It’s time to think big Alaska

Each allowed a question to take aim at Gov. Bill Walker, none of the Mat-Su Valley Borough Assembly Members took a shot that was particularly confrontational, nor incisive at Tuesday night’s meeting in Palmer.

Probably the most poignant question came from assembly member Barbara Doty, who asked Walker what could be done to diversify the state’s economy. A good point. After all, why should a state with as much going for it as Alaska be so Saudi-like in its reliance on the price of crude oil?

The question was music to the governor’s ears.

“I love talking about the future,” he said. “Why are we in this position now? Why didn’t we take the advice 40 years ago of Gov. Hammond, who said, if we do nothing about diversifying and living off one commodity, the day of reckoning will arrive. I agreed with him then as I agree with him now. I just didn’t know I’d be governor (when the day of reckoning) arrived.”

Curiously absent from the governor’s litany of ideas for economic diversity was the immediate commercialization of marijuana.

How come a state that has already legalized cannabis, doesn’t already have abundant recreational dispensaries open for business?

It’s like a county that goes from being dry to allowing alcohol, but only allows you to buy the bathtub moonshine you always got from Cleatus in a dark alley. Beer in a grocery store? Nope, keep on meeting Cleatus in the dark alley — or, feel free to make your own bathtub gin. But beer in a grocery store regulated for quality control and taxed? Why that’s just crazy.

Pot is legal in Alaska; that’s not going to change. So regulate, tax it and start monetizing it.

That obvious step toward diversifying the Alaska economy gets us into agriculture as a whole, which was the most fascinating thing of the night said by Walker.

“A lot of people talk about a water pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48,” Walker said in response to Doty’s question. “I was at a western states governors’ conference and they talked about how they were drying up on the west coast and wanted our water. I thought, why export water when we can do the agriculture here and export the product? There’s so much we can do agriculturally.”

He’s dead-bang right, and he’s getting more right with each passing year of drought in the west. Unless snowfall in the Rocky Mountains increases suddenly and drastically in the coming decades — which virtually no climatologist is predicting — the Colorado River will wilt into a mere creek and the desert metropoles of Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson it feeds will turn into ghost towns overnight. Barring a sudden and efficient way of desalinating the oceans, children born today could well see, in their lifetimes, the evaporation of California as a major agricultural producer, and a huge migration north.

Alaska should be preparing for this future today.

Start with opening and taxing recreational marijuana dispensaries and earmarking part of that revenue for an investment in a unified Alaska State University system with extension campuses focused on agriculture. Harvest crops that grow here now, and begin to mutate seeds and soil to develop capacity for crops that don’t grow here now.

Make Alaska the new heartland of America for a 22nd Century that could see its population exceed 40 million with the lower 48 bone dry in the west, and parts of the eastern seaboard and Florida possibly underwater.

Overdramatic?

Maybe.

Watching too many disaster movies?

Maybe.

But one way or another, people in the lower 48 will be flocking to Alaska.

The time to build for that future is now.