The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [209]
What the Arctic conservationists were proposing was a national park (or wilderness area) four times greater than Yellowstone. Flying over the Yukon Territory, both Collins and Sumner began thinking of a vast international park. As coauthors of a “Progress Report,” Collins and Sumner wrote that the Arctic Refuge had to remain free of “artificial disturbance,” and sportsmen’s activities there would need to be strictly controlled. Theodore Roosevelt had saved the Grand Canyon by means of the Antiquities Act of 1906 for “scientific reasons.” Similarly, the early cold war generation in Alaska, inspired by A Sand County Almanac, wanted a baseline virgin ecosystem to compare and contrast with other Arctic Circle lands damaged by the industrial order. The Sierra Club’s president, Benton MacKaye, wrote in Scientific Monthly that an “Arctic Park” would be a “reservoir of stored experiences in the ways of life before man.”8
If The Wilderness Society liked using the word wilderness, the National Park Service was invested in the notion of primeval lands. It was, at face value, a semantic issue. Wilderness seemed more commonplace than primeval, which harked back to efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to protect ruins such as Mesa Verde in Colorado and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The Oregon Caves had been saved in 1909 as a national monument, with local boosters calling themselves “cavemen.” The Izaak Walton League (the premier anglers club) and the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs both supported an “Arctic Wilderness” because it was based on honoring “primeval values.” Numerous Darwinian scientists and Arctic Eskimo leaders in the early 1950s used the term primeval to explain the evolution of Homo sapiens. “We hurt because we see the land being destroyed,” Trimble Gilbert, an Arctic chief, lamented. “We believe in the wild earth because it’s the religion we’re born with. After 10,000 years our land is still clean and pure. We believe we have something to teach the world about living a simpler life, about sharing, about protecting the land.”9
In November 1952 Collins and Sumner offered the Department of the Interior a twenty-three-page paper, titled “A Proposed Arctic Wilderness International Park” and illustrated with handsome photographs. A version of this report appeared in the Sierra Club Bulletin as “Northeast Alaska: The Last Great Wilderness.” “Unless an adequate portion of it can be preserved in its primitive state,” the report claimed, “the Arctic wilderness will soon disappear.”10 Because no single country owned the north pole, it made sense to the authors to form a collaborative agreement with Canada. After all, polar bears, caribou, and wolves didn’t recognize artificial borders. Ottawa hadn’t yet dealt in earnest with Washington, D.C., about the “one habitat” concept; but President Eisenhower was a hero in Canada for having staged the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-day during World War II. While he was not a conservationist himself, Eisenhower had a vision of working closely with Canada on building the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which would link the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean; and with regard to conservationist proposals, he was known to be cautious and slow, but not automatically opposed. Perhaps the Arctic International Park could be sold to Eisenhower as a bilateral initiative between two members of NATO?
Only half a year later, Collins and Sumner abruptly changed their minds about the international park. The Eisenhower administration was going to be pro-development in Alaska. The Department of the Interior might approve a Gates of the Arctic National Park—with extensive recreational facilities for visitors to the central Brooks Range—but it was unquestionably opposed to Bob Marshall’s concept of wilderness simply for the sake of wilderness. Aging New Dealers were being retired from Interior, and it became clear that