Southcentral

For thirty years Alaska had a small coal export industry, but with demolition slated for the state’s only coal loading facility, those days are likely gone forever.

At its peak in 2011, Alaska exported 1.1 million tons — or 18 ships’ worth — of coal annually. The coal traveled down the Alaska Railroad from the Usibelli Coal Mine in Healy to the Seward Coal Terminal. There, it was loaded on boats headed for South Korea, Japan and Chile.

But within five years, coal exports had dropped 95%. In 2016, the railroad and the mine shut it down.

“There simply wasn’t the global business to justify continuing with the operation at that time,” said Meghan Clemens, a spokesperson for the state-owned Alaska Railroad Corporation, which owns the Seward loading dock.

Demand for coal never came back, a signal of the global energy transition toward lower carbon fuels. Meanwhile, the coal-loading equipment on the Seward dock has sat idle for eight years, deteriorating to the point that it is unusable.

“It’s more of a liability than anything else right now,” Clemens said.

Now the railroad has decided to demolish the coal terminal in the hopes that it can find a new use for the dock.

“With this equipment out of the way, how can we better use this dock in Seward to bring some additional business through town?” Clemens said.

Bidding on the project closed last week and Clemens said the railroad will soon select a contractor. She said the demolition budget is $1.5 million to start.

With the coal loading infrastructure gone, it’s unlikely the mine or the railroad ever reinvests in coal exports, said University of Alaska Fairbanks energy historian Philip Wight.

“It’s hard for me to see any situation where this is not the end of Alaskan coal exports,” Wight said.

Usibelli Coal Mine did not respond to a request for comment.

Coal was never a huge part of Alaska’s energy exports. But Wight said its decline is one example of changes driven by the global energy transition.

Nations have committed to reducing their contribution to global warming, which means switching to lower carbon sources of energy.

Around the world, coal has been increasingly replaced by natural gas. Wight said since the 2010’s, countries in Asia have imported more liquefied natural gas, or LNG.

“And that made a big difference in the power sector, where countries like South Korea and Japan burned a lot more LNG rather than coal for electricity generation,” he said.

Natural gas releases less carbon into the atmosphere than coal when it’s burned, which has led it to be seen as a cleaner option. But it’s still a fossil fuel, and new research has raised questions about whether it has a lower climate impact than coal.

Despite that, demand for natural gas is growing. Wight said that’s in part because it works well as a backup to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

“We’re looking at a transition where LNG is going to continue to play a large role in that regardless of its carbon emissions.”

Even if the state likely won’t be exporting any more coal, it still remains a major energy source inside Alaska. In 2020, a third of electricity generated in the Interior came from coal, according to the Alaska Resource Development Council.

But coal infrastructure in Alaska is aging. And local utilities are eying other options — including wind energy and natural gas.

The Anchorage Assembly shot down a resolution Tuesday night calling on federal representatives to work towards an “immediate bilateral ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.”

The Assembly chambers were packed with people supporting the resolution, with dozens holding signs showing messages like “Stand with Palestine” and “Jews for a Ceasefire.”

“It is essential to object to the loss of life in Gaza, and to advocate for peace and a ceasefire,” Anchorage resident Erinn Barnett said during public testimony.

The resolution matches similar efforts passed by dozens of cities across the country, according to Reuters.

Ultimately, the Assembly voted to forgo debate and to postpone the ordinance indefinitely, effectively killing it. The vote was met with immediate backlash from many audience members, with Michael Patterson, head of the Anchorage Party for Socialism and Liberation, yelling out at Assembly members. Assembly Chair Chris Constant called for security to remove Patterson.

“Mr Patterson, you are creating a disturbance,” Constant said.

“Cowards, absolute cowards,” Patterson yelled as he and many other audience members jeered at the Assembly.

“Security, please remove Mr. Patterson,” Constant continued. “We will adjourn to our dinner break. The room will be cleared. Security, please clear the room.”

North Anchorage Assembly member Daniel Volland was one of nine Assembly members who voted to postpone the resolution. He said the Assembly received over 700 emails about the resolution on Tuesday, and most were opposed.

“Although it was drafted to be sort of neutral, I think it lacked context for the current conflict,” Volland said. “I also, you know, I think it was divisive, rather than something that was, you know, bringing more communication and peace.”

East Anchorage Assembly member George Martinez was one of three sponsors of the resolution who voted in support of it. He said the resolution was built based on a variety of local perspectives on the conflict, and he wanted it to express the community’s values.

“And if there was a voice for us, in our lane, to ask for our federal delegation, which was what our resolution did, to speak to a ceasefire in the lane that they’re working on now, then I think that was what we hoped for,” he said in an interview after the vote. “It is unfortunate.”

Assembly members Felix Rivera and Karen Bronga also voted in support of the resolution.

Later in the meeting, Constant asked the Assembly’s Youth Representative, Jesse Tyrrell, for his vote on postponing the ceasefire resolution. Though Tyrrell’s vote is procedural and doesn’t actually count, Tyrrell voted against postponing the resolution.

The Mat-Su School Board has removed the book “This Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover from library circulation.

The  6-1 vote Wednesday is the board’s first action on one of 56 books that the district removed from school libraries over a year ago, following public complaints.

The board also voted to send 18 books to the district administration to determine what age restrictions, if any, should be placed on them.

The controversy in the state’s second largest school district arose amid a national conservative movement to ban books deemed offensive. At public hearings last spring, people complained about dozens of titles, saying they were pornographic. That prompted the district to pull 56 books from school library shelves.

The school board created a Library Citizens Advisory Committee last fall to review them.

The advisory committee recommended removing Hoover’s novel from circulation.

“The committee unanimously concluded one title meets the elements of criminal obscenity under Alaska law,” board member Kathy McCollum said.

Of the 18 other books forwarded to the administration for further review, the committee concluded just five of those “might be obscene.”

Kendal Kruse was one of the school board members who voted in favor of removal.

“I also very much appreciate the transparency that none of this process was done in hiding and secret form,” she said. “The conversations are had, they are recorded, they are published.”

The removed book is a romance novel that describes domestic abuse. The board amended recommendations from the committee, but did not offer its own explanation for dropping the book.

Many of the challenged books feature characters of color or LGBTQ+ characters, a key point in a federal lawsuit Mat-Su students and their families filed last November.

The President of the American Library Association, Emily Drabinski, said in a recent interview that book challenges in Alaska follow a nationwide pattern of censoring material depicting LGBTQ+ experiences, as well as books about Black and Indigenous characters.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mat-Su School Board sparked international outcry over their removal of five books from the curriculum.

The world’s largest pizza company is delivering something new to Anchorage: stunt marketing with a $25,000 grant for the city’s snow plowing.

“At Domino’s, we’re plowing unplowed roads across the country, because cold roads shouldn’t get in the way of hot pizza. Nominate your town for plowing assistance at PlowingForPizza.com.”

And Anchorage locals did put in nominations – a “significant” number, according to a spokesperson for the company.

The campaign started after Anchorage got its record-breaking snowfall in November, overwhelming the city’s snow removal system and shutting down schools for days. Snow in Alaska’s biggest city continued to break records in December and January.

“Yeah, so we’re the lucky winners,” Veronica Hoxie said with a chuckle.

Hoxie is a spokesperson for Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson. She said the grant agreement was signed last week, and that there are other procedural hurdles to clear before the money changes hands.

But when it does, what does $25,000 of snow plowing look like?

“In the grand scheme of things, not a whole lot,” Hoxie said. “But it is a fun little, you know, unique funding mechanism.”

It’s the equivalent of roughly 900 operator hours in the city’s street maintenance crews.

One condition of accepting the grant is that the city will share photos and video of its operations to be featured on Domino’s Plowing for Pizza website.

In a warehouse in Anchorage, Rachel Bernhardt gently lowered the body of a Pomeranian named Wiley into a metal chamber.

Wiley was a beloved family dog, known for being feisty and, as his name suggests, wily. He was 17 when he died.

Bernhardt sprinkled rose petals around his body and lowered the platform down with a chain pulley. In the next chamber, she poured in a bucket of white powder–potassium hydroxide, a highly alkaline or basic chemical.

This was the process of “water cremation” or “aquamation,” which uses fluid to break down the body instead of heat. Bernhardt closed the lid, turned on the machine, and it filled with water.

In about 18 hours, Bernhardt will come back to finish processing the remains. They’ll be dried and put in a container for the dog’s family.

Bernhardt recently started doing water cremations for pets in her new warehouse space in Anchorage. The conventional death-care industry uses lots of chemicals, plastic and energy. But nationally, a movement toward natural burial, body composting and low-energy cremation is gaining ground. Bernhardt is passionate about offering some of those choices to people in Anchorage, starting with pets. She said the potassium hydroxide accelerates the water cremation process.

“It’s generally regarded as a gentler process than flame cremation and it’s a more energy-efficient process as well,” Bernhardt said.

Bernhardt worked for many years in organ and tissue donation programs, so she learned a lot about the intersections of health care and death care. She said her experience with the death of a family member was a turning point for her.

“What was missing was the hands on component because a lot of it happens behind closed doors,” Bernhardt said. “You know, your loved one is whisked away and the next time you see them is when they have makeup on, and they’re all done up. And then you go back a couple days, weeks later and pick up an urn. And that’s kind of your only interaction with that process. So it felt very disjointed.”

Bernhardt found solace in a national movement toward natural death care that began in the 1990s. The movement pulled from longstanding cultural traditions of natural burial that had been displaced by contemporary western death practices, though in rural Alaska, many villages do not embalm their loved ones, and instead bury them in simple wooden caskets. Green burials have become more available nationwide in recent years, but not in urban Alaska.

Bernhardt is quick to say that making choices around death is personal and there’s not one “right” way, but she’s doggedly pushing for people to have choices beyond conventional burial and cremation. She calls it an “obsession.” She also helps organize a regular meetup in Anchorage called a “death cafe” to talk about death and the choices people have around it.

“I wish more people could have a quiet moment with themselves and realize that the things that we find taboo, like talking about death–they’re really cultural,” Bernhardt said. “That’s not the way it needs to be.”

Bernhardt is dreaming big. Besides starting a water cremation business, she’s also working to create a natural burial cemetery in Anchorage. Bodies there won’t be embalmed before burial and they’ll be wrapped in a simple canvas cloth or “shroud,” instead of a coffin. She said a natural cemetery holds far fewer bodies than a regular cemetery.

“That low density natural burial as bodies naturally decompose, actually serves as nutrients to the ecosystem there rather than a source of pollutant,” Bernhardt said.

Bernhardt knows that she’s at least a couple years out from being able to bury someone in the natural cemetery she’s creating, but so many people were interested that she created a waitlist.

Stephanie Zaborac-Reed was one of the first people to join the waitlist. She lives in Fairbanks and is in her 60s. She said she was attracted to natural burial because she has a strong aversion to embalming. When she was 20, her father died and she said seeing him embalmed was disturbing.

“You don’t look a thing like you do when you’re alive,” Zaborac-Reed said. “I was young enough that it made a huge impression on me at the time. I expected to see my dad and this body in this casket was not anything like him at all.”

Embalming fluids include formaldehyde, which is toxic and a carcinogen, and embalming chemicals are harmful to both the embalmers and the environment after burial.

As Zaborac-Reed aged and started thinking more about death care options, she realized natural burial aligned with her values. She and her husband hope to be buried at the cemetery Bernhardt is creating.

“It just seems the gentlest of the alternatives and I’m conscious about the environment,” Zaborac-Reed said. “I don’t want to be polluting. I don’t want to be wasteful. I like the gentle approach.”

Bernhardt’s natural burial cemetery will be what’s called a “conservation burial ground.” She imagines a park where you’re more likely to see wild flocks of birds than a headstone. The grave markers will be much smaller than a typical cemetery.

“It’s better for the community, better for the planet, better for people,” Bernhardt said. “It’s a hands-on experience, burying somebody in a natural burial cemetery; if you want to use a shovel and help, that’s welcomed and encouraged.”

Bernhardt believes there’s a lot of interest in natural burial and cremation methods in the state, though she knows offering new options will take time. She’s currently waiting for approval from the city for the tract of land she’s identified near the Rabbit Creek neighborhood in Anchorage. But once more options are available, she hopes it will change the way people feel about death.

A legislator from Big Lake has a vision of Alaska where resources extracted in the Interior are shipped by rail to Port MacKenzie, loaded onto cargo ships in the shadow of a bridge spanning Knik Arm and sent off to the global market.

Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe’s vision has multiple unbuilt megaprojects in it, and he thinks a key piece of unlocking the funding to make those projects happen is for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and the city of Anchorage to hand their port facilities on opposite sides of Knik Arm over to a quasi-independent state port authority.

McCabe is sponsoring House Bill 255 to create the Port of Southcentral Alaska Authority. The bill’s first committee hearing was held Tuesday in Juneau.

“This isn’t envisioned to be any kind of an adversarial buyout or hostile takeover or anything like that,” he said to the House Transportation Committee. “This is designed and the idea – and the discussion that I wanted to engender with this bill was a way for both ports to move forward, whether it be for the bridge, or for the rail spur, or for resilience/redundancy, for earthquakes, or just for the synergies that we both have for docking different vessels.”

Under a port authority, McCabe said the ports would operate together in the entire state’s interest and for Alaskans broadly, rather than for the individual communities. He said that would make it easier for the ports and related transportation infrastructure to secure federal funding.

“There can be no effective resource development, which our constitution requires of us, without transportation infrastructure,” McCabe said. “You’ve all heard me say it: Even if it’s a goat path and a mule with saddle bags, resources need transportation to reach markets, smelting facilities, energy plants or end users. … We are poised to burst at the economic seams if we have all the pieces in place to help us thrive.”

Committee members peppered him with questions. He said he was unable to answer several of the most substantive ones, such as what compensation the local governments would get for giving up their ports, how the transfers might impact local property taxes or how port user groups feel about the idea. He said the bill is a vehicle for those discussions.

Anchorage city leaders have expressed resistance to a state takeover of their port, where most of the physical stuff shipped to Alaska arrives.

McCabe said the bill will be back before the committee, which he also chairs, at a later date.

A similar bill in the Senate that focuses exclusively on Anchorage’s port has not been scheduled for any hearings.