Ben Muse

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: