In the American imagination, Alaska represents the “Last Frontier,” an immense and natural wonderland unspoiled by mass market industry and urbanism. One of the State’s leading economic drivers, mass tourism, harnesses this picture, especially regarding its alleged “pristineness,” for marketing purposes. Concepts of Alaska’s “pristine” natural environment is an integrant that harkens back to American West and frontier discourses, that in mass tourism marketing, can paradoxically obscure negative landscape impacts, rather than revealing them. As I shall argue, this is because social calculations of environmental risks, in the case of Alaska, favor tangible and aesthetic elements that make the fluid in-and-out transfer of tourism appear far less lasting. This is especially captured in the “Leave No Trace” slogan. At the same time, however, by the very apprehension of Alaska’s “pristineness” as its finite resource for tourism marketing, tourism itself exhausts that integrant of Alaska’s imaginary. This process, more potent than greenwashing, harnesses historically-conditioned social and geographical portrayals of the State to resolve the conceived paradox of mass tourism in remote or “unspoiled” territory and by consequence tends towards its own exhaustion.
Introduction
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Alaska was annually smashing tourism records. In 2019, approximately 2.26 million travelers visited in the summer alone. 60 percent arrived on cruise ships. Over 1.3 million tourists visited the capital city Juneau alone that summer, which hosts approximately thirty-thousand residents. Since 2019, these numbers have ballooned approximately 20 percent, most notably because of the post-pandemic travel boom. To be sure, not all residents are onboard with spiking numbers. In 2022, the first season that resembled pre-Covid numbers, a few demonstrators gathered at the State Capitol building to protest the lack of environmental regulations on cruise ships. It was a small group, that nonetheless prompted a response from an environmental scientist with the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, who maintained “Alaska is unique because of our clean water resources.” The idea of Alaska’s pristineness, however, is often recalled by cruise ships themselves. Norwegian Cruise Lines market Alaska as “wild” and “pristine,” a “frontier vacation,” and a place itself “rarely seen.” These same keywords are employed by the other largest cruise companies in the world regarding Alaska, namely Carnival, Princess, and Royal Caribbean Cruises. In marketing, unspoiled nature defines Alaska.
Interestingly, local protestors are generally not against tourism per se, but rather against unregulated access. According to a recent poll, the majority of Juneau residents support cruise tourism, largely because of the economic benefits it brings to the local community. As the few protestors rallied against unregulated cruise tourism at the Alaska State Capitol building, members of Juneau’s Downtown Business Association, the Greater Juneau Chamber of Commerce, Travel Juneau, and even the University of Alaska Southeast’s mascot, Spike, all were at the docks greeting the first wave of cruise ships. Juneau’s mayor, Beth Weldon, hoped the cruise ship was at “maximum capacity” and that it brought “more ships with ‘em.” Indeed, Travel Juneau, the official tourism marketing organ of the city, relies on the same “pristine” discourses as the cruise ships themselves. On their website, all aspects of nature and touristic experience is prefaced by “pristine”:
“pristine natural wonder, pristine coves, pristine rides, pristine water, pristine habitat, pristine natural parks, pristine nature, pristine scenic views, pristine wilderness, pristine lake, pristine rivers and streams, pristine forest, pristine scenery, pristine coast, pristine parkland, pristine area…”
The concept of “pristine” is burdened with unique imaginings considered integral to Alaska itself. One common quip about the metropole and largest urban city Anchorage is that it is only a “twenty minute drive from Alaska,” referring to the transportation time out of the city and into nearby parks and trails. Anchorage’s official travel website portrays itself as the “gateway to Alaska adventure” which “opens doors to the best of Alaska.” Implicit in this description is that Anchorage is a bridge or point of departure to Alaska and not the destination itself. Anchorage is the gateway to adventure and the true Alaska, but is not really a representation of what Alaska “truly” is. To be sure, the construction of this image is centuries long – from the original “barren” wasteland of Russian Alaska to the wild and free paradise of John Muir’s Travels in Alaska, the notion that a wild, untapped, and “pristine” nature as the thought-image par excellence of Alaska is certain. This “image” of Alaska, of course, reflects larger discourses of Romanticism, the American West; and Anchorage itself is the “machine in the garden,” or America’s largest continuous garden that, as Alaskans will be sure to tell you, is geographically tantamount to “two Texas’.” A decade ago, The Lynn Canal Highway proposal again presented connecting Juneau by road to the contiguous road system. Aesthetic concerns were central – the Sierra Club questioned the impression the road would have for cruise visitors: “Instead of a wilderness, visitors would view a trucks lumbering along a large scar across the mountain-side.” Here, Alaska’s “pristine” image was at stake.
Multinational Corporations and Small Town Politics
Internet media plays a central role in Alaska’s relationship with the “outside.” Where Alaska’s political ecosystem once was a culture of “friends and neighbors,” of small town personalism earning and dealing political clout largely absent of direct (or at least unconscious of) external influences, Alaska today reflects social and political networks predominantly de-continuous and de-contiguous in space, and deterritorialized. External capital ventures, in the form of cruise tourism, for example, maintain great influence in Alaska. In the Southeast Panhandle, eight of nine key cruise ship players are among Carnival, Royal Caribbean, or Norwegian cruises – which themselves constitute over 70 percent of the world’s market share. Tourism in Southeast Alaska provides the second-largest proportion of employment and only continues to expand. Many local businesses are entirely oriented toward cruise tourism, primarily by seasonal operating schedules. The CEO of Travel Juneau claims small business and cruise tourism are inseparable, citing 85 percent of clients as dependent. Clearly, the sheer magnitude and economic power of cruise tourism – and the largely deterritorialized players within it – hold a real command in the region.
Nonetheless, the majority of Southeast Alaska’s regional income derives from government. While cruise tourism accounts for 11 percent of earnings, government accounts for approximately 33 percent. The median economic position of Alaskans far exceeds most Americans – in 2016, it held the second highest median household income in the United States. Since the 1990s, Alaska has consistently scored around the top ten states of this category. In 2020, Alaska was about 13 percent above the national median. While rent and costs of foodstuffs are notoriously high, predominantly because of transportation costs and the lack of a substantive agricultural base, Alaska has abolished sales and income tax. It also notably distributes a yearly “universal basic income” in the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which is allocated based on oil revenues. Alaskans are also highly educated, with Juneau residents holding much higher rates of post-secondary education than the national average. At the average, Alaskans are generally in an exceptional economic position.
This calls into question the “necessity” versus preferentiality of mass cruise tourism. Of course, in a globalized world, the acceptance of external multinational corporations might merely seem part-and-parcel of the modern condition. According to one of the state’s foremost economists, Alaskans historically have chosen to embrace them, and moreover “tax themselves as little as possible.” The dependence on external economic ventures simply balances out stringent fiscal conservatism. Cruise tourism upholds the economic position of many Alaskans, but the ongoing imaginative process of defining that relationship itself has remained complex. The imaginative reconciliation of mass tourism in a “pristine” environment may seem paradoxical, but it articulates an essential aspect of Alaska’s imaginary, of how the calculation of risk is socially structured, and of how aesthetics can hold significant weight in that calculus.
Alaska’s Landscape as a “Resource”
Far before Alaskan colonization, the local economy of Southeast Alaska thrived on resource extraction. For indigenous Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, fishing was essential for surviving the long winter season. During colonialism, that resource extraction – particularly the sea otter fur trade – would soon become entangled in an 18th century colonial commerce boom. American, European, Russian, and Japanese powers would go on to enter Alaska’s maritime fur trade, leading to the near complete elimination of sea otters from the Pacific Northwest. Once purchased from Russia, America attempted to curb this trend by placing a blanket, annual harvest cap at 1.5 percent of global otter populations. However, rather than halting decreasing sea otter rates, extractors proceeded to drain entire locales of sea otter populations, all while remaining under the abstract, delocalized numeric ceiling. Since sea otters are predominantly sedentary, spatially concentrated extraction simply exterminated local populations without triggering any significant migratory response. This practice was repeated annually and dealt a significant blow to sea otter numbers across the Pacific Northwest.
A similar process happened during Alaska’s frontier goldrush. Today, the belief in endless “frontiers” for exploitation, of course, seems far from our modern concepts of global fragility and finitude. Alaska’s moniker of “The Last Frontier” itself implies an exhausted planet, where frontiers are virtually extinct. Nonetheless, it claims to be the final refuge of genuine “frontierism,” although its modern significance is largely pervaded. To be sure, the steady prominence of resource extraction for capitalist commerce remains a continued thread in imagining Alaska as a land of plenty with development ready to spare. Still, contemporary imaginings after the rise of conservationism have conflicted, if not defeated altogether, at least explicit tensions between environment and economic development. Alaska represents the “poster child” of conservationism today – Trump’s mining and logging proposals in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass Forest, for example, garnered extensive national coverage. Conservation organizations across the United States, like the Sierra Club and EarthJustice, immediately launched countercampaigns and lawsuits.
It is paradoxical, however, that Alaskan conservationists themselves, who clearly do not echo the developmental discourses of colonists and frontiersmen, nonetheless often accept cruise tourism. One lamented that Trump’s proposals would put “Southeast Alaska’s thriving tourism and commercial fishing industries at risk.” The director of Salmon State, a nonprofit encouraging sustainable fishing practices, argued that “more than a million people a year don’t come to Southeast Alaska to see clearcuts.” Alaska State Representative Sara Hannan, who argued Southeast Alaska tourism was critical, even took to the Capitol building with protestors. Yet, as Gregory Ringer points out, “[cruise tourism] generate[s] as much as 30,000 gallons of raw sewage [in addition to 7 tons of garbage and solid waste, 15 gallons of toxic chemicals, 7000 gallons of oil and bilge water, and air pollution equivalent to the exhausts of 12,000 automobiles] every day” in Alaska, some of which is jettisoned into the Pacific Ocean. While symbolically pollution is not synonymous with the extraction of physical resources, the environmental infractions committed by cruise ships diminish fauna and ecosystems that themselves constitute finite resources. While not direct, therefore, cruise tourism pollution reflects an indirect ‘spoiling’ of resources.
The symbolic difference is engendered by an early movement of conservationism committed to a culture of “leaving no trace.” With the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980, over 100 million acres of land were placed under federal protection and were established as National Parks – a concession of motives between conservationists and proponents of economic development. With 13 total new or enlarged parks, Alaskan tourism experienced a boom in communities across the state. Visitors were now satisfying a range of local economies, and not only around Denali and Glacier Bay National Parks, which already enjoyed famed status through figures like John Muir. Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, once a staunch opponent of National Park conservation, himself realized the economic potential of tourism and suddenly converted to advocate “conservationism.” Equipped with the slogan of “Leave No Trace,” an unprecedented magnitude of visitors would descend into Alaska’s wild, so long as they followed “best practices.” Transportation vessels like cruise ships and helicopters would facilitate the connection of tourists to pristine “excursions” untapped by extractive enterprises. Once there, they would pack out trash, “respect wildlife,” and leave no visible, aesthetic trace. The certification program for “sustainable” tourism in Alaska, Adventure Green Alaska (AGA), would accredit companies’ dual pledge to environmental respect and economic development. The only requirement is United States law. Another organization in Juneau, Tourism Best Management Practices (TBMP), was wholly founded to “minimize the effects of tourism in a manner which addresses both resident and industry concerns.” TBMP’s guidelines for cruise’s include limiting noise levels, discouraging trash disposal for ship staff on streets, maintaining a maximum opacity of vessel smoke stacks to 20 percent, and encouraging “proactive steps feasible to manage visible emissions.” While these regulations enforce the activities of cruise ships, the substantive magnitude of cruise visitors is left unaffected. By comparison to extractive industries, Alaska’s cruise tourism appears less regulated, and far less controversial.
Alaskan Aesthetics and the Social Calculus of Risk
The calculation of potential risk in ecology is far more than a merely scientific process. According to Ulrich Beck’s acclaimed Risk Society, the assessment of risks, including those that could lead to irreversible social and ecology damages from toxins and pollutants, are “based on causal interpretations, and thus initially only exist in terms of the (scientific or anti-scientific) knowledge about them.” In many cases, the knowledge of risks become important only when the danger is brought into the conceptual scope of a given social party. The belief in environmental impact relies on the production of knowledge – the theories, experiments, and measuring instruments behind that knowledge generate “certain quantifiable risks on the basis of probable accidents.” The environmental impact of a cruise ship ejecting pollutants into the ocean will depend on an overdetermined number of factors, including where, when, the type of pollutants, the admixture of pollutants, ad infinitum, really like any other “causal” deduction. However, the deterritorialized nature of pollutants themselves, where local ecological disasters can trigger collateral damage across the world, undoubtedly complicates the equation. As we saw in the historical example of the serial depletion of sea otters in Alaska, the scientific organs that attempt to anticipate, estimate, and project possibilities of risk are by their nature limited to the social production of knowledge.
According to Beck, risk predictions are malleable, and can be “…changed, magnified, dramatized or minimized” according to social and political authorities in its production. This equates to a rupture between “expert” determinations of risk and non-expert perceptions of risk, especially in localities where the environmental impact is largely invisible, like polluted lakes 100 miles away. Social values and imaginings are, and always have been, therefore, essential in demarcating the line between acceptable and unacceptable levels of risk. Here lies a central integrant concerning Alaska cruise tourism. The potential ecology dangers can easily be interpreted away – unlike hunger, risk consciousness, or the awareness of potential risks, is not a condition that requires immediacy. The often intangibility of risk, therefore, can legitimize allowances to harmful activities, often contrary to their genuine urgency.
To be sure, the emphasis on visuality and aesthetics can be crucial here. A great deal of criticism over Alaska’s environmental preservation echo the mantra of “Leave No Trace” – the impressions of road development cutting through nature, the cleaning of trees, and managing visible smoke stack emissions. These descriptions emphasize tangible representation. Where resource extraction would tangibly pull resources from Alaska, which is part and parcel of its “untapped” and “pristine” image, tourism is viewed merely as a spectacle of Alaska’s resources. Mass cruise tourism views the tangible, but leaves no legible trace, at least to the degree that once tourists are gone and the street cleaners have finished their work, Alaska looks more or less the same.
The gigantic smudge on the landscape that cruise ships represent, undoubtedly obstructs the spectacle. But in contrast to direct extraction of the landscape, cruise ships are impermanent. Their transience brings them by and only for a brief seasonal period. The cruise ships smoke emissions, which have a regulated maximum opacity, dissolve moments after departing the stack. The majority of ships arrive and leave early morning or late evening – actual view of their operations is intentionally less common. The tourists themselves rarely interface with areas beyond the designated tourist sites – the compact downtown strip and the glacier visitor center. As sites of mass tourism, they are designed to flow swathes of people through, often leaving little space for interaction beyond “attractions.” Often times, visitors arrive on cruise ship, take a cruise ship rented bus to the glacier viewpoint, and immediately return to only depart to the next port. At the glacier visitor center, as well, the trails are bounded by large railing that makes off-trail exploration difficult to access. Of course, most locals themselves explicitly avoid tourist areas, which attests to the majority consensus that find themselves unaffected by cruise ship air emissions, vehicle congestion, or crowding on trails. Avoidance of tourists is so common in Juneau that the city releases graphic guides representing when and where to eschew.
The non-permanence of cruise ships and their patrons in Juneau is advantageous for imagining their level of environmental risk. This relates to the visuality of pristine nature. According to historical logics of the American West and Alaska, the term “pristine” primarily signifies lack of visible, permanent infrastructure. This same nature constitutes the meaning of the state’s commodification. The fluidity of tourism – which allows the invisibility of its environmental degradation – betters its odds in its risk calculus. Quite simply, millions of tourists can enter Juneau every summer and the landscape remains visibly the same. On the contrary, the extraction of precious metals conveys thought-images of real, substantive “removal,” of a “tapping” of resources. This inherent difference in aesthetics contributes to social differences over their respective risk calculus: mass cruise tourism is generally fine, but extractive practices are not.
Bibliography
Adventure Green Alaska. “AGA Certification Program Information.” Accessed May 10, 2022.
Adventure Green Alaska. “Leave No Trace Principles.” Accessed May 10, 2022. https://www.adventuregreenalaska.org/get-certified.
https://www.adventuregreenalaska.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/leave-no-trace-principles.pdf
Alaska Travel Industry Association. “Alaska Visitor Volume Report: Winter 2018-19 and Summer 2019.” Accessed May 5, 2022.
https://www.alaskatia.org/wp-content/uploads/Alaska-Visitor-Volume-2018-19-FINAL-7_1_20.pdf
Allan, Timo Christopher. “Locked Up!: A History of Resistance to the Creation of National Parks in Alaska.” PhD diss., Washington State University, 2010. https://ezproxy.lib.uwm.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/locked-up-history-resistance-creation-national/docview/753497953/se-2?accountid=15078.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (June 1990): 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002017.
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (June 1990): 301-302.
Ballotpedia. “Population represented by state legislators.” Accessed April 19, 2022.
https://ballotpedia.org/Population_represented_by_state_legislators
Baumaun, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage Publications, 2013.
Cruise Industry News. “Alaska Set for Record Cruise Ship Season This Summer.” April 4, 2022.https://www.cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/27141-alaska-set-for-record-cruise-ship-season-this-summer.html.
Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska. “Cruise Ship Calendar for 2022.” Accessed May 5, 2022.
Dwyer, Larry. “Globalization of Tourism: Drivers and Outcomes.” Tourism Recreation Research 40, no. 3, (August 2015): 326-339, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2015.1075723.
EarthJustice. “Lawsuit Takes Aim at Trump Administration Decision to Gut Tongass National Forest Protections.” December 23, 2020. https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/lawsuit-takes-aim-at-trump-administration-decision-to-gut-tongass-national-forest-protections
EarthJustice. “Southeast Alaskans Rally to Defend the Tongass and the Roadless Rule.” June 24, 2019. https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2019/southeast-alaskans-advocate-in-support-of-the-2001-national-roadless-rule.
Fall, James A. “Regional Patterns of Fish and Wildlife Harvests in Contemporary Alaska.” Arctic 69, no. 1 (March 2016): 47–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43871398.
Grinev, Andrei. The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Gullufsen, Kevin. “Alaska negotiating settlements with cruise companies over air, water violations.” Juneau Empire, November 2, 2018.https://www.juneauempire.com/news/alaska-negotiating-settlements-with-cruise-companies-over-air-water-violations.
Hall, C. Michael and Hazel Tucker. Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations. London & New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hirschman, C. Elizabeth. “Men, Dogs, Guns, and Cars–The Semiotics of Rugged Individualism.” Journal of Advertising, 32:1 (April 2013): 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2003.10601001.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London & New York: Routledge, 2015.
Kirkwood, Dan and Kirby Day. “Opinion: Sustainability strategy could help keep tourism working for our communities.” Juneau Empire, March 29, 2022. https://www.juneauempire.com/opinion/opinion-sustainability-strategy-could-help-tourism-working-for-our-communities/
Klimovich, Kristina, Laura Savatgy, and Clive S. Thomas. Alaska Politics and Public Policy: The Dynamics of Beliefs, Institutions, Personalities, and Power. University of Alaska Press, 2016.
Kollin, Susan. Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Larson E. Shawn, Bodkin, L. James, and Glenn R. VanBlaricom. Sea Otter Conservation. Amsterdam; Boston: Academic Press, 2015.
Larry Dwyer, “Globalization of Tourism: Drivers and Outcomes,” Tourism Recreation Research 40, no. 3, (August 2015): 326.
Lockett, Michael. “2022 cruise season begins in Juneau.” Peninsula Clarion, April 25, 2022.
https://www.peninsulaclarion.com/news/2022-cruise-season-begins-in-juneau/.
Lockett, Michael. “Roadless Rollback? Dunleavy and Trump eye Tongass National Forest.” Juneau Empire, August 29, 2019.
https://www.juneauempire.com/news/as-amazon-forest-burns-dunleavy-and-trump-eye-tongass-national-forest.
Marxists. “Karl Marx. Capital Volume One.” Accessed April 25, 2022.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm.
McKinley Research Group, LLC. “Juneau Tourism Survey 2021.” Accessed May 5, 2022.
https://juneau.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Juneau-Tourism-Survey-Report-REV-12_1_21-1.pdf.
National Center of Education Statistics. “Median household income, by state: Selected years, 1990 through 2019.” Accessed, May 2, 2022.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_102.30.asp
Ringer, Gregory. “Cruising North to Alaska: the New ‘Gold Rush’.” In Cruise Ship Tourism, edited by Ross Dowling, 270-279. Wallingford: CABI, 2006.
Ritter, Harry. Alaska’s History, Revised Edition: The People, Land, and Events of the North Country. Berkley: West Margin Press, 2020.
Segall, Peter. “Protesters call for more enforcement of environmental regulations aboard ships.” Juneau Empire, April 25, 2022.
Sierra Club: Alaska Chapter, “Tongass National Forest.” Accessed April 19, 2022. https://www.sierraclub.org/alaska/tongass-national-forest
Sierra Club. “Juneau’s Road to Ruin.” Accessed April 23, 2022.
https://www.sierraclub.org/alaska/juneaus-road-ruin
Slatta, W. Richard. “Making and unmaking myths of the American frontier.” European Journal of American Culture 29, no.2 (July 2010): 81-92.
Southeast Conference. “Southeast Alaska By the Numbers 2019.” Accessed May 5, 2022.
Southeast Conference. “Southeast Alaska By the Numbers 2020.” Accessed May 5, 2022.
Stone, Eric. “State of Alaska, cities, business groups file to defend exemption of Tongass from Roadless Rule.” KTOO, March 25, 2021.
Tourism Best Management Practices. “2022 Tourism Best Management Practices.” Accessed May 10, 2022.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17xk5mQoEWwWijO5X5oFWUwv4XrYfkEWo/view?usp=sharing.
United States Census Bureau, “Quickfacts” (comparing: Juneau city and borough, Alaska; United States; Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska; Anchorage municipality, Alaska; Alaska). Accessed May 10, 2022.
Visit Anchorage Alaska. Accessed May 8, 2022.
Wright, Will. The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 2001.
Zigmund, Dana. “Small businesses still struggling due to pandemic’s effect on travel.” Juneau Empire, November 23, 2021. https://www.juneauempire.com/news/small-businesses-still-struggling-due-to-pandemics-effect-on-travel.