Ben Muse

King Island and the American fur traders

Americans began trading in the Pacific in the 1780s. Trade was interrupted by Jefferson’s embargo and the War of 1812, but subsequently small American ships crisscrossed the ocean with cargoes of furs from the Pacific Northwest, sandalwood from Hawaii, copper from Chile, ginseng from the U.S. Appalachian Mountains, and silk and tea from China (Old China Trade).

Far to the north, beyond the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea, Eskimos, Chukchis, and Russians traded across the Bering Strait. Furs from America moved west, in exchange for glass beads and iron. Coastal and island Eskimos were active intermediaries.

Briefly, in 1819 and 1820, Americans from the Pacific tested the waters in the Bering Straits: two American brigs, the General San Martin and the Pedlar, explored regional trading opportunities. King Island flits into sight in journals and reports of these visits.

Sled dogs to snowmobiles

In the early 1990s, Alaska's Board of Fisheries had to address a controversy over the feeding of subsistence fish to dogs used for commercial purposes.  To provide some background, David Anderson prepared a paper on the use of dog teams in the Yukon River drainage, and their fish consumption, for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Division of Subsistence.    Anderson described the evolving role of dog sledding in the regional economy: The Use of Dog Teams and the Use of Subsistence-caught Fish for Feeding Sled Dogs in the Yukon River Drainage, Alaska.

Coastal Eskimos had been using sled dogs for a long time prior to contact with the West:

Integrating Peanuts

From The Edge of the American West: Black people can’t swim, &c. Don't skip the comments.

Stronger individual property rights do reduce overfishing

Christopher Costello, Steven D. Gaines, and John Lynham find that fisheries with individual fisherman's quotas are less susceptible to overfishing: Privatization prevents collapse of fish stocks, global analysis shows.  The actual title of the article in Science is "Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?" I haven't found a link to the original article or an earlier working paper yet.

The "privatization" here is the assignment to a right to a share in the seasonal or annual harvest.    A fisherman with an individual and transferable quota has an asset whose value depends on the long-term health of the fish stock, and a greater incentive to care about that stock.

The abstract:

Recent reports suggest that most of the world’s commercial fisheries could collapse within decades. Although poor fisheries governance is often implicated, evaluation of solutions remains rare. Bioeconomic theory and case studies suggest that rights-based catch shares can provide individual incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse. To test whether catch-share fishery reforms achieve these hypothetical benefits, we have compiled a global database of fisheries institutions and catch statistics in 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003. Implementation of catch shares halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward widespread collapse. Institutional change has the potential for greatly altering the future of global fisheries.

And in conclusion:

Although bioeconomic theory suggests that assigning secure rights to fishermen may align incentives and lead to significantly enhanced biological and economic performance, evidence to date has been only case- or region-specific. By examining 11,135 global fisheries, we found a strong link: By 2003, the fraction of ITQ-managed fisheries that were collapsed was about half that of non-ITQ fisheries. This result probably underestimates ITQ benefits, because most ITQ fisheries are young.

The results of this analysis suggest that well designed catch shares may prevent fishery collapse across diverse taxa and ecosystems. Although the global rate of catch-share adoption has increased since 1970, the fraction of fisheries managed with catch shares is still small. We can estimate their potential impact ifwe project rightsbased management onto all of the world’s fisheries since 1970 (Fig. 2). The percent collapsed is reduced to just 9% by 2003; this fraction remains steady thereafter. This figure is a marked reversal of the previous projections.

Despite the dramatic impact catch shares have had on fishery collapse, these results should not be taken as a carte blanche endorsement. First, we have restricted attention to one class of catch shares (ITQs). Second, only by appropriately matching institutional reform with ecological, economic, and social characteristics can maximal benefits be achieved. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that as catch shares are increasingly implemented globally, fish stocks, and the profits from harvesting them, have the potential to recover substantially.

The Environmental Defense Fund reports here: Catch Shares Key to Reviving Fisheries.  New Study Shows Innovative Approach Can Help Solve Overfishing.  Here's Costello's website with background information on the study: Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?

Revised Sept 19 to add a comment about how individual quotas give fishermen a greater interest in the long-term health of the fish stock.

From Kandahar to Kijaki

The Chinese built the generator, the Russians flew it into Kandahar, the British negotiated for permissions to transit, the British and the Danes created a diversion, the Canadians, Americans, Australians, Afghans, and British fought their way with it for 100 miles through the Taliban, the Americans and French provided air support, and the Chinese will install it.  Development in Afghanistan: how to install more generating capacity in a dam: Development through combat.

Revised Sep 5.

The old aerial polar bear hunt in Alaska

From the late 1940s until the early 1970s hunting guides in Alaska took their clients in airplanes out over the Chukchi and Beaufort Sea sea ice.  When the guides found a bear on the ice, they would try to land and give their clients a chance to hunt.  At times the planes were used to herd the bears towards the waiting hunters. 

The hunt and some of its economics were described by U.S. delegations to early (1965-1974) international meetings on the status of the polar bear.  I think that much of the following material was prepared by Jack Lentfer, a government bear biologist who attended these meetings. 

Here is a map for orientation.  The hunts originated in six or seven small communities in Northwest Alaska.  Little Diomede Island, which you will read about, is right in the Bering Strait.

The aerial sport harvest began sometime in the late 1940s.  In the years before that most hunting had been by Alaska Natives for subsistence and income (Polar Bear Management in Alaska; Jack Lentfer, Third International Conference on Bears, 1974):

King Island, 1880

A few days ago 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 Corwin 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:

A Visit to King Island, July 12, 1881

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.

Arctic Economics

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.

The Senate Would Like an Investigation of the Coconut Road Earmark

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:

Fewer Fishermen

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:

Climate Change and Outdoor Recreation

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:

Over-Exploiting the Arctic Animal Commons

Robert McGhee (The Last Imaginary Place. A Human History of the Arctic World) doesn't think the original Arctic peoples were modern Western conservationists:

A Land of Milk and Honey (If You Know Where to Look)

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:

Antarctic Tourism Is Way Up

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:

"The Economic Value of Teeth"

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:

Where have all the hunters gone?

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).

Thin Ice

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.

King Island Enters History

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.

 

"The new Strait of Malacca"

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.

Obama/Clinton Tiptoe Around NAFTA in Texas

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....

We're not playing as much golf

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):

Back From Back-to-Nature

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:

"Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?"

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:

Income and Religiosity

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):