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tics, the state aims to kill more than 500 wolves. At least 250 have been killed so far. The killing of predators was halted for some years because of public protests. Since Murkowski was elected in 2002, however, the "control" effort has resumed with a vengeance.
"We can't just let nature run wild," former Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel once declared.
Development-minded Alaskans have long claimed that wildlife will toe the line and accommodate strip mines and clearcuts and wilderness roads.
Critical questions and warnings have been treated with contempt. In the 1970s, fishery groups in Cordova resisted the Valdez pipeline terminus and oil port by raising the prospect of a catastrophic tanker spill in Prince William Sound.
The Anchorage Times snorted in response, "The fears about damage from oil spills are like the fears of Henny Penny when she ran to tell the king that the sky was falling."
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, famously told Prince William Sound fishermen, "Werner von Braun, you know, the spaceman, assured me that all of the technology of the space program will be put into the doggone tankers, and there will not be one drop of oil in Prince William Sound."
After the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef on Good Friday of 1989 and dumped 11.9 million gallons of oil into the Sound, the oil industry's strumpets on Capitol Hill were hard to find.
Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, spent part of Congress' Easter recess in California, picking up a $2,000 honorarium from an industry group. When the House Merchant Marine Committee took up tanker-safety legislation that fall, Young was moose-hunting near Fort Yukon.
A half-century ago, a group of well-connected Anchorage businessmen -- including Anchorage Times publisher Robert Atwood -- filed oil leases in the Kenai National Moose Range southwest of the city. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had designated the moose range in 1941.
Oil was struck a year later. An interior secretary nicknamed "Giveaway McKay" threw open 250,000 acres in the moose range to oil leasing. Only a nationwide protest by conservation and wildlife groups -- one of the first actions of its kind -- forced a moratorium on leases and the study of their effect on the moose.
Ultimately, the western half of the moose range was opened to leasing. Responding to public pressure, Interior Secretary Fred Seaton did protect the remainder of the refuge.
The Anchorage investors made about $3 million apiece, according to John Strohmeyer's book "Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska."
Alaska insiders continue to do well. The Los Angeles Times revealed last year that Stevens has become a millionaire through a modest ($50,000) investment made in partnership with a developer.
Stevens helped the same developer secure a $450 million housing contract at Elmendorf Air Force Base outside Anchorage. One of the senator's interests was a partnership that owns a building leased at $6 million a year to an Alaska Native corporation that Stevens helped create.
The senator has since sold his controversial investments and transferred the proceeds into a blind trust.
We in the Lower 48 should take a message from the wolf trappings, bear baiting and insider luck: Don't trust these guys! They would strangle Bambi to make a buck.
The federal lands and wildlife populations of Alaska belong to all of us. Our prime task, as overseers, is to protect "The Great Land" from its own politicians.
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