The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [0]
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SAVING ALASKA’S WILDERNESS KINGDOM, 1879–1960
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DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
To
SAM HAMILTON
Visionary at U.S. Fish and Wildlife . . . stout friend of Alaska’s Arctic Refuge . . . and a true believer in the Quiet World.
&
STONE WEEKS
My twenty-three-year-old assistant at Rice University . . . killed in a trucking accident in Virginia on July 23, 2009. . . . He was an angel of pure future . . . with an intense love of wild Alaska.
&
EDWARD A. BRINKLEY
My father . . . who served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant with the 196th Regimental Combat Team during the Korean War from 1950 to 1952, based out of Fort Richardson, Alaska. . . . For telling me many great army stories about encountering grizzlies on his Alaska Range ski patrols from Haines to Fairbanks.
And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.
—Jeremiah 1:6
When roads supplant trails, the precious, unique values of God’s wilderness disappear.
—William O. Douglas, My Wilderness: The Pacific West (1960)
Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost. . . . Mystery whispered in the grass, playing in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies. . . . I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formally at work among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain. . . . I can remember old fellows in my hometown speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet.
—Sherwood Anderson, letter to Waldo Frank (November 1917)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue: John Muir and the Gospel of Glaciers
Chapter One - Odyssey of the Snowy Owl
Chapter Two - Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Doctrine
Chapter Three - The Pinchot-Ballinger Feud
Chapter Four - Bull Moose Crusade
Chapter Five - Charles Sheldon’s Fierce Fight
Chapter Six - Our Vanishing Wildlife
Chapter Seven - The Lake Clark Pact
Photographic Insert 1
Photographic Insert 2
Chapter Eight - Resurrection Bay of Rockwell Kent
Chapter Nine - The New Wilderness Generation
Chapter Ten - Warren G. Harding: Backlash
Chapter Eleven - Bob Marshall and the Gates of the Arctic
Chapter Twelve - Those Amazing Muries
Chapter Thirteen - Will the Wolf Survive?
Chapter Fourteen - William O. Douglas and New Deal Conservation
Chapter Fifteen - Ansel Adams, Wonder Lake, and the Lady Bush Pilots
Chapter Sixteen - Pribilof Seals, Walt Disney, and the Arctic Wolves of Lois Crisler
Chapter Seventeen - The Arctic Range and Aldo Leopold
Chapter Eighteen - The Sheenjek Expedition of 1956
Chapter Nineteen - Dharma Wilderness
Chapter Twenty - Of Hoboes, Barefooters, and the Open Road
Chapter Twenty-One - Sea Otter Jones and Musk-Ox Matthiessen
Chapter Twenty-Two - Rachel Carson’s Alarm
Chapter Twenty-Three - Selling the Arctic Refuge
Epilogue: Arctic Forever
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Douglas Brinkley
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue: John Muir and the Gospel of Glaciers
Glaciers move in tides. So do mountains. So do all things.
—JOHN MUIR
I
How sad John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would be to learn that in the first decades of the twenty-first century many of the great glaciers of Alaska were melting away at an astonishing rate. Like the Creator himself, glaciers were architects of Earth, sculpturing vast ridges, changing bays, digging out troughs, making concavities in bedrock, and creating fast-flowing rivers.1 Global warming—the alarming increase of the Earth’s near-surface air temperature exacerbated by carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles and by the burning