Valdez Spill’s Sticky Legacy of Public Land

The sliver of beach looks like one of the many forlorn paradises that stretch uncataloged across the Alaskan wilderness: a small, frigid bay of sharp blue, a narrow crescent of rocks along the shore, then the hard wall of the forest.

It is pristine, except when Ernie Piper begins prying up boulders, uncovering a large chunk of black asphalt and petroleum muck. The water under the stones runs rainbow with oil sheen. Piper shrugs.

“Unfortunately, this wasn’t such a success story,” he says, recounting the weeks of cleanup on this Prince William Sound island after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. “This beach got absolutely hammered. We had backhoes in here, we moved the rocks out with a Caterpillar, we flushed it all down and collected and skimmed it. But even now we’ve got a pretty continuous band of oil and asphalt all up and down the beach.”

In the coming weeks, $2 million in cleanup work will begin at Sleepy Bay on Latouche Island and at nine other oiled beaches--an effort that, seven years after the disaster, will close the book on cleanup of the deadliest spill in North American history.

But it is the second chapter of the story that is perhaps most remarkable and least remarked. After the last beach-washers go home, more than 30,000 acres of verdant islands around Sleepy Bay and nearby Chenega Island will become national forest and state marine parkland--signed over or sold, if the deal goes through, by a Native Alaskan corporation to help mitigate the damage from the spill. An additional 30,500 acres will be forever protected from logging and development.

$900-Million Mandate

As scientists, lawyers, public officials and corporate representatives battled over cleanup and compensation, the $900 million that the Exxon Corp. agreed to pay in civil damages has quietly funded a huge new trust of public lands--designed to shelter the dozens of species decimated by the spill and protect this part of rural Alaska from the logging and construction boom that washed in with the oil.

It is a program unprecedented in its conception and scope. Never before has government been given such an overwhelming conservation mandate--restore an entire devastated ecosystem--and so much money with which to do it.

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council has launched negotiations with Native Alaskan shareholders to protect up to 1 million acres of land in southeastern Alaska, so far signing or initialing deals for purchase or permanent resource protection of 422,290 acres.

The land purchases, so far tentatively committing $195.3 million of the trust fund, are creating state parks, expanding wildlife refuges, acquiring key privately held land in such popular spots as Kodiak Island and Kenai Fjords National Park, and establishing a land barrier to a major wave of logging that has crept northward into virgin forests, a phenomenon environmentalists say could prove as disastrous for wildlife as the oil spill.

“It’s unique in the history of the environmental movement to be able to have hundreds of millions of dollars to buy some of the most spectacular land, rich in fish and wildlife habitat, on the North American continent. I think it should be a model of how to deal with environmental damage,” said Pamela Brodie of the Sierra Club, a member of the trustee council’s public advisory group.

“Ironically, the spill turned out in some ways to be a benefit,” said Ralph Eluska, who heads the Akhiok Kaguyak native corporation on Kodiak Island, which deeded over 76,646 acres and barred development on an additional 43,239 acres of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge--parts of which have the densest brown bear populations on Earth.

“On the one hand you say, no way, you can’t let a disaster of this kind happen. There’s no value you can place on the harm that happens to the Earth, to people’s emotions. But spending the money to restore the habitat, it comes a little bit of the way toward justice.

“That bear habitat has got to last forever. But if it was left in our hands, over 40 or 50 years, the world’s going to change. The economy’s going to change. At some point . . . there’s going to be urban sprawl,” he said. “By the time it’s over with, they’ll end up paying us $46 million. I think that’s a small price to pay for the bears.”

The social consequences of such a vast acquisition program are only beginning to be felt. Nearly all the land belongs to Alaskan natives who won huge concessions from the government in the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. That legislation ceded native tribes 44 million acres of land--10% of the state of Alaska--to be held by profit-making native corporations.

Although the contracts protect subsistence-hunting rights, the large Exxon Valdez buys represent the most important shift of native land ownership back to the government since the hand-over, reversing, in the eyes of many Native Alaskans, the bitterly fought gains of the past half-century.

Stain on the Land

“Our land is the center of who we are, it’s what we are. You can’t put a price on culture and heritage and tradition,” said Gail Evanoff, a Chenega Bay resident and shareholder who has vowed to fight the sale of land. “I’m sorry, but I can’t even begin to fathom . . . how they think they’re going to give this area better stewardship than we ever did.”

The sense that something big still needed to be done reflects an awareness that, seven years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, the spill’s devastating legacy squats there like the rolling, early summer rain clouds.

Harbor seals, Harlequin ducks, killer whales and several species of seabirds have not recovered and, in some cases, continue to decline. Pacific herring populations crashed inexplicably in 1993 and have not sprung back, further hurting hundreds of fishermen. Pink salmon, once the staple of Prince William Sound’s canneries, has just begun to recover, and its price on a world market, in part dubious about oil spill fish, remains 1/13th of what it was. Natives don’t trust biologists’ assurances that mussels and clams can be safely eaten.

In Cordova, fish-based revenues have declined more than 50% since the spill. Many fishermen have abandoned pink salmon fishing in the sound and have gone after other fisheries further afield, in the Copper River.

“The sound is dead, and Exxon keeps trying to tell us everything’s normal,” said Paul Saunders, a Cordova fisherman since 1975. “You can’t crab, there’s no shrimp, there’s no herring anymore. Before the spill, I had a coffee can and I was stuffing $100 bills in there till I couldn’t get any more in. Now I’m thinking about moving. The cannery doesn’t even want us here anymore. The guy down there told me I shouldn’t go pink fishing this year. . . . A processor telling a catcher, ‘Don’t go fish.’ I never heard of such a thing in my life.”

Waiting to Be Rich

Fishermen damaged by the spill won a record $5-billion punitive judgment from Exxon in 1994. If it ever comes through, many of them will be millionaires. “Spillionaires,” they call them here. But several years more in legal appeals stand in the way of collecting. A few have died waiting. The former mayor of Cordova committed suicide. Stress levels in Cordova, five years after the spill, were measured by sociologists at the same level as that of a rape victim a year after the crime.

“Some people are surely thinking in the back of their mind, ‘That settlement will save us.’ But if you’re out there planning your life on the Exxon money, I wouldn’t do it,” said Jerry McCune, president of United Fishermen of Alaska and of the local Cordova fishing union.

Exxon has long argued that the ecological problems plaguing Prince William Sound can’t all be blamed on the spill, and the dilemma for trustees trying to rebuild the ecosystem is that Exxon may be at least partly right.

The number of seals, for example, was in decline long before the spill. And it’s an open question whether their escalated drop-off would have happened anyway. Declines in spill areas have been sharper. But did the spill affect their food supply in ways that haven’t been measured? The herring didn’t crash until four years after the spill, and the cause was traced to a virus. But did stress from the spill make the herring more vulnerable to disease? How are declines in small forage fish contributing to the slow recovery of seabirds that ought otherwise to be stabilizing?

To answer questions like these, millions of dollars of the Exxon civil settlement money and a separate $125-million fund in fines and criminal restitution have been devoted to research and field studies, some of which have produced findings and methodologies that will benefit marine environmental efforts around the world.

In the end, however, it was clear that simply studying individual populations and allocating money for beach cleanups wasn’t enough. Especially when so many of the species already reeling from the effects of the spill were seeing their habitat slowly eroding with increasing timber harvests all around Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.

“You’ve never had such a large ecosystem and such a large amount of money to [restore] it with. It’s unprecedented,” said Molly McCammon, executive director of the trustee council. “But what does it mean to restore an injured ecosystem? . . . Seven years after the spill, we still don’t know what restoration needs to be done. You never know for sure.”

Forests at Risk

At a series of public hearings, land acquisition was the overwhelming recommendation, focusing on key habitat for species most harmed by the spill. It took years to get underway, prompting legal challenges and a federal General Accounting Office report critical of foot-dragging and bureaucratic waste by the council. Now that the acquisition program is going forward, most of the critics have fallen back to see how it plays out.

“The irony is, the day before the spill, [former Cordova Mayor] Kelley [Weaverling] and I were sitting here in the cafe and saying, ‘This is the year we’ve got to do something with the forest,” said David Grimes, a former trustee council critic and environmental activist who has been one of the strongest backers of the habitat-acquisition program. “The irony is that without the oil spill and this possibility of acquiring habitat protection, probably Prince William Sound would have been clear-cut by now.”

All across the narrow forest strip that blankets the band of coastline between the sea and the glacial ice fields above--the only place anything on the sound can live, really, and the lifeline for its salmon--chain saws have been cutting the forests for the past decade at rates higher than what can grow back.

Most of the cutting is the work of the native corporations, which are under mandate to return a profit to their shareholders. Ragged clear-cuts scar the hillsides around Cordova, where the Eyak corporation, failing to sell its lands to the trustees, has logged 17,000 acres since 1987.

On Afognak Island, an uninhabited wilderness where trustees acquired land for a new state park at Seal Bay and are negotiating to buy 48,700 acres more, pristine hills have been stripped bare and laced with logging roads.

The Afognak Joint Venture, a coalition of native corporations that is negotiating with the trustees, says it can make more money for its shareholders logging the land than what the trustees want to pay to protect it, with $70 million on the table so far.

“We’re obviously unapologetic loggers. We are clear-cut loggers and truly proud of it,” said James Carmichael, timber manager for the joint venture. “The mission of the Afognak Joint Venture is economic value, but here [with a sale to the trustees], we have an opportunity to preserve something. I guess I’m talking about saving us from ourselves.”

In the living room of his cluttered home in Cordova, Eyak activist Glen “Dune” Lankard has painted a classic native death mask overlooking a clear-cut plain. For him, it should have been an easy decision to sell a conservation easement on Eyak lands to the trustees--the Eyaks keep the land, but agree not to develop it.

But infighting on the Eyak board and haggling over price and terms pushed the deal off the table. The chain saws started humming again earlier this year. A new deep water port, subdivisions around scenic Eyak Lake (connected to one of the last wild salmon stock runs in the area), a hydroelectric power plant and coal mining aren’t far behind.

“I told them, ‘We’re clear-cutting ourselves out of house and home, driving ourselves out of our subsistence lifestyle,’ ” Lankard said.

Acquisition and conservation easement payments so far have been used in most cases to set up permanent trust funds from which native shareholders can draw perhaps $1,500 or more a year in dividends. By comparison, Lankard said, each Eyak shareholder has seen a total of only $2,000 in logging proceeds since 1989.

“To me, there’s no other way to go. Let’s say you get paid forever to watch your trees grow, or you cut them all down and you get nothing,” he said. “The only thing we’re going to be left with is a legacy of being idiots.”

Settling on a price has been the biggest stumbling block in all the land acquisitions. The council has drawn criticism in the local press for the relatively large amounts it has paid for the land bought so far, often many times the value set in federal government appraisals.

The problem, said McCammon, is the appraisals count only the economic development potential, which is often negligible, not how much the land is worth in terms of habitat. Final deals have hovered at $300 to $400 an acre, although the trustees stretched to pay $1,200 an acre for wilderness on Shuyak Island, the makings of a state park, and $900 an acre to create a park on Afognak Island.

“Valdez ended up giving us the means to do it,” said Jay Bellinger, Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge manager, who has seen important additions to the refuge. Now he’s urging trustees to complete a purchase on prime logging lands at Afognak before it’s too late.

“Sure, it’s more than just repairing the damage of the oil spill. The idea is to not only protect it so it could heal from the oil spill injury, but so it could be protected from other kinds of damage,” Grimes said. “It’s like the first point in the Hippocratic oath: First, do no more harm. And the second is, trust in nature’s own healing capacities. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do with the settlement.”