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By Root 3092 0

three Muries (along with Aldo Leopold and Marshall) became very active in The Wilderness Society when it was created in 1935. With a unified voice, they were determined to save Arctic Alaska for perpetuity by writing books and holding chautauquas. They had earned the right to preserve the unfathomable Arctic by loving it more than anybody else. When they spoke about Arctic sea ice being continually converted into fresh ice, they were believed because of their doctoral and master’s degrees. When Marshall suddenly died, while only in his thirties, Olaus and Mardy stepped in to fill the void. What Mardy had learned best from Marshall was to attack conservation issues with a “pixie sense of humor.” The fight to save natural resources in Arctic Alaska would be a long, hard struggle. But they were on the side of the angels. As Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, later wrote, “the idea of wilderness needs no defense, only more defenders.”34 Important landscapes throughout America that were unprotected—such as Arizona’s Tumacacori Highlands, California’s Eastern Sierra, Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains, Oregon’s Mount Hood, Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Forest, and Washington’s Wild Sky—had grassroots defenders, locals ready to stand in front of a timber truck or fight in courts for injunctions. In Arctic Alaska the Muries had replaced Bob Marshall as the frontline defense for the Brooks Range on both the local and the national level.

Unbeknownst to the Muries, there was a U.S. Supreme Court justice—William O. Douglas, a legal prodigy from Yakima, Washington, just turning forty—who was ready and eager to push the agenda of The Wilderness Society forward in very dramatic ways. Even when the Supreme Court was in session, he would often wear western-style shirts and pants. History would soon know Douglas as “nature’s justice” for his relentless conservationist efforts to protect America’s wild places. “I hiked, rode horseback, and took canoe trips through all parts of the United States and often related my experiences in public,” Douglas wrote. “I became increasingly alarmed at the pollution of our rivers, at the darkening skies due to smog, at the silting of rivers due to overgrazing and reckless logging practices. I saw beaches despoiled by industry and Lake Erie turning into a cesspool. I saw highways destroying wilderness areas. I was shocked at the manner in which ‘development’ programs were ruining the wilderness recreational potential of the nation.”35

Almost miraculously, the Muries cast off their grief over Marshall’s death because Douglas was there to step into a new leadership role. A public intellectual, Douglas was always astutely political when it came to protecting wild America. Nobody before or after him championed the freedom to roam—the general public’s right of access to wilderness—more enthusiastically than Douglas. “Commercial interests unrestrained by biologists, botanists, ornithologists, artists and others, who see the spiritual values in the outdoors,” he wrote, “can in time convert every area of America into a money-making scheme.”36

The inherent difficulty of mining or drilling in Arctic Alaska became powerfully clear to Americans on August 15, 1935, when the beloved humorist Will Rogers and his friend Wiley Post, a renowned aviator, crashed near Point Barrow. Rogers had named the little Lockheed Orion plane Aurora Borealis to honor the northern lights. After hunting and fishing near Fairbanks, they had decided to see the Arctic, which was just becoming popular in sportsmen’s periodicals. Their aircraft crashed into the water, and their widely reported deaths were a warning to other enthusiasts that the North Slope airspace was as unpredictable as the roughest seas and that nature was still decidedly in charge. “When Will Rogers died with Wiley Post in 1935 in an airplane crash in Alaska, an important influence went out of American life,” Douglas wrote in his memoir Go East, Young Man. “Apart from FDR, there have been no presidents in this century who could make America laugh. We need laughter for good health.