The Two-Million-Dollar Barge

I grew up in Yakutat, Alaska, on the Situk River. My mother is Tlingit and Haida; she has seven brothers and a sister, and I am an enrolled member of the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe, of the Lukaaẋ.ádi clan. My father is Scottish and Viking. From the year I was born until I was twenty-one, I fished every summer with both sides of my family — purse seining and king-crab fishing on the ocean with my father’s people, and salmon on the rivers with my mother’s. The Pacific raised me. The salmon, in particular, taught me how to think.

In my Tlingit language there is no word for “trash.” There is no away. Everything that comes into the village leaves the village again as something useful, or it does not come in. You harvest what you need, you use what you take, and you keep your environment clean — not because it is virtuous, but because there is no other sensible way to live in a watershed you intend to inhabit for ten thousand more years. My elders did not call this sustainability. They called it being a person.

And yet, every summer of my childhood, a barge came into Yakutat harbor carrying diesel. The number I grew up hearing was roughly two million dollars a year — for one small Alaska Native village to keep its generators running, its boats fueled, its houses heated. That figure was not unusual. It was the price of being a remote community on the wrong side of a centralized energy grid. King crab on the boats, king salmon in the smokehouse, and two million dollars a year flowing out of our community into the accounts of a small number of foreign suppliers who would never see our river. We had abundance you could weigh in pounds, and we were paying tribute.

I did not have the words for it as a child. I had the feeling. The feeling was that something in the architecture was wrong — that a people surrounded by salmon, crab, water, wind, and tide should not be hostage to a fuel barge. That feeling is the seed of this paper.

Three Teachers

As I grew up, three teachers gave me the language for what I had already seen.

The Salmon

The first was the salmon itself. I would stand on the bank of the Situk and watch chinook move upstream against current that should, by any reasonable accounting, exhaust them. They did not seem exhausted. They seemed to be using the current — riding eddies, slipping into the pressure shadows behind boulders, traveling on the river’s own structure. Later I would learn that Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian forester, had spent his life studying exactly this: the way water organizes itself in vortices, and the way living systems work with flow rather than against it. Schauberger called it implosion — energy generated by inward, centripetal, spiraling motion, as opposed to the outward, centrifugal, explosive motion that defines almost all of our industrial machinery. The salmon was Schauberger’s textbook, written ten thousand years before he picked up a pen.

Buckminster Fuller

The second was Buckminster Fuller, encountered in books. Fuller gave me the line that has organized my work ever since: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Fuller’s geodesics, his Spaceship Earth metaphor, and his insistence that scarcity is a problem of design rather than a feature of reality — all of it confirmed what my elders had taught me by example: a watershed, properly inhabited, is an abundance system. Scarcity is a downstream consequence of designs that ignore the watershed.

Hartford Van Dyke

The third was Hartford Van Dyke, my mentor in commercial law, international law, local currencies, and systems theory. Hartford taught me to read the world as a system. From him I learned that money is a protocol, debt is a circuit element, and sovereignty is something that can be designed — that the legal and economic plumbing most of us treat as a fixed feature of reality is, in fact, a set of human conventions that can be engineered, swapped, or rebuilt at the community level. Hartford was a controversial figure, and I do not lean on his specific legal conclusions here. What I owe him is the habit of seeing every law, every contract, every currency, and every fuel-barge invoice as a signal flowing through a circuit — and the conviction that circuits can be redesigned. The mathematical heart of this paper is, in many ways, the formalization of his lessons.