Ted’s Commercial Sensibility Senator Ted Stevens has been providing me with more straight lines than you can shake a stick at. Amazing. Now he’s trying to get "wild" equated with "organic." The "organic" label is valuable in this day of persistent organic pollutants, additives, preservatives, processed foods, irradiated foods, and bleached-and-‘enriched’-to-within-an-inch-of-its-natural-state foods. Organic means it is healthy, clean, pure food, that doesn’t have a thousand odd chemicals added or subtracted. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that wild food is organic. Not any more. Take a look at caribou: significant concentrations of radioactive isotopes—not added to the meat by injection, no, but certainly there because of human actions. And wild salmon: their fat is full of lipid-soluble PCPs, commonly found in such things as electrical transformers That is not what the organic label on food stands for. The difference between wild food and organic food is that in wild foods, nobody prevents poisons from getting into them (unless you count the Kyoto Accords, of which the U.S. doesn’t want any part). Organic food is guaranteed to be free of added hormones, added toxins, added thises and thats. Wild food comes with no guarantees whatsoever. It usually tastes as good or even better than commercially-produced food, even organic food, in my opinion, but I think that comes from lack of attention to the taste of food in breeding in favor of commercial yield. So Senator Ted is, it seems to me, attempting to increase the (superficial) commercial value of a lucrative natural resource for Alaska: its wild game and fruit. Pollutants come cycling up from the rest of the northern hemisphere to be deposited in the Arctic, where they are concentrated in wild plants and animals. As you go up the food chain, the concentrations become higher, until you get people who live in the supposedly pristine North dying from cancers and other horrible diseases caused by toxins in their blood and bones. That little tidbit doesn’t sell well in the supermarket. The term "organic," once upon a time the descriptor for "food grown by fruitcake environmentalist hippies," now implies "big fashionable yuppie bucks." Ted is apparently trying to cash in politically on something he’s treating like a commercial fad. Problem is, organic farming, in order to mean anything valuable, has to maintain the principles involved, which mean caring for the soil and water in which the food is grown, and preventing poisons from polluting it. It’s a long-term endeavor, and it takes years of hard work for a regular farm to make the transition to organic production. Senator Stevens’ suggestion makes it clear that he doesn’t understand—or perhaps care—what organic produce really is. Free Speech and Validation As one of my regular cartoonists has seen fit to comment about the columnist brouhaha over at Fairbanks’ only daily newspaper, I decided that perhaps I should get my two cents’ worth in, also, especially since I have offered one of the News-Miner’s former columnists, Dan O’Neill, a paid space here in the Republic. I don’t usually have the resources to pay my columnists money, but I was able to make the offer in this case because so many folks out here in Ester asked me to, and said they would put out a collection can or pay out of their own pockets for a column or two. I felt I owed it to my readers to at least make the gesture. (Besides, it would be a coup to have a genuine investigative journalist writing for the Republic.) The offer still stands. I don’t believe that Kelly Bostian is squelching freedom of speech. I do believe that he has clearly made a symbolic statement on the worth of columnists. The pay these writers received was a token amount, relatively insignificant for the News-Miner, and certainly not adequate recompense for the effort expended by the columnists themselves. However, the fact of payment, even a token, was an important validation of their role as professionals. To have an open community forum is a fine idea, and one I commend Bostian for instituting. It’s too bad the daily thought it necessary to apply the same standards to both amateur and professional writers, however. There is a difference, and it should be recognized. Professionals are paid for their work because they are held to standards that amateurs are not. By not paying their professional, local columnists, and defending this decision by saying that they have just as much opportunity as anyone else who submits articles to the Community Forum, the News-Miner is in effect equating the professional skill and training of these columnists with that of untrained and nonprofessional writers, simply because they are all local writers. An amateur writer may be very good, and a professional very bad, but an amateur has no obligation to be thorough or to adhere to professional standards and ethics. I think that this distinction is significant, and it is a pity that our local daily does not. Still, this local circus show may have a good end after all: I have heard rumors that folks are mad enough that the Fairbanks area might just end up with another paper, perhaps a weekly or even another daily. Truly local journals--note that the News-Miner is part of an Outside chain--have zest. Ester already contributes its little monthly, but I say, the more, the merrier. We could use two independent newspapers in the valley. | ||
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