ICYMI: The King Cove Road is a Matter of Human Rights
Washington, DC – Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) wrote a longform essay on King Cove, Alaska, for the latest issue of the American Bar Association’s Human Rights magazine. The full piece – which is copied below and available online here – makes the case for a life-saving road to connect King Cove with the all-weather airport in nearby Cold Bay. This simple, one-lane, gravel, non-commercial use road is needed to ensure reliable transportation access to and from the predominantly Aleut community during frequently severe weather conditions. The life-saving road has drawn bipartisan support, most recently from the Biden administration, and is, as Murkowski writes, “a matter of human rights.”
American Bar Association (Human Rights Magazine): Climate Justice Comes in Many Forms
My home state is grappling with receding sea ice, thawing permafrost, and accelerating erosion. We are witnessing changes in wildlife migration patterns, devastating declines in salmon and crab populations, and the arrival of invasive species. Cool, rainy summers have kept catastrophic wildfires down over the past few years, but the return of warmer, drier weather would result in millions more acres burned.
While most Alaskans are experiencing climate change in some form, the Alaska Native people who live in remote villages are often on the front lines of its impacts. For outlying communities such as Kivalina, Shishmaref, and Newtok, the threat is existential.
Each Alaska Native community will respond to climate change based on its unique circumstances. Some will have no choice but to move; others may seek protective measures to help avoid relocation. What is important is for these communities to determine their own futures, to the greatest extent possible, and for the rest of us to support them—especially when confronted with the high costs of adaptation and the complexities of federal land ownership.
In the midst of those efforts, we can’t forget that many communities in Alaska already face serious threats from their existing climate, even before worsening change. Foremost among them is King Cove, where the lack of reliable access to a nearby all-weather airport is a danger to public health, a longstanding environmental injustice, and a matter of human rights.
King Cove is located at the end of the Alaska Peninsula, roughly 625 miles southwest of Anchorage. The community is home to about 750 people; most are Aleut and members of the Agdaagux and Belkofski Tribes. The Aleut have stewarded the region for millennia—at least 4,000 years—and are deeply connected to their place in the world.
Today, King Cove has two harbors, two stores, a couple of inns, a school, and a small medical clinic. Its economy is mostly fishing-based, although the local processing plant—which provides over half the municipal tax base—sits idle. The community has invested in renewable energy, with hydropower meeting 80 percent of demand. Posted signs warn of bears, which are frequently sighted, along with foxes, wolves, moose, caribou, and many bird species.
It’s an unmistakably beautiful place, even by Alaska’s high standards. But that’s also where the trouble begins: King Cove is nestled on a small spit between volcanic peaks, with the Bering Sea on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. The prevailing geography makes the weather in the region a major, life-affecting challenge.
It is only possible to reach King Cove by small plane or fishing boat. On any given day, however, high winds, low clouds, heavy rain, or dense fog can shut down travel entirely. King Cove has a gravel airstrip that can accommodate small, fixed-wing aircraft, but it is closed an average of 100 days a year. The seas are no friendlier: During storms, waves frequently reach 12 feet or more.
Travel delays and cancelations are routine for King Cove. Earlier this year, their high school boys’ basketball team won a state championship but was unable to return home for almost a week afterward. It’s not unusual for residents to go a week or more without mail.
King Cove is resilient and has done what it can to adapt. Residents try to stock up on medicine, knowing refills may not arrive on time. Pregnant women must depart for Anchorage or another population center at least six weeks before their due dates. Telehealth has paved the way for more local services with fewer in-person resources.
Still, not everything can be planned for, and nothing can prevent medical emergencies. King Cove’s medical clinic is modern but cannot treat significant injuries and illnesses. When the worst occurs, the clinic often simply seeks to stabilize patients until they can be medevaced to a hospital—the cost of which can be upward of $80,000.
When the weather cooperates, patients can reach Anchorage in a matter of hours. But when conditions are bad, there’s no way out—patients are stranded with their lives on the line.
To resolve this, the people of King Cove have had a simple ask since the 1970s: to build a road to connect them to the nearby community of Cold Bay.
Cold Bay’s origins are much more recent than King Cove. In 1941, concerned about the risk of an invasion on U.S. soil, the military chose it as the location of an airfield. Thousands of American troops were stationed there and built infrastructure, including dozens of miles of roads, to support their wartime operations.
At present, Cold Bay is no longer a military outpost and has only about 50 residents. The community’s primary asset is its airport, which features one of the longest runways in Alaska. Unlike King Cove’s short gravel strip, Cold Bay’s airport can serve larger planes and operates in nearly all weather conditions.
It’s easy to understand why King Cove residents want a road to Cold Bay: Driving there would be far safer, faster, and more reliable than any other mode of transportation. Their relatives helped build Cold Bay’s runway during World War II, and existing roads on each side—one out of King Cove, the other from Cold Bay—have left just 11 short miles to connect.
In most of America, that road link would have been built long ago without a second thought. But in this instance, those 11 miles fall within the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, most of which Congress designated as federal wilderness in 1980 through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).
Izembek’s designation occurred without consultation of the local Alaska Native people—the legislative record indicates public meetings were held in Anchorage and Cold Bay but not King Cove. Adding insult to injury, elders recall being shocked as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees burned their subsistence cabins within the newly designated refuge shortly after ANILCA’s passage.
The absence of reliable access to emergency medical care has had predictable results in King Cove. A baby was born prematurely on a boat and kept warm in its oven during a rough, multi-hour journey to Cold Bay. An elder with broken bones endured a similar boat trip and was hoisted to Cold Bay’s dock in a crab pot because they were unable to climb its treacherous 20-foot ladder.
Worse still, at least 20 lives have been lost—12 in plane crashes and the others during lengthy medevacs.
Amid generations of unnecessary trauma and death, King Cove has tried just about everything to resolve this situation—even a hovercraft, which failed because it could not operate in extreme weather. They have signed numerous land exchange agreements with the federal government to trade tens of thousands of acres of their Native lands for a small federal land corridor, only to see those agreements opposed by outside environmental groups and tied up in the courts.
The only solution is the most obvious: a short, gravel, one-lane, non-commercial road through a small fraction of the Izembek refuge. Yet, even when bipartisan legislation gave the U.S. Department of the Interior the ability to approve such a road in 2013, they said no, claiming that impacts on migratory birds would be too great. The land exchange under that legislation would have been nearly 300:1 in the federal government’s favor, but it still wasn’t enough.
Since that decision was made, Fish and Wildlife Service employees have continued to drive on military-built roads within Izembek, with no apparent impact on birds or any other wildlife. But King Cove has no such connection, and its residents have endured well over 200 medevacs over the past decade alone. The U.S. Coast Guard carried out more than 30 of those, at great personal risk to their pilots and crews and millions of dollars in costs to taxpayers.
The courage and skill required to make it from King Cove to Cold Bay in severe conditions are incredible—but also unnecessary—and not every victim makes it to care in time. Just a few months ago, a local resident passed away en route to Anchorage after being stranded in King Cove for 27 hours. An ambulance to Cold Bay would have taken about an hour and likely saved their life.
As we grapple with climate change, all of us will need to adjust our thinking about what is appropriate and necessary—from the types of energy we use to highly localized decisions that protect our fellow citizens from harm. What we will learn is that climate justice comes in many forms and, in a place like Alaska, can be driven just as much by the current climate as it is by projected change.
###
