The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [151]
When Marshall visited California’s Sierra Nevada on a listening tour in 1937, he was appalled by what he saw: campgrounds filled with too many people and too much garbage. Many of the gorgeous places where John Muir had tramped were damaged by roads, commercialization, and pack stock. Brainstorming with the Sierra Club’s president, Joel Hildebrand, Marshall wondered whether certain parts of California couldn’t be preserved in “super-wilderness condition,”61 particularly the area around Kings Canyon.
Saving Arctic landscapes as wilderness became Marshall’s crusade in the late 1930s. The worth of Arctic Alaska, Marshall argued, was that “the emotional value of the frontier” could be preserved. In the Arctic, where rivers were made of ice, an explorer could have a mystical union with the creator. The Beaufort Sea coastal plain was still unknown to wildlife biologists. In the late evening Marshall, like another Clausewitz, plotted strategy for the wilderness. After flirting with various preservationist schemes for Alaska, he decided that even the unexciting fields of tufted cotton grass on the Brooks Range (“rock desert,” a topography inhospitable to plants or birds) should be off-limits to development. Although not a bird-watcher, he described the golden plovers (Pluvialis dominica)—mottled black and white with a rich golden tinge on the back—that flew annually from Wiseman all the way to Patagonia. Having earned three academic degrees (including the PhD in forestry at Johns Hopkins), he hoped people might listen to his persuasive argument about leaving the Arctic wilderness alone. Still, Marshall had few illusions that launching a political movement to create an Arctic refuge would be easy, and he wasn’t quixotic or overly romantic. Success, he knew, would come one bureaucratic step at a time. Independently wealthy since his father’s death, Marshall underwrote a new map, approved by the U.S. government, of more than forty wild roadless areas, surveying those forlorn areas himself. Because of his relentless, focused energy, Marshall had faith that he was making an impact from the fringe of the Roosevelt administration.
Marshall went back to Alaska in 1938 to map and explore the upper Koyukuk region anew, in part to settle a bet regarding the source of the Clean River.62 He carefully studied the calcium-rich soil of the tundra and also wanted to prove his theory about the effects of glaciation on the timberline. Spruce seeds he had planted eight or nine years earlier didn’t sprout. The climate was too harsh. “My experiment,” he wrote, “was a complete, dismal failure on both plots.”63 Stopping for lunch one afternoon at the side of a minor stream, Marshall marveled because nothing seemed to grow along its banks. Resorting to his habit of naming geographical landmarks off-the-cuff, he called it Barrenland Creek. He watched the aurora bolt like lightning across the sky, and this reenergized his campaign to save the Arctic refuge as wilderness. Somehow rivers like the Innoko (500 miles), Nowitna (250 miles), and Tanana (659 miles) had to escape the fate of becoming part of Harding’s petroleum reserve. He would devote his considerable energy in Washington, D.C., to making the Arctic refuge happen. It was a life mission.
After visiting the Brooks Range again in 1939, Marshall consolidated all his ideas about the wilderness into an airtight proposal, which he brilliantly presented to a congressional committee. Convinced that saving wilderness was as American as Lewis and Clark, Marshall used terms like “pioneer conditions” and “the emotional values of the frontier.” Boldly Marshall proposed all Alaskan lands north of the Yukon River be kept free of roads, pipelines, electrical wires, smokestack industry, and even farming. America was being given a rare second chance to establish something of permanent value: an American frontier. “Alaska is unique among all recreational