The Last Alaskans TV series

[LandSailor]

Just wanted to let people know about this wonderful series. Its really beautifully filmed in high-res. Its on discovery channel or if you have streaming box (Apple TV, Roku) you can binge-watch it on Hulu (similar to Netflix).

"In 1980, the U.S. government banned new human occupation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a protected area, home to thousands of native animals and pristine terrain spanning roughly the size of South Carolina.
Currently, only a handful of families spread across seven permitted cabins are allowed to remain in the refuge. Within less than 100 years, all remaining permits will reach expiration, and there will be no human presence left."


http://www.discoverychannel.com.au/show ... -alaskans/

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Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

[Hallu]

I'm afraid to watch this. TV shows from the Discovery channel on Alaska are generally rubbish. They hype up the dangers, like in Homestead Rescue, using greedy/actor people like the Raney family, with the same deep-voice narrator as usual, dramatic music, lying about the dangers from predators, fires, and cold. The National Geographic channel did it too with Ultimate Survival Alaska. Fake dangerous situations, fake distances, fake exhaustion etc... Yeah Alaska is dangerous. So is Australia, any desert any jungle any mountain any isolated place. So for once I hope it's not about the dangers but the simple beauty of the place. I find that shows about Canada and places like the Yukon are usually less hyped up/Americanised.

[LandSailor]

I'm afraid to watch this. TV shows from the Discovery channel on Alaska are generally rubbish. They hype up the dangers, like in Homestead Rescue, using greedy/actor people like the Raney family, with the same deep-voice narrator as usual, dramatic music, lying about the dangers from predators, fires, and cold. The National Geographic channel did it too with Ultimate Survival Alaska. Fake dangerous situations, fake distances, fake exhaustion etc... Yeah Alaska is dangerous. So is Australia, any desert any jungle any mountain any isolated place. So for once I hope it's not about the dangers but the simple beauty of the place. I find that shows about Canada and places like the Yukon are usually less hyped up/Americanised.

I know exactly what you mean. I also dislike that hyper-sensationalised narration style you see so much of on US documentaries.
This series is genuinely different. The people are authentic and the cinematography is beautiful.
There is a large focus on hunting which some people will not like but it is in the context of feeding their families.
Here's a small taste

The Last Alaskans - Sneak peek

[Hallu]

Yeah I've just watched a couple. At first I was gonna say "they do 2 episodes on unsuccessful moose hunting and then go directly to winter ? WT *$&# ?" but then I realized it's simply because they must go there a week or two at a time to shoot, and don't have the whole thing, and that shows it's probably 100% legit. So yeah for once, an unhyped show on Alaska. More than the snow the cold or the food I think the hardest must be the total darkness in winter. Anyway it's a good show yeah.

[north-north-west]

I thought they'd opened the ANWR to oil exploration and drilling. Kind of makes the human occupation thing moot, doesn't it?

[Hallu]

No, most democrats are in favor of expanding the protection and not opening the area for drilling. The area in play is the "1002" red area on the map above. Since the 70s republicans want to open this part of the world to industrial projects while democrats want it safe. The main argument against is the disturbance of caribou migration. Regularly the Republican House proposes bills or attach sneaky amendments to otherwise unrelated bills in order to authorize drilling, and regularly the Democratic Senate opposes them. And in case it passes, Obama could still declare the area a National Monument under the Antiquities Act. That's what Jimmy Carter did to turn 56 of the 157 million acres into protected land under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The 56 were challenged by Alaskans themselves, burning Carter in effigy, before realizing several years later how good it was for tourism. I don't see any way this area is opened up for drilling unless the US get a Republican Senate, House and President at the same time.

[north-north-west]

Thanks.
That's a relief. In some ways the seppoes are considerably more advance than we are on this sort of thing.

[Hallu]

Yeah that confounds me as well. On one hand they've destroyed most of their country (mostly the East), put factories everywhere, decimated their wildlife (bisons for meat and fur, wolves by fear, and birds for fashion) but on the other hand they invented the national parks, have rich people who donated land and gave their life to the conservation movement, and in general have a culture of the national park unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Ken Burn's book, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea", gives a very good insight. Basically they were so shocked by the destruction and the speed at which it was going in the 1800s, cutting down trees, killing wildlife, building huge farms and all, that they just decided to save a little bit. In Australia, it's slightly different : not enough people, not enough water to sustain a large population and have the same scale of destruction. Hence people take most of it for granted (like the Great Barrier Reef) and there's not enough protection. It's not a coincidence the Green movement started on a small island, Tasmania, where you could see the destruction and oppose it.

[north-north-west]

In Australia, it's slightly different : not enough people, not enough water to sustain a large population and have the same scale of destruction. Hence people take most of it for granted (like the Great Barrier Reef) and there's not enough protection. It's not a coincidence the Green movement started on a small island, Tasmania, where you could see the destruction and oppose it.

It helped down here that a number of genuinely iconic places (Pedder, the Franklin) were targets of the 'develop at all costs' mentality. Although you might be surprised at what people tried to do at other times and places in Aust. By 1930 there was a concerted move by a reasonably sized bloc of scientists and others to have all land over a certain altitude within the country preserved against exploitation. Not sure exactly what their demarcation was - maybe 1200 metres or something like that. It would have included all the alpine and sub-alpine areas, plus a considerable buffer zone of associated forests. Pity they didn't succeed.

[Giddy_up]

In Australia, it's slightly different : not enough people, not enough water to sustain a large population and have the same scale of destruction. Hence people take most of it for granted (like the Great Barrier Reef) and there's not enough protection. It's not a coincidence the Green movement started on a small island, Tasmania, where you could see the destruction and oppose it.

It helped down here that a number of genuinely iconic places (Pedder, the Franklin) were targets of the 'develop at all costs' mentality. Although you might be surprised at what people tried to do at other times and places in Aust. By 1930 there was a concerted move by a reasonably sized bloc of scientists and others to have all land over a certain altitude within the country preserved against exploitation. Not sure exactly what their demarcation was - maybe 1200 metres or something like that. It would have included all the alpine and sub-alpine areas, plus a considerable buffer zone of associated forests. Pity they didn't succeed.

I wonder what their stumbling block was way back then NNW, be interesting to know if the same lobby groups and arguments where used back then.


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[north-north-west]

I know the forestry and grazing groups were very much against the movement. Of course, those groups had more money and more political power ('twas ever thus and ever will be) so they won out. Wasn't until the 1960s that they started kicking the cattle out of KNP, and the situation has only very recently been resolved in Victoria.

[Hallu]

The cattle situation is quite paradoxical in France. Cows, goats and sheep help keep what we call "Alpages", or high altitude meadows. They're full of flowers, some of them rare. And with no livestock, the forest would reclaim its grasp on the landscape, removing the flowers... So even the Greens want to keep the farmers in the national parks as it is for that reason. I disagree with them and think at least National Parks should be sacred, but it's not the way it's being done here.

[north-north-west]

Very different ecosystems, despite some similarites. The big thing here is that every single ecosystem in this country evolved without hard-hoofed animals. You chuck animals the size and weight of your average beef cattle into that and you're causing major problems, quite aside from the impact they have on the spread of weeds and parasites.

The whole pro-grazing lobby here runs a highly disingenuous campaign, not to mention highly inaccurate. All their bull (pun intended) about grazing reducing the intensity and frequency of fires is just that - absolute, complete and utter codswallop. Cattle don't eat the things that are the greatest contribution to the fuel load: dry leaves, dropped bark, dead twigs, aromatic shrubs and trees. Their preferred food up there is the inter-tussock herbs, and the alteration in balance of vegetation that grazing causes actually increases the likelihood of fires spreading as it favours the aromatic shrubs which, with their oily leaves, burn far more easily than the grasses and herbs the cattle eat.

The best way to maintain and preserve a lot of our alpine and sub-alpine 'meadows' is to reinstate (as precisely as we can), the indigenous burning regimen which limited the spread of scrub.