Jimmy Carter, at age 97, steps into a big fight over a small road in Alaska
By Alaskan standards, the gravel road that an isolated community near the Aleutian Islands wants to build to connect to an airport is not a huge project. But because it would be cut through a federal wildlife refuge, the road has been a simmering source of contention since it was proposed decades ago.
Now the dispute is boiling over. And none other than former President Jimmy Carter, 97, has weighed in.
Residents of King Cove and political leaders in the state, who argue that the road is needed to ensure that villagers can get emergency medical care, see the potential for a long-sought victory in a recent federal appeals court ruling that upheld a Trump-era land deal that would allow the project to move forward.
Conservation groups, who say the project is less about health care and more about transporting salmon and workers for the large cannery in King Cove, fear that more is at risk than just the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, 300,000 acres of unique habitat for migratory waterfowl, bears and other animals.
They say the ruling guts a landmark federal law that protected the refuge and 100 million more acres of public lands across the state and that, if it is allowed to stand, future secretaries of the interior could carve up those lands practically at will. And they are disappointed in the Biden White House, which defended the previous administration’s land deal in court.
Enter the 39th president of the United States, a Democrat who left office 41 years ago.
In a rare legal filing by a former president, Carter this month supported an appeal by conservation groups to have a larger panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rehear the case. He wrote that the earlier ruling by a three-judge panel “is not only deeply mistaken, it’s dangerous.” The panel voted 2-1 to uphold the land deal, with two Trump-appointed judges in favor.
In the legal brief, Carter noted that he had been many things in his life — among them farmer, Sunday school teacher and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize — but that he was not a lawyer.
Yet he has expertise and a vested interest in the matter. As president, he pushed for and signed the law in question, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known as Anilca, in 1980.
In response to questions from The New York Times, Carter wrote that the law “may be the most significant domestic achievement of my political life.”
“Our great nation has never before or since preserved so much of America’s natural and cultural heritage on such a remarkable scale,” he added.
With a population of about 800, many of them Natives, King Cove lies 600 miles from Anchorage in an area known for its nasty weather. It has a small gravel airstrip, but to get to Anchorage, villagers have relied on a larger, all-weather airport at Cold Bay, on the other side of a bay.
A road from King Cove to Cold Bay, which would be about 40 miles long, first was discussed in the mid-1970s, since travel by small plane or boat was not always possible or fast enough for emergencies. “We were not able to get our loved ones out of there in bad storms, which are pretty frequent,” said Henry Mack, the community’s longtime mayor, who left office last fall.
Over the years, alternatives were considered, including an all-weather ferry and a dedicated helicopter service. At one point, King Cove received millions of federal dollars to buy a fast hovercraft, and a road was built to a landing site near the refuge. The hovercraft handled about two dozen evacuations for several years before being abandoned in 2010 as too costly and incapable of operating in high seas or winds.
The full road remained the dream. But it would have to run for at least 11 miles through the refuge, an area with delicate wetlands containing some of the world’s largest beds of eelgrass, which attract black brants and other migratory geese.
Until former President Donald Trump took office in 2017, the proposal that had made the most headway was one in which the state and the local Native village corporation would swap acreage elsewhere with the federal government for a corridor through the refuge.
The exchange was authorized by Congress during the Obama administration but was rejected by Sally Jewell, then the interior secretary, after a review found it would cause irreversible damage to the refuge and its wildlife.
Once Trump entered the White House, however, the land swap idea was revived, this time by Trump’s interior secretaries, who bypassed Congress. Ryan Zinke made an agreement with the village corporation in 2018, and when it was rejected by courts in response to a lawsuit by conservation groups, Zinke’s successor, David Bernhardt, made a similar deal in 2019.
The groups sued again, and a federal judge threw out Bernhardt’s land swap in 2020. It was this ruling that was overturned by the three appeals court judges in March.
But to Carter and others, the majority’s reasoning was flawed. In passing Anilca, Carter wrote in the legal brief, Congress was designating lands for two purposes: conservation, and subsistence use by rural residents. The law did not give the secretary of interior discretion to consider economic and social benefits.