Alaska finally has clout to match its wilderness. That's bad news for wilderness.
Thanks to last year's GOP electoral sweep, the state's three-man, all-Republican congressional delegation is sitting pretty. Not only does Representative Don Young have one of the best seats in the House as head of the Resources Committee, but Frank Murkowski now chairs that panel's counterpart in the upper chamber, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. They are an unlikely pair-the vituperative Young, a onetime tugboat captain, and the drab Murkowski, a former banker. But on such issues as opening the Arctic Refuge to drilling or drastically upping the timber cut in Tongass National Forest, they pose a formidable one-two punch for development interests. Ted Stevens, the undisputed brains of the outfit, backs up their brawn as number-two Republican on the Appropriations Committee.
"No state has ever had both chairs of the two authorizing resource committees before," says Sierra Club Honorary President Edgar Wayburn, who notes that Young and Murkowski each won re-election with the votes of fewer than 130,000 Alaskans-yet are now poised to turn over the public lands of more than 250 million Americans to private oil, timber, mining, and real-estate interests. Murkowski, a Seattle native and a member of the Capitol newspaper Roll Call's "Senate Millionaires Club," is by temperament and training the candidate of big business. In his first year as head of the Energy Committee, he has quietly taken aim
at logging restrictions in the Tongass and at the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act itself, targets he shares with his more vociferous colleague in the House. Murkowski is one of a handful of surviving members of the 1980 Senate class, part of the "Reagan revolution."
Stevens, Alaska's senior senator, has won election five times since Governor Wally Hickel appointed him to a vacant seat in 1968. Like the rest of the anti-outsider Alaska delegation, he hails from the Lower 48. Born in Indianapolis, he is a Harvard-trained lawyer with a strong command of parliamentary procedures and a talent for tucking obscure provisions into the nooks and crannies of complex bills. He is a consummate Washington insider: in 1984 he unsuccessfully opposed Bob Dole for his party's leadership. Like Dole, he also has a mean streak. Just weeks after November's elections, Stevens convinced the incoming majority leader to reserve bill-number S.39-identified with Alaska-wilderness legislation since the late 1970s-for his own rewrite of the Magnuson Act, which regulates commercial fishing off the U.S. coast. The change created logistical and financial headaches for conservationists, who were now forced to get the word out to a generation of activists that S.39 no longer stood for wilderness protection.
Development's dream team is already showing off its footwork. When Murkowski held hearings recently in Alaska on his bill to force the Forest Service to subsidize thousands of timber jobs in the Tongass, he met with vigorous opposition from his constituents.
The surprised senator retreated. Meanwhile, Stevens simply attached a Tongass rider-less conspicuous than Murkowski's bill, but no less destructive-to an Interior Department appropriations bill.
