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| December 6, 2006 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Saving our Mental Health
Down below my school there is a trail that winds its way to a remote beach, Coast Guard Beach. It’s a place I go to unwind from the stress of teaching 75 seventh graders. The trail passes a couple of giant cedar trees, corduroy walls that shrink me, and I descend a smaller person. The gravel ends, so I have to leap from root to tottering board, to tuft of moss, to … splash … missed. Where the rut of a path emerges from the rainforest, there is a beach and no one. A cluster of mergansers waddles into the ocean and patters off along the water. It is approaching dusk. A pink cloud hangs about a violet horizon. A seal skims the surface, watching me. It is twenty minutes down the slippery, soggy trail to this paradise of beach. Then the prospect of backhoes, dump trucks and chain saws shatters my meditation. Returning up the trail to the school’s parking lot, I see, to the west, a brutal clearcut. The mountainside scar is the most obscene in Ketchikan. For 50 years, loggers working the forests in lower Southeast at least hid most of their damage from the view of their communities. Yet, one agency, a public one at that, has proven more heinous than the worst corporate abuser: The Alaska Mental Health Trust. After statehood, Congress set up the Trust and gave it one million acres that, over time, became something of insatiable smack for politicians and developers. The Mental Health website is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presentation. Dr. Jekyll has a photo of people in flowing clothes, holding hands and dancing in a white room The Mr. Hyde side of the site has the appearance of a mega-corporate mining, oil and gas, or logging operation. A provision in the law, its barbiturate property, is its requirement for “maximization of long-term revenue from trust land.” The trail to the refuge of Coast Guard beach crosses Mental Health land. I attended a meeting of residents concerned by the prospect of losing one of the last portions of undeveloped shoreline in the area. They were exasperated by the inevitable conclusion: “Mental Health will sell it to the highest bidder. They just don’t give a damn.” The mentality of the Mental Health Trust mandate is brutally insane. The law forces the agency to destroy the very habitats that not only can restore mental sanity to human inhabitants, but that secure the sanity of ecosystems. The value of the land to our state’s “mental health” lies in keeping it intact. There is no need to mention a plethora of studies proving the value of wilderness in helping people with psychological disorders. It is obvious. Outdoor programs that bring young people suffering emotional distress to the natural world grow in popularity as word spreads about their effectiveness, programs like Raven’s Way, Outward Bound, and so on. Our middle school students use the Coast Guard beach each year to conduct survival training. It is the high point of their eighth grade year. Even if you are to take the Mental Health Trust’s own argument for an economic imperative, then leaving the land alone is its own valuable resource. The enlightened approach to economics of “full-cost accounting”, a measure that considers the value of unadulterated trees, animals, and streams, means that an intact ecosystem is more highly valued than any ruined landscape for a short, quick fix of cash. The word on the mossy path is that Sarah Palin’s first order of business is “disposing” of these lands, selling them off. What can we do? Organize the residents of API? Do they know that the psychotropic drugs doctors are feeding them are paid for with money from a ravaged and polluted earth? Should we get together an initiative to change Mental Health Trust’s mandate? Should we find a buyer to put together a sweeping conservation easement proposal? Whatever. Stop the insanity of the Mental Health Trust. Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. 'Red Alert' appears on insurgent49.com every Wednesday. |
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