Environmentalists Care More About Wilderness Than About People’s Lives

King Cove is an Aleut Alaskan fishing village of about 400 people. It is adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which was designated a wilderness area in 1980.

This presented a lethal problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport, meaning that very ill or badly injured people are unable to get to Anchorage during inclement weather.

A town called Cold Bay — only 20 miles away — does have an all-weather airport, so the people of King Cove came up with a commonsense solution, first proposed in 1997: Build a simple, one-lane gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife refuge to Cold Bay so that those who need urgent care can be driven to the airport there. The proposed evacuation road would require only about 450 of the 330,000 acres in the wilderness zone, and any impact on the refuge would be de minimis. Later, to sweeten the pot, King Cove offered a land swap that would add ecologically delicate wetlands to the Izembek Refuge in return for the road.