What are our rarest and most valuable resources?
Majestic mountain vistas can be found all over the western United States. So can dramatic coastlines. If you know where to look, the world is still teeming with wildlife. Away from big cities, there are tiny towns and corners every bit as tranquil as this place.
So what does Haines have that’s just not common in the rest of the world? This is it: Clean water, non-toxic air and a plentiful and sustainable wild food source, namely salmon. Air, water and food are life’s essentials. You can jury-rig sources of shelter, jobs, and cash, but once you’re out of pure food and clean air and water, the game is over.
In my hometown of Media, Pa., in the lush and watered part of the nation, residents no longer drink tap water. In a scam right out of a James Bond movie, a private company has bought up municipal sewer and water utilities all around Philadelphia.
The house I grew up in is served by Aqua America, a private water provider, and no one drinks the stuff out of the faucet. My brothers say the taste is off. Instead, they buy cases of bottled water at the grocery store.
Selling sewer plants apparently sounded like a great deal to municipalities, as it brought windfalls of cash while promising to reduce budgets and workloads. But water? Clean drinking water is elemental to human life. In a jam, any of us would pay any price for it.
It doesn’t take an economist to realize that raising the money to pay for sewage treatment is no problem for a company that also owns a community’s drinking water. No need to sweat the former because price is no object to people who need the latter.
Turning over a water supply to a for-profit company is like putting a noose around one’s neck and handing the long end of the rope to an uncharitable stranger. Nationally, about 12 percent of water utilities are privately owned, but in Pennsylvania it’s 30 percent, and in New Jersey, 37 percent.
That’s frightening.
In watery parts of the world like Philadelphia, making clean drinking water is not particularly difficult nor expensive. And for years, if you didn’t like treated water, there were natural springs the public could tap. But those have been going away, too.
One such watering hole near Media, the Black Hawk spring, for decades attracted people from afar. At all times of the day and night, motorists lined up with dozens of empty milk jugs to fill.
Sadly, the private owner of Black Hawk spring closed it in 1992, when a test found high bacteria levels.
In Haines, we have a similar roadside spring at Mud Bay, where residents can get clean, natural water for free. Considering the cost of bottled water, our roadside spring is a gold mine. The Chilkat Valley may have no other single feature of greater value.
Now consider wild salmon, a pure food source that we get essentially for free. Nature, undisturbed, delivers this protein and vitamin source to our town each year at no cost. A household in Haines can take 50 sockeye per year under subsistence regulations, and many more coho, chum and pink salmon. Virtually all a person’s protein sources, untainted, can be harvested here for the price of one’s equipment and time. Where else in the country, or the world, can a person still do that?
I ate some delicious meals on my recent trip to Philadelphia, but nothing that tasted as wholesome as a sockeye fillet my wife threw in the oven when I got back to town.
Clean water and pure, wild salmon. Those are our crown jewels and with each passing day they become rarer and more valuable. They are also our gold standard. Every development scheme, highway project, and proposed subdivision needs to be measured against them, and their value is staggeringly high.