Politicians, 1 Polar Bears, 0

March 09, 2008

Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now

Here’s a nice headline . . .

Alaska politicians oppose plan to protect polar bears

My head has been all up in Alaska these past weeks. You start to nose around here and there online, looking at this or that lodge or guided tour or whatever, you send out a few tentative e-mail queries, and suddenly you’re in “We’re booking up! You must make your reservations RIGHT NOW!” mode without quite realizing what happened to you.

So suddenly it’s looking like an Alaska adventure for four might come together, even though we haven’t really made a commitment to going. Part of me is super-psyched. The more I read about the region we’re going to—the Kenai Peninsula—the cooler it all looks.

The rest of me is ill with anxiety. Because “booking” means “money,” and Alaska is wicked wicked expensive. So yeah, 10 days for four people? Staggering. Woeth. How we will find this money is a story for another day (or maybe that should be “decade").

But let’s not talk about money, it’s so gauche. Let’s talk about that disconnect between the guidebooks (even the good ones), the web sites, the tourist info, and the newspaper travel articles on the one hand and the real world on the other.

Example A: while I am planning my wilderness lodge vacation
and booking a bush plane flight to see brown bears eat pink salmon, Alaska legislators are busy pointedly passing up the chance to protect the habitat of the polar bear in the only place it lives in the wild in the United States (i.e., Alaska).

Though they’re not stupid enough to throw it in the faces of eco-space-cadet dreamhead tourists like me, the Alaskan economy is run by oil, oil, oil. So they pass out the tourist brochures with one hand and with the other re-elect state officials who are more concerned with a natural gas mega-pipe than with the starving, drowning polar bears. (BTW, if you’re interested in these things, Alaskan politics is apparently one big muck of corruption.)

Of course, this problema isn’t confined to AK by any means (booked a trip to China lately?). Closer to home, I’m sure hundreds of people come to Massachusetts every year to see the cradle of the revolution, and stand at Plymouth Rock or Old North Church or Lexington Green with their blood boiling as they think of all those married Massachusetts gay people making a mockery of our shining American ideals. 

I’m totally out of my league here—geopolitically responsible tourism is a huge topic, one that lots of people smarter than I am have written about. But still, it gives one pause to be shelling out a big chunk of change to get to the wilderness while the stewards of said wilderness behave so cravenly. ROWR. Bite them.