Rich Seifert spoke at Kodiak College Friday night with an idea that many Alaskans may consider radical: The state should use Alaska Permanent Fund money to “provide a marvelous opportunity to finance Alaska as a sustainable example for the world.”

Seifert was the keynote speaker for a community sustainability discussion sponsored by Sustainable Kodiak. A resident of Fairbanks and the Interior for nearly 40 years, Seifert works as the housing and energy specialist for the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service. At UAF he’s known as the “energy guy” and is passionate about teaching homeowners how to build energy-efficient homes.

One of Seifert’s main points is a possible reorganization of the permanent fund — “an insight I think we need to plant the seeds for,” he said.

He said reorganization is necessary because of Alaska’s problem of reliance on oil production, which mostly is extracted from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. He said oil production peaked there in 1988 — more than 20 years ago.

“By 2015, depending on what happens, we may be in a situation where there isn’t enough oil to keep the pipeline full,” Seifert said.

He said the North Slope’s oil, estimated to be 190 to 200 million years old, might be gone only within two generations’ time.

“The life you are living is in an enormously unique time in history,” Seifert said. “That oil’s been there for about a 190 million years, and we’re going to take it all out and sell it to the world in 50 years … it’s going to be gone. That means, to me, we better be very careful how we use that permanent fund.”

Seifert said he felt “the key here is there is going to become a point where oil is not going to be the productive, major contributor to our Alaska state budget. We’re going to be dependent on something else and we’re going to have to become sustainably dependent on it. This may be the permanent fund.”

Newer generations have a distorted view of the permanent fund, Seifert said, reiterating that a restructuring of that money could be greatly beneficial for Alaska.

“That would be the greatest possible victory that we could get out of the oil, that if we at least used it to make our own Alaska sustainable … we can make that a political mandate in this state, make people aware that’s really the original intent of it, anyway.”

Seifert, who last gave a presentation in Kodiak in February of 2008, said he admired Kodiak’s sustainability movement.

“Kodiak and Homer both have two of the most active and aware sustainability movements,” he said.

Seifert presented “10 myths” about sustainability. One myth was that “nobody really knows what it means.”

“(Sustainability) is really a pretty simple idea: Don’t take more than your share; recognize greed for what it is; live off income resources from the natural world; don’t do anything that’s not sustainable,” Seifert said. “The real question — the real fist in the face — is if you’re not sustainable, what are you? That’s the real fundamental rhetorical question.”

He later clarified: “Really, the problem of a sustainable community is that nobody really knows what it looks like because they’re aren’t any in any real sense. There may be some really Amazonian or Native culture, ones that have very little connection with the really connected, global economy, which is really not sustainable. So the idea of sustainability is a huge educational process.”

Seifert said another myth is that sustainability is “all about recycling.”

“That’s (only) a very small part … there is no conception in the natural world of waste. Nothing in the natural world can really be categorized as waste. There’s nothing that’s awful that has to be disposed of in some way.”

Another debunked myth is that “sustainability is too expensive.”

“Well, what’s the alternative? If it’s too expensive to live sustainably, you’re not going to live,” Seifert said. “This is a pretty bizarre perception that somehow we can’t afford to do this. In fact, we can’t afford not to.”

Seifert said he did not believe sustainability had to use a grassroots or activist approach. Government could help, he said, pointing to examples in Kodiak and Haines.

“We have a tendency that you know government is ‘evil.’ Lots of politics keeps professing that government is evil,” he said. “But if you keep government outside of sustainability, you can get it’s going to be ‘evil.’ That’s going to (ruin) everything you do because we have to change the paradigm under which we work.”

He said he was happy to see the state Legislature recently approve $300 million toward energy conservation and retrofitting. Some of that money has gone toward education and rebates for energy-efficient approved homes.

“It really precipitated an awareness that we have a first step toward building sustainable communities, which is fixing our houses to prepares ourselves for sustainable lives,” Seifert said. “It means less oil dependence, all those things that are going to be risk factors for living economic life in the future.”

He also referenced an interesting statistic on “ethical eating” habits with Alaska fisheries. Seifert said the 2008 Alaska salmon harvest was 354,000 tons. If that harvest were divided among Alaska’s population, it would mean 1,100 pounds of salmon for each Alaskan, each year.

“You could feed the entire protein needs of the entire population of Alaska, today, with 17 percent of the salmon harvest,” Seifert said. “What it means is you could feed Alaska and still have 83 percent of it for international trade, and that’s only salmon. It’s only a calculation, but it’s a very interesting and telling calculation.”

Among the transition steps for sustainability for communities Seifert said were: “finding the gaps” in a community and designing in case of their demise (such as a reliance on air transportation); creating visible, meaningful efforts toward sustainability; building a bridge with local government; honoring elders; letting “a movement go where it wants”; and creating an “an energy plan in full cognizance of peak oil and (the) decline of energy availability.”

Seifert’s biggest piece of advice was for a community to create a renewably powered electrical system. He said he thought Kodiak was a good example, with the recently added wind turbines on Pillar Mountain and the Terror Lake hydroelectric plant.

“We want to create a survivable, sustainable future for humans and other species,” he said.

Mirror writer Bradley Zint can be reached via e-mail at bzint@kodiakdailymirror.com.