A few days I posted on a visit to King Island by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin in 1881 (A Visit to King Island, July 12, 1881).
The Corwin, under Captain Calvin Hooper, also visited in 1880. Hooper's report was published in 1881: Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue-Steamer Corwtin in the Arctic Ocean .
Hooper supplied his own illustrations - here's his picture of King Island from about four miles to the south:
Hooper's description:
The U.S. bought Alaska in 1867, but it really didn't have much of a presence there, and especially not in more remote areas like the Bering Sea, for many years. The Treasury sent a revenue cutter into the Bering Sea in 1870, and again, nine years later, in 1879.
In 1880, the revenue cutter Thomas A. Corwin entered the Bering Sea under Captain Calvin Hooper. At Hooper's recommendation, regular annual cruises by revenue cutters were began in 1881. Hooper and the Corwin made the 1881 cruise.
In the late 19th Century these patrols were the face of the U.S. government in the Bering Sea. The cutters had a lot of jobs. They tried to interrupt the regional trade in liquor and rifles, investigated vessel disappearances, conducted search and rescue efforts, provided logistical support for the census, moved people around within the region, helped the shipwrecked get home, suppressed fur seal poaching, shipped reindeer from Siberia to the U.S., and carried out geographic and scientific research.
Science was important right from the start In 1881, John Muir was the cruise glaciologist. On a shore stop at the western Alaskan port of St. Michael, the Corwin picked up an employee of the U.S. Signal Service, the naturalist and ethnographer, Edward Nelson. The Coast Guard, a successor agency to the Revenue Service, dates its participation in oceanographic work from this trip. Captain Hooper, made several attempts to gather information about currents from the Bering Strait (Oceanography in the Coast Guard).
The Corwin in 1885.
The Corwin had left San Francisco on May4 and arrived at Unalaska in the Aleutians on May 17. Thereafter she performed various missions in the Bering Sea and Arctic, arriving at St. Michael in Norton Sound on July 4. She departed St. Michael on July 9 and sailed north and then west along the south side of the Seward Peninsula. She arrived at King Island on the morning of July 12.
I've pulled various posts dealing with the Arctic and copied them into a new site called Arctic Economics. I'm going to use that weblog to explore the economics of global warming induced Arctic climate change.
In 2005 the President signed legislation that Congress hadn't passed.
The bill in question authorized money for transportation projects and earmarked a lot for particular projects. Sometime after Congress passed the legislation, and before the President signed the bill, someone secretly rewrote one of the earmarks. This was the Coconut Road earmark for highway work in Florida (Allocating scarce resources among competing transportation projects, Ben Muse, August 25, 2007).
There's some reason to believe Alaska's only Congressman, Republican Don Young, who was Chairman of the House Transportation Committee at the time, was involved.
I'm reminded of this because the Senate voted 64 to 28 yesterday (Apr 17) to ask the Justice Department to look in to what happened: Justice asked to probe Young earmark (Erika Bolstad, Anchorage Daily News, Apr 18).
Thursday, support for the Justice Department investigation, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., drew an unlikely coalition of Democrats and Republicans, many of whom said they were concerned about the integrity of their legislative process. Twenty of the votes of support came from Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate minority leader.
House leaders had a muted response to the Senate vote, but indicated they were concerned about what had happened. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday that the matter should be taken up by the House ethics committee. The Republican House leader, Rep. John Boehner, said he also had no objections to an investigation....
Young is connected to several ongoing investigations. He has spent $1.1 million from his campaign fund recently on lawyers: Young's legal fees surpass $1 million (Erika Bolstad, Anchorage Daily News, April 16).
The "Justice asked to probe..." story above notes an interesting constitutional question:
Continue reading "The Senate Would Like an Investigation of the Coconut Road Earmark" »
Sport fishing isn't as popular as it used to be in the U.S.
The Fish and Wildlife Service conducts national surveys of fishermen and hunters every five years. The surveys from 1991 to 2006 have been done in a consistent manner. Here are the key numbers for total anglers, freshwater anglers (Great Lakes and non-Great Lakes) and saltwater. All measured in thousands:
What will we do for fun outdoors, as global warming increases average temperatures, rainfall, snowfall, and sea levels? John Whitehead at Environmental Economics reads the tea leaves in a series of three posts:
Robert McGhee (The Last Imaginary Place. A Human History of the Arctic World) doesn't think the original Arctic peoples were modern Western conservationists:
Continue reading "Over-Exploiting the Arctic Animal Commons" »
Lots of explorers entered the Arctic and died there because - among other things - they couldn't find anything to eat. Sir John Franklin led two expeditions to disaster; on the first his followers ended up eating each other for lack of anything better.
That wasn't a problem for the locals. Robert McGhee (The Last Imaginary Place. A Human History of the Arctic World) points out that the Arctic had real productivity advantages for a hunting people:
Continue reading "A Land of Milk and Honey (If You Know Where to Look)" »
Hugo Ahlenius of the United Nations Environment Program summarizes trends in Antarctic tourism in recent years (Trends in Antarctic tourism). Here's the annotation for the figure:
I liked the title of this one: The Economic Value of Teeth (Sherry Glied and Matthew Neidell, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 13879, March 2008). Here's the abstract:
The numbers of hunters in the U.S. have been declining.
Ian Urbina reports on state efforts to encourage young people to take it up (including hunters education, apprenticeship programs, lower minimum age requirements, agency sponsored hunting trips for women, children under 15, and the disabled, hunting classes for single mothers, youth hunting weekends): To Revive Hunting, States Turn to the Classroom (New York Times, March 8).
In March the Arctic ice cap reaches its greatest annual extent. And this year's March ice cover only a little smaller than it's been it the past.
But look at this: red indicates one-year old seasonal ice.
Mason Inman reports on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing that perennial or multi-year ice has dropped by half since the 80s and early 90s: Shrinking Arctic Sea Ice Thinner, More Vulnerable (National Geographic News, March 18, 2008)
That's important because the seasonal ice is thinner and melts faster. The ice cap is smallest in September and last September it was as small as we've ever seen it. We still don't know what will happen this summer, but the ice cap is starting the season with a big strike against it.
Of course Alaska's King Island had a long history before it entered the written record. During the Ice Age, when the land bridge connected Asia and America, the island's cliffs must have risen dramatically from the surrounding plain. Maybe it had a magical significance for the people who lived near it or passed it. Later the sea rose around it, cutting it off from the mainland. Later still, it became a platform from which people could harvest seals, walrus, polar bear, fish, and birds. The people who lived on it, or who traded or raided with it, certainly had an oral history and tradition.
But the written record begins in July 1732.
This Google map of the Bering Straits shows the key places in the story. On the left is Cape Dezhnev on the Russian mainland. The white line is the current U.S.-Russia boundary. There are two islands in the upper part of the picture astride the international boundary. Big Diomede is on the Russian side, Little Diomede is on the U.S. side. The point of mainland on the U.S. side is the end of the Seward Peninsula, culminating in Cape Prince of Wales. South of this Cape is a small island - King Island. To the southeast of King Island, just off the southern shore of Seward Peninsula is another small island - Sledge Island.
US Coast Guard Admiral Brooks may have exaggerated somewhat in his comparison of the Bering Strait and the Strait of Malacca, but he does expect a lot more traffic through the Bering Straits in the next 10 to 20 years: U.S. needs to prepare for Arctic traffic surge (Tom Kizzia, Anchorage Daily News, Feb 14).
That's the tip of Russia's Chukchi Peninsula on the left, and the tip of Alaska's Seward Peninsula on the right. The shortest distance across is about 55 miles. The big island on the Russian side of the international boundary is Big Diomede, and the U.S. island next to it is Little Diomede. You can't see Fairway Rock, a small island to the southeast of the Diomedes. King Island is under the Seward Peninsula south of the straits.
There are parts of Texas where they like NAFTA. Consequently, despite poll results showing that a plurality of likely Texas Democratic voters disapprove of NAFTA, Clinton and Obama have toned down there rhetoric: Nafta Bashing Ends at Texas Line (Amy Chozick and Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal, March 3):
After weeks of hammering the North American Free Trade Agreement on campaign stops in Ohio, the Democratic presidential candidates are singing a different tune in Texas.
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have had to adjust their messages as they have shuffled between hard-hit Ohio and robust Texas, where Nafta is largely seen as an economic boost to the state's border communities.
Saturday, Sen. Clinton dedicated her stops in Fort Worth and Dallas to talk of national security. Friday, she focused a speech in Waco on veteran's rights, because Texas has a large military population. Sen. Obama is keeping his Texas message squarely set on uniting the country. He omitted mention of Nafta at a rally here Friday night that attracted 8,000 people....
People aren't getting outside and playing golf as much as they used to: More Americans Are Giving Up Golf (Paul Vitello, New York Times, Feb 21):
Thoreau, Muir, and T.R. would be appalled! Oliver Pergams and Patricia Zaradic write that there is Evidence for a fundamental and pervasive shift away from nature-based recreation (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 8, 2008).
Here's the abstract:
Violent movies increase aggression but during the movie violent people are in the theatre watching. They're not drinking while they watch either. Crime rates are down during the movie and for a while after. On balance? Violence drops on the weekends violent blockbusters come out.
That's what Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna find in this analysis of short-run impacts: Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime? (NBER, , January 2008). Here's the abstract:
Continue reading ""Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?"" »
The most recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey report (The Pew Global Attitudes Project, October 4, 2007) has this neat graphic (click on it to see a much larger version):
King Island is a small rocky island in the Bering Sea, just south of the Bering Straits. For many years it was home to a small group - perhaps 200 people - of Inupiat Eskimos.
When they were on the island, they lived in the village of Ukivok, which clung - impossibly - to the sheer rocky south side of the island.
But they didn't spend the whole year on the island. In June they migrated to the mainland where they lived in a summer camp at Nome, hunted, fished, gathered, and worked and sold carvings to raise money.
In October, when the weather began to get really cold, of all things, they left the relatively large and modern support network in Nome and migrated back to their barren rock to spend the winter largely isolated from contact with others.
During the winter they lived an unexpectedly comfortable life in homes perched on stilts (to level them out on the steep slope). The Bureau of Indian Affairs supported a small school and coop store, and the Catholic church maintained a priest and church.
They exploited a wide range of resources - fishing for fish and crab through the ice right in front of town, harvesting seals, polar bear, and walrus from the ice around the island, and harvesting small plants, birds, and bird eggs from their rock once the spring and early summer had come.
In 1994 you couldn't buy one of those plastic retail gift cards with magnetic strips to track the balance of the gift. The Mobil Oil Company sold the first ones in 1995.
Jennifer Pate Offenberg pulled some research on gift cards from her Ph.D. thesis and reported on the market place in the Spring 2007 Journal of Economic Perspectives (Markets. Gift Cards). Look at how the business has grown:
Continue reading "How to Squeeze the Most Happiness from a Gift Card" »
Alaskan's love a good bear attack story. We have books composed of nothing but. Here's a December 1 story from local Juneau radio station KINY:
I didn't plan to post on trade or related topics when I started this blog, but I do so quite a bit.
I've decided the best way to handle trade and related posts is to create a new blog for them, taking advantage of the one additional blog that Typepad offers me on my current subscription plan. This will provide a weblog with more focus and better organization - particularly a more meaningful and useful set of categories for archiving. Here's the new location: The Custom-House.
All the existing trade related posts from this blog have been moved there. From now on I'll send trade and related posts there, reserving this blog for other topics. I am not deleting the old posts from this blog so existing links will still work. However I will gradually revise the categories here so that they will be clearer and more focused.
All posts on the Korea-U.S. trade agreement will continue to be placed on the Korea-U.S. FTA weblog.
The ships that carry 90% of world trade (by volume) are a major source of air pollution:
Ships release more sulfur dioxide, a sooty pollutant associated with acid rain, than all of the world's cars, trucks and buses combined, according to a March study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. That study also found that ships produced an estimated 27% of the world's smog-causing nitrogen-oxide emissions in 2005. Only six countries in the world emitted more greenhouse gases -- which trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the globe -- than was produced collectively in 2001 by all ships larger than 100 tons, according to the study and United Nations statistics....
At current rates of growth, oceangoing ships will generate 53% of the particulates, 46% of the nitrogen oxides and more than 94% of the sulfur oxides emitted by all forms of transportation in the U.S. by 2030, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates. That compares with levels for the same pollutants in 2001 of 17%, 12% and 49%, respectively, according to the EPA.
Bruce Stanley reports on the issue in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal: Danger at Sea. Ships Draw Fire for Rising Role in Air Pollution (Nov 27).
Leon Trammel of Witchita-based Tramco (a conveyor-belt manufacturer) explains (Smaller Companies Grab Bigger Share of Surging U.S. Exports , Courtney Schlisserman, Bloomberg, Nov 23):
Continue reading "Why Are Trade Agreements So Important to Smaller Firms?" »
