Alaska News Brief February 2025–how to drink from a fire hydrant
How do you drink from a fire hydrant?
Well, first, take a deep breath. In fact, take a long pause and remember that when quenching your thirst, reach for a container that’s designed for drinking from, not one that might drown you. And, of course, drinking is not the point during a flood.
Focus, focus, focus. Brown bear at Brooks Falls peers into rushing water for fish. Photo by Peter Pearsall, USFWS
This is what I’m doing right now. First, I breathe, I pause, I catch myself before falling into the doom scroll or rabbit hole. I’m a lawyer. I lead a small but consequential Alaska law firm that knows its role and focus area—Alaska lands and water, Alaskans and their ways of life.
We know that the Trump administration wants to “flood the zone” with commands and actions so people cannot respond to any one thing because they’re pulled into the raging flood of all the bad things.
We know that we need to focus. The directives laid out in executive orders have yet to materialize on the ground on Trustees’ issues, but they will. We are ready. We have lawsuits in play and more on the way. We know this because laws will be broken. They were broken during Trump’s first term, and they’re being broken now in other areas of his agenda.
We also know that Congress seems to have given up its power, by which I mean, the body at large, the legislative branch, has bowed out of its constitutional obligation to assert its authority over its legislative directives and the money for carrying them out. Funding that has bipartisan or majority support to have been appropriated. It’s one thing to have a different political agenda or set of policies, but for so many congress members to roll over and hand over their power disregards needs—some very basic ones—of their constituents.
It’s true that many people do not understand all the constitutional mandates and laws being broken or eroded, and others may generally support the stories of “efficiency” and “government waste” they hear. But members of Congress cannot claim to do what people want if they’re abdicating the very power that they were elected to assert.
Maybe nihilism, populism, fascism, feudalism, and even the robber barons are back in vogue, but that’s just another rabbit hole, and the 20-dollar-word labels aren’t going to help us. We need to call a spade a spade.
The “flood” that is happening is an outright attack on all of the values Americans hold dear—the Constitution, patriotism, community, civil rights, and freedom, to name a few. We are a republic, which is government by the people and the power comes from the people.
The people carrying out this attack know exactly what they are doing, and they do it for power, money, and dismantling the checks and balances that we have worked on so long and hard to make the U.S. a respected leader in the world. That leadership is now being diminished to carry out small and petty acts of retribution and racism with no care about what happens to people.
There is no vision here.
The Trump administration wants to expand the power of the executive by doing audacious things and pushing to get those things litigated in the U.S. Supreme Court to see what breaks, what shifts, what it can get away with. There is also the question of the neutering of the courts as well since Vice President J.D. Vance claims that courts can’t tell the executive what to do since the executive determined it to be legal. Hmmm….Marbury vs. Madison (1803) anyone? Let’s see what Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito do with that.
Truth is, a constitutional crisis is here. We know what to do. Trustees will work within united coalitions, we will provide strategic and legal guidance and support, and we will sue.
A lot will happen in the next four years, so we will shift focus where it makes sense, and we will work with many others who do care about Alaska. Who do care about Alaskans.
Who do care about resisting a worldview that cares so little about jobs that it intends to slash millions of them without regard to the consequences to many more millions of people who rely on those services; and that cares so little about people that it slashes life-giving medicines and care; and that cares so little about people that it withholds funding from school meals that are the sole nutrition for some kids.
Caring matters. May we all continue caring and taking care of ourselves and each other.
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
Midnight sun on Wonder Lake and the Alaska Range. Photo by Kent Miller, NPS
What does the law do? ANILCA and public lands in Alaska
Collared wolverine, Alaska. Photo by David Saalfeld, ADFG
On beings and biomes–the wolverine
