Long before Carson and Crisler, women had been important in the U.S. conservation movement. There was the indomitable Isabella Bird, whose explorations of the Rocky Mountains in 1873 had a distinctly feminist goal: “simply to experience the place the same as any male nature lover.”18 Her memoir A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, based on the letters she sent from Colorado to her sister, remains a classic evocation of the Rockies’ wilderness as a “place of freedom from civilization.”19 Even more significantly, Mary Hunter Austin came onto the literary scene in 1903, writing Land of Little Rain, an elegiac memoir promoting conservation of the American Southwest. Every page had the feel of hand-polished turquoise. Death Valley and the Mojave Desert were, finally, not dismissed as wastelands but celebrated as bountiful ecosystems. Bird and Austin are taught in courses in environmental history, but other activists haven’t been given their due. Whether it was saving the Palisades along the Hudson River or the ancient ruins at Mesa Verde or stopping saw gangs from clear-cutting California’s sequoias, women’s organizations were often in the front ranks of the preservation movement. Pick your state and you’ll find heroines. In Minnesota there was Lydia Phillips Williams, who protected the Chippewa National Forest from becoming board feet. In Calaveras County, California, Harriet West Jackson prevented timber barons from devastating Calaveras Groves. By 1915, more than 50 percent of the members of the National Audubon Society were women. By the late 1920s, when Herbert Hoover was in the White House, the same was true of the National Parks Association.20
The novelist Edna Ferber, author of So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant, also entered the “wild Alaska” movement in the 1950s. To gather material for her 1957 novel, Ice Palace, Ferber made five trips to Alaska. There is a wonderful photograph of Ferber bundled up in winter clothes, hood covering her ears, hands deep in coat pockets, taken in the Arctic village of Kotzebue. Ferber thought Alaska was pure magic. A love letter to Alaska, Ice Palace was sometimes called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the movement for statehood. With an unerring eye for detail, Ferber wrote about parkas, salmon fisheries, and mining-camp prostitutes; her portrait of Alaska as it was transformed from a territory to a state remains timeless. “Alaska,” she said, “is two times the size of that little bitty Texas they’re always yawping about.”21
In Arctic Alaska, Rachel Carson, Lois Crisler, and Mardy Murie were at the forefront of the conservation movement. They were in 1960 what Roosevelt, Muir, and Burroughs had been in the first decade of the twentieth century. Carson’s Edge of the Sea offered essential scientific arguments for protecting Alaska’s unparalleled marine life. Crisler’s Arctic Wild brought wolves and caribou into the category of spectacular North American animals worthy of federal protection. And in 1960 Murie, disseminating her detailed diaries of the Sheenjek River Expedition of 1956 among friends in The Wilderness Society, helped persuade the Eisenhower administration to protect more than 8.9 million acres (increased to more than 19 million acres in 1980) of the Arctic Range. Murie’s film Letters from the Brooks Range shows her washing clothes in Arctic waters, a modern-day embodiment of the pioneer woman.22 All three women were effective conservationist crusaders in 1959, for they placed the ideas of ecology within the broader context of the cold war and frowned on nuclear testing in far-flung ecosystems such as the Aleutians.
While schoolchildren were watching Disney’s White Wilderness in biology classes and theaters in 1959, Carson sent a letter to the Washington Post warning that the pesticides had arrived and were destroying birdlife. This letter awoke Americans to the toxic perils in their own backyards. Some of Carson’s biological research had been reinforced by Christine Stevens of the Animal Welfare Institute.23 The National Audubon Society gave further credence to Carson’s brave research, documenting the declining populations of bald eagles as a result of DDT.24 In Alaska, as Matthiessen noted in Wildlife in America, there was a chance to save the last great wilderness. “To many of us this sudden silencing of the song of birds,” Carson wrote, “this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest of birdlife, is sufficient cause for sharp regret.”25 To Mardy Murie, the combination of Project Chariot and DDT was too much to bear. With Alaska’s statehood looming, a quid pro quo to save the Arctic Range had to be worked out quickly. The “save the Arctic” movement needed to quickly gather a head of steam.
Chapter Twenty-Three - Selling the Arctic Refuge
I
Whether travelers approached Arctic Alaska by plane, boat, or dogsled, a hush fell over most of them. They seemed to be entering God’s no-trespassing zone. For much of the year, the Arctic was frozen off from outsiders, though the Gwich’in and Inupiat traveled the North Slope year-round. Visitors lucky enough to come in the summer months, particularly those trained to understand the flora and fauna seen on a day’s hike, were likely to return to civilization as prophets of the wilderness, reverent disciples of the quiet world. Arctic Alaska was God’s own altar on Earth, an undatable place so obviously hallowed that no human footprint should ever be too deeply imprinted in the frozen tundra or sea ice. In the delicate northeastern corner of Arctic Alaska that the Muries were trying to save, horrible ruts produced by U.S. Navy vehicles retained their depth for decades, slashing the permafrost as boldly as if they were freshly made. From above—from a bird’s-eye view—a traveler could see ancient caribou trails etched into the tundra. Those witnessing the actual migration were often overcome with a stabbing wave of exaltation. Other game trails followed stream corridors and hoof-beaten switchback paths up limestone hillsides. The question that American environmentalists of the mid-1950s were asking was: could the industrial order leave much of a treasured landscape free from development? Or, as Mardy Murie asked, “Will our society be wise enough to keep some of ‘The Great Country’ empty of technology and full of life?”1
Ever since the Sheenjek Expedition of 1956, Olaus and Mardy Murie had lobbied for an inviolate 8.9 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from sixty miles east of Prudhoe Bay all the way to the Canadian border.* The proposed site was bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean (Beaufort Sea), on the east by Canada, and on the west by the Canning River, and led south to a point beyond the lovely crest of the Brooks Range. When discussing Arctic ecosystems, the Muries often used the word fragile to help laypersons understand the interconnectedness of the far north wilderness. The elimination of one species could cause a chain reaction affecting others. Lemmings and sparrows were as important to the Muries as polar bears. They had also studied twenty-three types of spiders found in the Arctic.2
Bursting with enthusiasm, convinced that Arctic Alaska could be saved, the Muries launched a comprehensive plan to convince Alaskans that the time for preservation was now. This seven-year push for the Arctic Refuge coincided exactly with the movement for Alaska’s statehood, which was under way following a 1955 constitutional convention in Fairbanks.3 To the Muries, the land forming the Arctic Alaska refuge was the most majestic panorama of wilderness in North America. It presented life in consummate ecological harmony. Winning the fight against the proposed dam in Dinosaur National Monument emboldened the Muries to seek another victory in Arctic Alaska.
Bringing dozens of photographs they had taken with Justice Douglas while camping in the Brooks Range along the Sheenjek River, Olaus and Mardy Murie spent more than two weeks in Alaskan cities in the fall of 1956, talking about the Arctic with the Territorial Land Commission and local news organizations. Olaus’s Elk of North America was a classic study of the Jackson Hole elk herd, and many Alaskan outdoorsmen hoped he’d now fight for the preservation of caribou. In Juneau the Muries met with U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers, garden clubs, and Alaskan politicians. Their lobbying culminated when Olaus Murie showed slides of Arctic Alaska to the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association (TVSA) at a stag dinner in Fairbanks. Besides the great caribou herds and Dall sheep groupings, more than 300,000 snow geese (Chen caerulescens) fed on the Arctic tundra in autumn before migrating to their wintering grounds in Calif
ornia. The TVSA bird hunters wanted to be sure that this migration would continue for their children’s children to enjoy. “Afterward several came to me,” Murie wrote to George L. Collins, “and fervently promised their support, and greatly surprised me by giving me an honorary life membership in their organization.”4
Even though Olaus and Mardy Murie were ecologically-minded, they had no serious qualms about genuine hunters. Unlike some “faux hunters” who guzzled beer and then stomped into the autumn woods to kill deer for a trophy, many serious Alaskan hunters (both Native and Euro American) had an almost Paleolithic reverence for animals. These real hunters used their body and senses with a trained acuteness, actually getting into the thought processes of the stalked animals. Where would a grizzly be catching salmon today? What bog would a moose prefer in a cold drizzle? The poet Gary Snyder wrote about this kind of genuine hunter in Earth House Hold: “Hunting magic is designed to bring the game to you—the creature who has heard your song, witnessed your sincerity, and out of compassion comes within your range. Hunting magic is not only aimed at bringing beasts to their death, but to assist in their birth—to promote their fertility.”5
The Muries were convinced that there were members of TVSA who, like the Gwich’in, knew the magic of the animals they killed. Not that the sportsmen’s association didn’t also include “slob hunters” and “gun nuts” among its members. But the Muries were betting that a number of TVSA leaders—whom they knew as friends for decades—would join the Arctic preservation cause because they intuitively understood Rousseau’s theory of the noble savage: the ancient notion that humans still had a lot to learn from the primitive world. Congress had granted TVSA twenty acres of land along the Chena River (an unusual allocation for any sportsmen’s club) for two reasons: to teach Alaskan children how to safely use firearms, and to promote the “fair chase” ethics of Theodore Roosevelt’s wildlife conservation policies.
Almost like a theologian, Olaus Murie spoke to the TVSA about the spirituality of the Brooks Range and the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. The 120,000-head Porcupine caribou herd was his best selling point. Pregnant female caribou came to the coastal plain to give birth in May and June. Since the Pleistocene age, the Muries’ proposed Arctic range was also home to the northernmost population of Dall sheep, whose curled horns TVSA hunters coveted. And Murie had preservationist selling points for anglers. America’s largest and most northerly alpine lakes—Peters and Schrader—were also located in the proposed 8.9 million-acre Arctic Refuge. As Justice Douglas had found out, the braided rivers were rife with grayling in the summer. Most important, northeastern Alaska was the home of the Gwich’in people, who considered themselves one with the caribou herds. Murie made it clear that the proposed Arctic Refuge was, as Rick Bass put it in Caribou Rising, “as wild as when it was first created.”6
Convincing the antigovernment types in the TVSA that withdrawing 8.9 million acres of Arctic tundra for either U.S. Fish and Wildlife or the National Park Service wasn’t easy, even for Olaus Murie. The U.S. Geological Survey had barely mapped Arctic Alaska. Who knew what riches lay under the permafrost? Oil seeps had been spotted between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay along the Beaufort Sea. Ore deposits were considered probable on the tundra. In fact, the Alaskan mineral extraction industries—both local and national—abounded with rumors that zinc, copper, nickel, and platinum were to be found in the Muries’ proposed Arctic Refuge. Naturalists like Olaus and Mardy were opposed to coal mining, oil drilling, and wolf hunting—activities that many TVSA members thought made Alaska great. “He was a mild-mannered fella,” Charles Gray, an unrepentant aerial wolf hunter, recalled of Murie’s attempts in the fall of 1956 to lobby the TVSA. “He was sincere and had facts.”7
A few days after lobbying the TVSA, Murie wrote to Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society explaining his firm conviction that to persuade fiercely antigovernment Alaskan residents to protect the Arctic for recreational and aesthetic reasons took patience: “a lot of psychological progress will have to be made before enough Alaskans favor further federal reserves, that is a phobia in Alaska.” Zahniser, operating from Washington, D.C., frustrated by the five-hour time difference with Fairbanks, didn’t have much patience for the hand-holding style of Olaus Murie. He didn’t believe in Snyder’s “hunting magic.” To Zahniser, who had suffered a heart attack in 1951 and understood the meaning of borrowed time, most Alaskans were shoot-em-up types, uneducated in modern principles of conservation and ecology, reckless stewards of the land whose own front yards resembled town dumps with rusted Chevrolets and broken bottles littering the unmowed lawns. Left to their own devices these north country fools, ready to do anything for a fast dollar, would foul the Arctic. Extolling the virtues of the Alaskan tundra, Zahniser, who had started drafting a wilderness bill, wanted the Arctic Refuge rammed down the territory’s throat while statehood was a pending issue. The time for the federal government to strike, Zahniser believed, was now. “Will the wilderness disappear,” Zahniser, who had never visited Alaska, asked Murie, “while we are waiting to be good psychologists?”8
Such exchanges between Murie and Zahniser were commonplace in the late 1950s. As a member of The Wilderness Society’s governing council, Murie worried that Zahniser’s in-your-face style was alienating congressmen and threatening the society’s tax-exempt status.9 Unlike Zahniser, Olaus and Mardy Murie were beloved in Alaska. Powerful friendships had been built up by the couple over the decades. Even though the Muries’ primary home was Moose, Wyoming—which had grown into a campus of seventeen ranch structures—they were embraced by the Fairbanks community, and Mardy had many childhood friends in town. Olaus had proudly received an honorary membership in the Pioneers of Alaska—the venerable sourdough club. “Some years ago I received in Alaska one of my most valuable treasures,” Olaus Murie wrote, “It was not a gold nugget. It was an honorary membership in the Pioneers of Alaska.”10
Deeply respectful of outback types who made a living in the far north, Olaus and Mardy were friendly toward Alaskan miners, hunters, and homesteaders; and this attitude made environmentalist fund-raisers in the Lower Forty-Eight uneasy. Olaus and Mardy Murie’s consensus-building style with Alaska’s NRA types took up a lot of precious time. But the Muries insisted that the Arctic movement needed Alaskan sportsmen as partners. Furthermore, they also wanted the Gwich’in who lived just outside the proposed Arctic Refuge to become allies. “While we were camped on the Sheenjeck River, a group of Indians came up and camped across the river on a hunting expedition,” Olaus Murie wrote in Living Wilderness. “We had some good visits with them. These represented the first human settlers of Alaska; they fit in with wilderness living, and our system of wilderness areas does not intend to interfere with hunting and trapping by such people.”
Searching for influential allies, Olaus turned to George L. Collins of NPS to explain why Brower’s confrontational activism wouldn’t work in Alaska. “George,” Murie explained to Collins in late 1956, “in this whole project I have adopted a go-easy method. As an old-timer up north said to me once: ‘Easy does it.’ I met with many people, from Fort Yukon to Juneau and I can’t remember a time when I came right out and said: ‘Support this wilderness proposal.’ I told them what our experience was, and I sincerely wanted them to make up their own minds. Without the sincere backing of people who have thought the thing through, I feel we can get nowhere.”11
Fairfield Osborn Jr.—who was president of the New York Zoological Society and whose 1948 book Our Plundered Planet was an eye-opening critique of humans’ reckless stewardship of Earth’s natural resources—was carefully monitoring the Muries’ advocacy of the Arctic Refuge. Osborn worried because the proposal to withdraw more than 8.9 million acres had no proper name, such as Yellowstone or Mount McKinley. “The Arctic Range” sounded like the entire north pole. Perhaps if the proposal was signed into law by Eisenhower, the land could be called the “Pioneers of Alaska Range,” maybe the “Theodore Roosevelt Refuge,” or the “Will
iam O. Douglas Reserve.” The problem with the name Arctic National Wildlife Range, it seemed, was that the acronym, ANWR, sounded like a Saudi oil field. Osborn, however, agreed with Olaus Murie that wilderness hunting be allowed on the Arctic Refuge, or Arctic NWR (whatever name was chosen), and that getting the 500-member TVSA on board was essential.
When Lois Crisler discovered that Olaus Murie (of The Wilderness Society) and Fairfield Osborn Jr. (of the New York Zoological Society) were promoting hunting—hunting of her beloved wolves!—in the proposed Arctic NWR, she felt betrayed. She wrote a searing letter to Murie denouncing the “hunting syndrome” as a manifestation of males’ cruelty to animals that shouldn’t be perpetuated in the modern era. Crisler was most disturbed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s predator control program as it affected wolves; it involved carnage unacceptable in the postmodern world. Crisler reminded Murie that he himself had written an article in Audubon magazine calling for a “wholesome impulse of generosity toward our fellow creature.” Using recent ecological studies to make her point, Crisler described hunting as “neurotic behavior,” which was “no longer rooted in the demands of reality.”12 Like Zahniser, she wasn’t impressed with the concept of “hunting magic” as an argument for killing wolves; in fact, the Alaskans she encountered in the Brooks Range when she was writing Arctic Wild were cold-blooded killers.
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 56