• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3044 0

was giving slide presentations of wolves actually howling all over Alaska. While Matthiessen was studying sandhill cranes that breed in the wetlands of western, northern, and interior Alaska (and also catching up with them near Corpus Christi, Texas), Crisler was having Colorado schoolchildren pat wolves as if these animals were poodles. The field biologist David Mech—author of The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species—later credited the Crislers with giving the wolf a makeover from a rangeland menace to a beguiling trickster with the heart of a dog. Without Arctic Wild and White Wilderness, in which wolves were the dignified heroes, the reintroduction of the species to former ranges such as Yellowstone National Park, Idaho, and New Mexico would have been hugely unlikely.7

While Justice Douglas fumed about Disney’s nature faking, Olaus Murie knew that True-Life Adventures would attract a new, young audience to the cause of wildlife protection. By trying to capture the quirks of animals in his documentaries, Disney aroused sympathy for them. Disney, in fact, told Olaus Murie that he loved to watch squirrels playing games outside his window; they seemed to have “personalities just as distinct and varied as humans.”8 Murie knew that Disney was overly romantic and given to anthropomorphism—Disney saw human qualities in animals—but he was an important ally of conservation, and Murie did not want to be rude to him. “All nature,” Murie once wrote to Disney, “has much in common among its various forms; certain general laws, certain general reactions, and much that can be predicted under many circumstances. But, and I hope this is not too paradoxical, there are many distinct facets that have individuality.”9

With Douglas being the only dissenter, The Wilderness Society rallied behind Disney’s True-Life Adventures filmed in Alaska. In an article in Living Wilderness, Murie marveled at Disney’s unique ability to capture “the simple beauty of untouched woodlands and their wild inhabitants” (although Murie later criticized Disney’s film The Living Desert as overemphasizing “tooth and claw” and as being exploitative).10 And that was the most controlled praise for White Wilderness. Another reviewer for Living Wilderness said that Disney was the best friend conservationists had, “a sun ripening the grain for wilderness advocates to harvest!” The National Audubon Society bestowed on Disney its prestigious Audubon Medal.11

II

There are many wonderful stories about the friendship that developed between Lois Crisler and Rachel Carson following Disney’s release of White Wilderness. Crisler spent time at Silver Spring with Carson, at exactly the time when America’s gifted marine biologist was tormented by the problem of how to make her controversial scientific findings public and was marshaling damning evidence that DDT was poisoning animals and making humans sick. Carson’s correspondence with Crisler between 1956 and 1960 shows her promoting the “wonderful book” Arctic Wild. Together Carson and Crisler formed a sort of iron sisterhood that eventually included Beverly Knecht, Dorothy Algire, Irston Barnes, and a few others. When Carson had radiation treatments for breast cancer, she confided in Crisler her fears and her determination to become a survivor. Furiously, Carson worked on Silent Spring (the title came from a poem by John Keats), struggling with her own ill health, determined to ring an alarm bell about the lethal effects of pesticides, DDT, and other toxic chemicals. Carson and Crisler were planning to hike trails together in the Colorado Rockies once Carson finished Silent Spring. They wanted to brainstorm on how to stop poisoned bait being dropped from planes by U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents all over Arctic Alaska; the agents were trying to exterminate only wolves, but the chemicals were also killing polar bears and grizzlies.12 “I feel really over the hump now—there remain only two new chapters to do, plus of course a lot of final revision,” Carson wrote to Crisler in August 1961 from Maine. “There has been