Alaska (USA)
A sample page from the book
| Population: | 640,000 (2001) |
| Capital: | Juneau |
| Population of Capital: | 30,684 |
| Declared: | 49th state in 1959 |
| Size: | 365,500,000 acres |
| Country closest in size: | Mongolia: 386,925,500 acres |
| Houses: | 221,600 |
| Owned: | 138,509 |
| Rented/leased: | 83,091 |
Background
Bought from Russia by US Government in 1867 for 2 cents per acre ($7.3 million). The US military are a major landowner, with around 2 million acres, and are responsible for about 18,000 jobs in Alaska. The main industry is oil, which produces state revenues of over $2 billion pa, from about 15.7 million acres leased to American and British oil compaines. The US Government estimates that there are 15 million acres of agricultural land in Alaska, of which under 1 million acres are currently cultivated. There are five main groups of native people in Alaska, which takes its name from the Aleut word for ‘great land’: Alyeska. Many of the native peoples have Russian surnames from the period of Russian colonisation (c. 1690-1867). The main groups of native people are: the North coast indians, the Inupiaqs, the Yupiks, the Aleuts and the Athabascan Indians.
| State of Alaska land | 90,600,000 |
| Federal land in Alsaka | |
| Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public lands | 86,000,000 |
| Departments of Defence and other federal land | 2,000,000 |
| National US Forest System | 22,000,000 |
| National Park System | 54,000,000 |
| National Wildlife Refuge System | 70,700,000 |
| Private land in Alaska | |
| Native corporations | 37,500,000 |
| Other private land | 2,700,000 |
| Fish and Wildlife Service | 18,676,320 |
| Forest Service | 5,754,000 |
| National Park Service | 33,492,269 |
The main oil companies with the 15 million acres of leases are: Chevron, BP Exploration, Exxonmobil, Marathon, Phillips, Shell, totalFina and Unocal.
Farms in Alaska
There are 548 farms in Alaska, standing on 881,045 acres of land. of these farms, 332 are wholly owned, 138 partly owned and 80 are tenanted. There are 2 farms of between 1,000 and 2,00 acres and one farm of over 2,000 acres in the state.
The farmers of Alaska were entitled to about $12.3 million in direct federal farm subsidies in 2004.
Forestry
The overall breakdown of the forestry industry is 51% federal, 25% state and local university, 24% native corporations and .04% other private interests. The website http://www.privateforestry.com/ gives the following detailed breakdown:
Total forest land in Alaska is 129 million acres, of which the state owns 22 million acres, the federal goverment owns 77 millions acres, ond ‘other’ is 26.7 million acres. There are a total of 224 private landowners and 14 corporations noted operating in Alsaka.
Private landowners
The largest private landowner in alaska is Doyon Ltd, a company the emerged from the Alaskan Native People’s Settlement Act (ANPSA) of 1971. That act transferred 43 million acres and $952 million to various native settlements and communities. The largest individual transfer, of 12.5 million acres, was to Doyon, making it the largest private landowner in the state and also one of the largest landowners of the USA. Doyon, at time of writing, is chaired by Mike Irwin. The next largest landowner, another child of the ANPSA, the Calista corporation, with 6.5 million acres. A smllaer corporation, Chugach, with 631,000 acres, is likely to be aa major beneficiary of the final settlement from the Exxon Valdez oil-tanker spill, which affected many of the corporation’s members. The Aleut Corporation, which has 1.57 million acres, is chaired by Elary Gromoff at the time of writing.