We know that Alaskan communities pay high prices at the grocery store, largely due to the cost of shipping food by road, water, and air from the lower 48. But with trade tensions simmering between the US and Canada, and the premier of British Columbia threatening to put tolls on trucks headed to the Last Frontier, Eva Holland’s investigation discovered that among the obstacles between Alaskans and the food on their table, the threat of tolls is only the beginning.
I’ve lived alongside the Alaska Highway, where it passes through the Yukon capital of Whitehorse, for most of the past 16 years. The tolls have yet to be implemented — although Eby’s government has created the legislative framework to do so — but I was fascinated by the threat, and by the paradox of a road built for Alaska’s defense transformed into a glaring weakness by unpredictable foreign relations. I pictured Alaska as a balloon bobbing at the end of a very long string, with Canada, an unexpected adversary, wielding a pair of scissors.
It struck me that, for a state where many residents pride themselves on their self-
sufficiency — and Alaskans in general are some of the most quietly competent and resourceful folks I’ve ever met — their food supply was unusually dependent on public infrastructure. Down South, private sector producers might rely mainly on a functioning road network to get their food to private retailers. But in Alaska, so much more was in play, across ocean, land and air.
More picks about Alaska
Where the Dogs Run
“Along the Yukon River, declining salmon populations threaten the future of the region’s sled dogs—and the communities that rely on them.”
In Alaska, A Mystery Over Disappearing Whales
“Sam Ellis his colleagues have shown that killer whales with living grandmothers are more likely to survive than those without.”
Bats of the Midnight Sun
“Reimer has spent over a decade specializing in chiropterology, the study of the species with “’winged hands.’”
