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Atrocious to me that anybody would want to block that road. A mine? Sure. Logging? Yup. Oil exploration? Yeah. A gravel road to an airport in Alaska? Come on. I

Atrocious to me that anybody would want to block that road. A mine? Sure. Logging? Yup. Oil exploration? Yeah. A gravel road to an airport in Alaska? Come on. I haven't lived in Rural Alaska in 20 years but I was born and raised in a fishing village. People in the lower 48 have no understanding of the vastness of Alaska and how small a concession this really is. These specious environmental lawsuits are why no infrastructure has been built in this country in 40 years. We need to protect the wilds but a regulatory structure that allows vetos of a gravel road to the airport? What the hell.

Victerius 4y ago
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  This "we don't negotiate with terrorists" type thinking is going to come back to bite you the nanosecond the tables are turned and it's some interest you care about that's seeking some tiny compromise.
  - lovich 4y ago
    I think the point is that it’s not a tiny compromise in aggregate. Pointing to the one instance here and treating the decision like it’s in a vacuum is not what the people against the road believe will happen, based on the points in the article about how this will lead to further development
- asdfk-12 4y ago
  Your view seems fundamentally misanthropic - instead of autochthonous population having access to a resource that you take for granted, you would rather kick them out into an expensive urban area where their life is disrupted? All for a perceived risk to a comparitively tiny corridor?
  - askin4it 4y ago
    This is about the holy trinity of living today: being correct, being on the right team, and getting your way all the time, every time. It's only a matter of time before it won't be enough to let them call the shots on everything. You know what's after that, you'll either like all this stuff or you'll be part of the reason why it isn't ushering in utopia. Misanthropic is 100% accurate.
  - AzzieElbab 4y ago
    and for no other reason than feeling good about oneself. I mean people are replying to a guy from Alaska
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Absolutely. The sustainable future is with dense urban living. Reducing humanity's footprint is key.
- EB66 4y ago
  I came here to say exactly the same thing. Development always begets more development. The rural wilderness that I grew up in is completely unrecognizable today. Acres and acres of essentially untouched forest now replaced with human housing. Creeks have dried up and animal life is a shadow of what it used to be. We used to have otters, beavers, deer, and more but they're long gone now. That transformation started with mundane uncontroversial things like gravel roads and basic utilities. But it grew to encompass much more as more people moved in. If you accept that the diversity and abundance of plant and non-human animal life has instrinic value then it's awfully easy to say that blocking further human development in wild areas is the "right" thing to do.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    Humans historically preferred to live in standalone houses because it was the only way to achieve relative comfort, and of course building bigger mansions on more land (populating them with servants to take care of it all) signaled wealth. Now we have the technology to build to live densely and in comfort, and we also see what a disaster we generally are to the environment. I wish we slowly started to consider it ethically not OK to want to move to untouched areas and demand them to be developed and infrastructure erected.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Comparing a rural community that wants better access to medical treatment to a “cancer cell” is abhorrent. If you want to pay these people to leave, the pony up the money. But until then let them have the basic necessities of civilization and development.
- dereg 4y ago
  How is this anything other than a slippery slope fallacy? Can you provide some examples of where the development of a rural, gravel road led to unstoppable, cancerous development?
  - Victerius 4y ago
    It's not a fallacy. We have plenty of evidence. Human development, when not constrained by war, natural disasters, disease, lack of local resources, or inhospitable climate, is exponential. Every human settlement ever started small. One road. One house. Then two houses. Three houses. One day, the land on which New York City sits today was rural, and then a road was made. The rest is history.
    - dereg 4y ago
      How do you reconcile this with the fact that most modern nations are facing population decline? All sigmoidal curves look exponential until it plateaus.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      Survivorship bias. Massive chunks of the Midwest and west in the US are littered with dying populations. All of this “exponential” growth you’re referring to is in a small subset of cities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > The flaw in this logic is that it sets a new baseline of expectations. I.e., sometimes the inclined plane does have a low coefficient of friction: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
- weeksie 4y ago
  You're wrong. If King Cove was growing at a good clip, you'd have a point but as it stands it's just a remote relatively static Alaskan town. I could point you at my own home town which is at the edge of the Prince William Sound and nearly unchanged over the last 50 years. A few new buildings have been built, and a few have gone down. They did build a new harbor in that time, but Cordova has not turned into Anchorage and it would be brain-piercingly stupid to believe that it would.
rayiner 4y ago
> Atrocious to me that anybody would want to block that road. Environmentalists are like “hold my beer.” I actually spent much of law school taking environmental law classes. There’s a lot of good work done by environmental organizations. But “regulation by litigation” is broken. Activist organizations are incentivized to pursue cases that tug the most on heart strings (“protecting pristine Alaska wilderness”) instead of those that best balance costs and benefits.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Victerius 4y ago

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
This "we don't negotiate with terrorists" type thinking is going to come back to bite you the nanosecond the tables are turned and it's some interest you care about that's seeking some tiny compromise.
- lovich 4y ago
  I think the point is that it’s not a tiny compromise in aggregate. Pointing to the one instance here and treating the decision like it’s in a vacuum is not what the people against the road believe will happen, based on the points in the article about how this will lead to further development
asdfk-12 4y ago
Your view seems fundamentally misanthropic - instead of autochthonous population having access to a resource that you take for granted, you would rather kick them out into an expensive urban area where their life is disrupted? All for a perceived risk to a comparitively tiny corridor?
- askin4it 4y ago
  This is about the holy trinity of living today: being correct, being on the right team, and getting your way all the time, every time. It's only a matter of time before it won't be enough to let them call the shots on everything. You know what's after that, you'll either like all this stuff or you'll be part of the reason why it isn't ushering in utopia. Misanthropic is 100% accurate.
- AzzieElbab 4y ago
  and for no other reason than feeling good about oneself. I mean people are replying to a guy from Alaska
throwaway290 4y ago
Absolutely. The sustainable future is with dense urban living. Reducing humanity's footprint is key.
EB66 4y ago
I came here to say exactly the same thing. Development always begets more development. The rural wilderness that I grew up in is completely unrecognizable today. Acres and acres of essentially untouched forest now replaced with human housing. Creeks have dried up and animal life is a shadow of what it used to be. We used to have otters, beavers, deer, and more but they're long gone now. That transformation started with mundane uncontroversial things like gravel roads and basic utilities. But it grew to encompass much more as more people moved in. If you accept that the diversity and abundance of plant and non-human animal life has instrinic value then it's awfully easy to say that blocking further human development in wild areas is the "right" thing to do.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Humans historically preferred to live in standalone houses because it was the only way to achieve relative comfort, and of course building bigger mansions on more land (populating them with servants to take care of it all) signaled wealth. Now we have the technology to build to live densely and in comfort, and we also see what a disaster we generally are to the environment. I wish we slowly started to consider it ethically not OK to want to move to untouched areas and demand them to be developed and infrastructure erected.
rayiner 4y ago
Comparing a rural community that wants better access to medical treatment to a “cancer cell” is abhorrent. If you want to pay these people to leave, the pony up the money. But until then let them have the basic necessities of civilization and development.
dereg 4y ago
How is this anything other than a slippery slope fallacy? Can you provide some examples of where the development of a rural, gravel road led to unstoppable, cancerous development?
- Victerius 4y ago
  It's not a fallacy. We have plenty of evidence. Human development, when not constrained by war, natural disasters, disease, lack of local resources, or inhospitable climate, is exponential. Every human settlement ever started small. One road. One house. Then two houses. Three houses. One day, the land on which New York City sits today was rural, and then a road was made. The rest is history.
  - dereg 4y ago
    How do you reconcile this with the fact that most modern nations are facing population decline? All sigmoidal curves look exponential until it plateaus.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Survivorship bias. Massive chunks of the Midwest and west in the US are littered with dying populations. All of this “exponential” growth you’re referring to is in a small subset of cities.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throw0101a 4y ago
> The flaw in this logic is that it sets a new baseline of expectations. I.e., sometimes the inclined plane does have a low coefficient of friction: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
weeksie 4y ago
You're wrong. If King Cove was growing at a good clip, you'd have a point but as it stands it's just a remote relatively static Alaskan town. I could point you at my own home town which is at the edge of the Prince William Sound and nearly unchanged over the last 50 years. A few new buildings have been built, and a few have gone down. They did build a new harbor in that time, but Cordova has not turned into Anchorage and it would be brain-piercingly stupid to believe that it would.

rayiner 4y ago

> Atrocious to me that anybody would want to block that road. Environmentalists are like “hold my beer.” I actually spent much of law school taking environmental law classes. There’s a lot of good work done by environmental organizations. But “regulation by litigation” is broken. Activist organizations are incentivized to pursue cases that tug the most on heart strings (“protecting pristine Alaska wilderness”) instead of those that best balance costs and benefits.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]