The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [183]
Roosevelt’s concern for Alaskan wildlife—particularly marine species—was sincere. On April 18, 1939, the president had more than doubled the size of Glacier Bay National Monument, a tribute to John Muir. Professor William Skinner Cooper, one of the nation’s most eminent ecologists, was teaching at the University of Minnesota when he heard this news. Marine areas teeming with Dungeness, king, and Tanner crabs were finally made off-limits to fishermen. Whole subtidal benthic communities, along with schools of Pacific halibut, rockfish, lingcod, Pacific cod, sablefish, and pollock now had protected Alaskan nurseries (although a limited amount of fishing was allowed until the 1970s).38 Muir’s glaciers may have been receding, but federal protection was intensifying.
For Cooper, the doubling of Glacier Bay National Monument meant that the complexes of plant life thriving around the terminal of receding glaciers could be properly analyzed by biologists. Because Glacier Bay had more than 220 bird species—half of all American birds—the National Audubon Society considered Executive Proclamation 2330 Roosevelt’s grandest conservation effort yet. For the Sierra Club, it was the fulfillment of John Muir’s vision. The Alaskan communities of Haines and Gustavus now prospered as gateways to glaciers and wildlife. (People in Haines started boasting that their town—the Chilkat Indian community Muir wrote about in Travels to Alaska—was founded by the great naturalist.) All of Glacier Bay’s geographic provinces would remain protected, owing to Muir’s early advocacy and Cooper’s dogged lobbying.39 (But there was no guarantee that the glaciers wouldn’t melt.)
During the 1930s, while pushing for the Lake Clark region to become a national park or wilderness reserve, Frederick Vreeland, through the Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA), promoted the idea of allowing Native Alaskans exclusive reindeer breeding rights. Even since the missionary Sheldon Jackson imported a herd from Siberia to Amaknak Island, domesticated reindeer had been raised in Alaska to pull sleds and serve as a high-protein food source. By the 1930s they were a big business for Alaska (there were an estimated 640,000 reindeer in the territory). Vreeland hoped that if Alaskan Natives ate reindeer, as ranchers ate cattle in the Lower Forty-Eight, then the big game wouldn’t be shot out. On September 1, 1937, Congress, with the approval of the CFCA, passed the Reindeer Act. Not only were Natives given exclusive reindeer breeding rights, but in the future they would earn concession rights. The interbreeding of caribou (wild) and reindeer (domestic) sometimes caused disease, but Vreeland had succeeded in protecting the Lake Clark caribou from overhunting.40
One New Deal conservation program that significantly affected Alaska was the Duck Stamp Act (its official title was the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934). Ding Darling was a Republican, but his commitment to the biological conservation movement was not inhibited by his party affiliation. A Bull Moose at heart, Darling was brought into FDR’s administration to serve on the President’s Committee for Wild Life Restoration (along with Thomas Beck and Aldo Leopold). By 1935, Darling, a cartoonist who had won two Pulitzer Prizes, took over as head of the Biological Survey. Although he served for only eighteen months in this post, Darling was deemed the best friend that Alaskan ducks ever had.
With the Great Depression persisting, and with no signs of recovery on the horizon, Darling had to find creative ways to promote the protection of migratory birds. Putting aside his usual satirical wit, he designed an elegant blue-and-white duck stamp.41 Anybody age sixteen or older who wanted to legally hunt a duck was required to purchase a stamp. The stamps raised a lot of money, and just in the nick of time. In 1934, migratory waterfowl had reached a low of about 27 million.