At a meeting on Aug. 17, Haines-area state forester Greg Palmieri tried to bring Mosquito Lake Road residents around to accepting some small timber sales in their neighborhood.
It shouldn’t have been a hard sell. Clearcuts would be small – no larger than 10 acres – and restoration of old logging roads there might open some areas to recreation, including hunting, skiing and berry-picking.
The men and women building roads and cutting trees would be their neighbors and the resulting timber would end up in their bookshelves or woodstoves.
But Palmieri was hobbled by 40 years of Republican ideology and mismanagement that’s made it difficult for government to accomplish much of anything, including selling trees from public lands to make local lumber and firewood.
Starting around 40 years ago, Republicans claimed power nationally by trash-talking government. Ronald Reagan famously declared that government wasn’t the solution but the problem in our lives. It couldn’t be trusted.
The GOP rose to power on the hard-fisted philosophy that people freed of social and government restraints should wrest their fortunes from the world and to hell with complainers and government bureaucrats and Democrats. It would be every man for himself.
So when government forester Palmieri said in so many words, “Trust me, I live here,” and “These jobs will help your neighbors,” his message wasn’t exactly falling on fertile ground.
When it’s every man for himself, a man fights to keep his land intact and he fights clearcuts that adjoin his property and might despoil his property and its values. Some Republicans have the gall to decry this attitude as “NIMBY” or “Not In My Back Yard,” but it’s actually Reaganism distilled: It’s “I’ve got mine and I’ll fight you to keep it.”
The GOP’s tattered version of our nation’s social contract – that each citizen give a little for the greater good of the whole – was finally torn to shreds by Donald Trump, who maligned as “losers” nearly every American who was not either wealthy, white or both.
It’s unclear whether our nation will survive toxic Republicanism but we’re seeing the effects of its poison right here.
Palmieri also was hobbled by Alaskan Republicanism, which has decimated state government functions in order to maintain power by doling out giant permanent fund checks.
As one Mosquito Lake resident testified before Palmieri: Why should we trust Alaska Division of Natural Resources? DNR has a park down the road from our meeting here, and it’s falling apart.
After the meeting, I drove to Mosquito Lake Campground, which could be in Appalachia or a Third-World nation. Its driveway is rutted. Its main sign is bullet-holed. A ramp to a decrepit dock on the lake appeared ready to collapse. Weeds grow to the tops of rotting picnic tables. There is no outhouse and someone has been falling trees, maybe for firewood.
The State of Alaska officially describes Mosquito Lake campground as in “passive management,” but the average visitor would call it abandoned.
Abandoned also describes our state ferry system. Alaska’s Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy literally penciled in a zero for his first Alaska Marine Highway budget. Now it’s prohibitively expensive to travel in Southeast Alaska on the few occasions that ferries are scheduled.
Dunleavy and his oil-industry GOP sycophants in the Alaska Legislature also have abandoned our schools, our roads, our court system, even our state prisons. Fifteen inmates died in our prisons in the past year, but do the Republicans care?
For them, it’s still every man for himself, even men in state jails.
That philosophy works right up to when you need to ask citizens for a favor, like going along with state plans for a timber sale in their backyards.
I felt bad for Greg Palmieri at the Aug. 17 meeting. Greg is a dutiful public servant. He has raised a wonderful family here and volunteers around town for worthy causes. I just hope when he steps into the voting booth on Nov. 8, he understands who is making his job hell.
It’s not the residents of Mosquito Lake.