What’s the Izembek Refuge land swap and road proposal really about?
By Dawnell Smith
In the early 1980s and for decades after, Alaska legislators, governors, and other political players argued for putting a road in Izembek National Wildlife Refuge to generate corporate growth and support an international fishing company. Their problem was that the law protects Izembek from exactly these kinds of incursions. The purposes laid out in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act centered on protecting food and subsistence resources for Alaskans, safeguarding fish and wildlife habitat and populations in their natural diversity, and conserving lands designated as national parks, refuges, and wilderness areas.
Brant geese on eelgrass in a foggy Izembek, Photo by USFWS.
We challenged a Trump-era land trade to make way for a road and won in U.S. District Court in 2020, but the decision was appealed and later dismissed by the appeals court as moot when that land swap was rescinded. Meanwhile, the effort to build a road on the narrow Izembek Isthmus continues with the Biden administration, which chose a revised land swap and road as its preferred alternative in its November supplemental environmental impact report. Right now, there’s a comment period in which you can speak up to protect Izembek
These days, proponents of the road say it’s about providing emergency medical access for King Cove residents, and political players like Sen. Dan Sullivan claim that Alaskans who stand up for protecting Izembek care more about birds than people. Browbeating talking points like this intentionally distract from what’s really going on here.
Let’s say it again: Congress passed ANILCA to protect animals of all kinds precisely because of their importance to people and living communities, and to the natural landscapes that support subsistence. Alaskans rely on the migratory birds that feed in Izembek for their food at various times of the year.
Plus, protected places like Izembek aim to preserve interconnected waterways and landscapes that nourish plants, fish, and an array of animals vital to people and the planet.
Black brandt stop during migration to feed on the rich eelgrass beds in Izembek Lagoon. Photo by USFWS
What gets erased in Sullivan’s and other’s tired “birds v. people” sound bite is that conservation lands were intentionally protected to benefit Alaskans and Americans. Allowing the Interior Secretary to trade away conservation lands without congressional input or approval in order to promote roads, infrastructure, construction, and other social and commercial activities endangers food and subsistence resources and the health of lands designated by law for the highest protection.
An Izembek land trade to build a road would set a dangerous precedent for all national parks, national refuges, and designated wilderness areas in Alaska, from Gates of the Arctic to Denali to Katmai. The impacts on people across the state would be enormous, potentially pockmarking areas meant for protection with infrastructure benefiting private interests rather than supporting all communities through the generations.
The “tradeoff” mentality
A “tradeoff” mentality creates an either/or equation toward solving human problems, a noncreative and uninspiring way to try to come up with solutions. Truth is, there’s a medical access question that can be answered in many ways, but many people in leadership roles will allow a conversation about only one of them—the road.
This road proposed for the Izembek Isthmus would connect King Cove with Cold Bay, which has a less resourced and capable clinic than King Cove, but a larger air strip. King Cove’s residents, like Alaskans in most rural communities, need to fly to Anchorage hospitals for medical emergencies requiring higher levels of care.
Flying above Izembek Isthmus, photo courtesy of USFWS.
King Cove recently got funding to upgrade its airstrip and medical clinic, and got many millions of dollars in funding years ago for a hovercraft that successfully transported residents to Cold Bay; that hovercraft later got dismantled and sold.
Let’s be clear: All Alaskans deserve access to emergency medical care and health care of all kinds; people across the state, urban and rural alike, need leaders who will work hard and creatively for better access to medical care for everyone.
Rural Alaskans in particular have limited levels of care available nearby and need to be transported to hospitals in emergencies. No matter the form of that transportation, the weather conditions, terrain, and other hazards can make it difficult and dangerous.
Just like air travel, roads pose severe risks in these remote conditions, and there would be massive snow drifts, hurricane force winds, thick fog, potential avalanches, and other hazards in the notoriously tumultuous Izembek area, said Dr. Peter Mjos, who provided medical services to King Cove, Cold Bay, and villages on the Alaska Peninsula and western Aleutian Islands for many years.
“That road, if it were built and people tried to use it during those big storms, is a set up for catastrophic road deaths,” he said.
Moreover, he said, the very weather that makes airplane or marine travel difficult or impossible is precisely the weather in which people should not use such a road. Even those who could make it to Cold Bay via any form of transportation would up stuck in Cold Bay when airplanes can’t fly, noted Dr. Mjos, and Cold Bay’s clinic is far less capable than King Cove’s, which is one of the best in rural Alaska.
Izembek rainstorm. Photo by Lisa Hupp, USFWS
A functional and funded marine option offers better emergency access without trading away Izembek and the interests of other Alaska communities or the health of the lands that support those communities, he said.
The legal question and future
We’re lawyers, not doctors, but we can see where this is going. And so did Congress.
People want roads for many reasons—for emergencies, sure, and to get to other communities for social reasons, for recreation, to make it easier to take a four-wheeler into more remote places, and of course for commerce. Marine travel meets many of these needs and desires, as Alaskans know.
ANILCA exists because Congress recognized that those with specific interests would want to put roads and pipelines and all manner of infrastructure across Alaska, and Congress wanted to protect some of these places before these webs of industrial infrastructure pockmarked every square mile. They protected conservation lands—national parks, refuges, and wilderness areas—precisely to prevent spider webs of roads. And the provision included in ANILCA to allow the trading of land is pertinent only if the trade is intended to strengthen conservation goals and protect the conservation land’s purposes, not to build roads.
If an Interior secretary can make a land trade for a road now in Izembek, then future secretaries could use the same reasoning to authorize limitless land exchanges to build roads across all 150 million acres of federally protected lands in the state. That’s not what ANILCA intended.
We all know what getting a foot in the door of natural places looks like. A small gravel road turns into a wider one, and that in turn becomes a conduit for offshoot roads, and since there’s no means to enforce any of the promised limitations, these areas steadily suffer the degradation and destruction of unfettered motorized use and expansion.
Izembek lagoon. Photo by Kristine Sowl, USFWS
That’s how we lose healthy natural landscapes. That’s how animal species diminish and vanish. That’s how clean water turns toxic. That’s how people stop finding the animals they eat, or appreciate, or that hold systems of life together.
Protecting Izembek is about ensuring the health of places important to people and future generations as natural landscapes that support abundant life.
You can make a difference in what happens in Izembek Refuge right now. You’ve got until Feb. 13, 2025, to speak up for Izembek. Here’s how to do it: sign the Defenders of Wildlife letter, the Alaska Wilderness League letter, or comment directly at the agency site.
Here’re some ideas of things to say in your comments:
ANILCA’s purposes are to promote conservation and subsistence. Using a land trade to build a road fails to enhance either of those purposes and in fact diminishes them.
The proposed land trade to construct a road would profoundly harm the fish and wildlife, and their habitat that ANILCA aimed to protect. The specific land where the proposed road would go would be in the heart of Izembek between two lagoons that nourish so much life—the precise reason Izembek was protected in the first place.
The purposes of the Izembek Refuge include conserving and safeguarding fish and wildlife populations and habitats in their natural diversity for multiple reasons, including the opportunity for continued subsistence uses by local residents.
A land trade in Izembek would mean opening the door to land swaps to make way for roads on federal lands across the state, undermining the central subsistence and conservation purposes of ANILCA.