Note that Sam's opinion piece begins with a misdirection: "Few places in the world maintain a stronger connection to hunting, gathering and eating well from the land than Alaska."  Based, the anthropologist in me asks, on what world-wide sample of "places"?

Mr. Cotten?  Paying attention?  How about Canada, or other Arctic countries, or Polynesia or Micronesia, both with strong subsistence fishing cultures, or the interior of Brazil, or other parts of South America, or, well, sections of Africa, or India, or Indonesia?--in aggregate, millions and millions of folks engaged in subsistence economies of some sort.  Alaska's uniqueness is not because of subsistence but because of the conjunction of culture, policy (state and fed), and economics.  Few places in the world?  Not really.

One sentence, and already Mr Cotten lost my trust.  Each of the subsequent sentences in his piece are similarly wrong-headed.  Ah well, it is an opinion piece, after all, not one of empirical accuracy.