The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [260]
Long before Carson and Crisler, women had been important in the U.S. conservation movement. There was the indomitable Isabella Bird, whose explorations of the Rocky Mountains in 1873 had a distinctly feminist goal: “simply to experience the place the same as any male nature lover.”18 Her memoir A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, based on the letters she sent from Colorado to her sister, remains a classic evocation of the Rockies’ wilderness as a “place of freedom from civilization.”19 Even more significantly, Mary Hunter Austin came onto the literary scene in 1903, writing Land of Little Rain, an elegiac memoir promoting conservation of the American Southwest. Every page had the feel of hand-polished turquoise. Death Valley and the Mojave Desert were, finally, not dismissed as wastelands but celebrated as bountiful ecosystems. Bird and Austin are taught in courses in environmental history, but other activists haven’t been given their due. Whether it was saving the Palisades along the Hudson River or the ancient ruins at Mesa Verde or stopping saw gangs from clear-cutting California’s sequoias, women’s organizations were often in the front ranks of the preservation movement. Pick your state and you’ll find heroines. In Minnesota there was Lydia Phillips Williams, who protected the Chippewa National Forest from becoming board feet. In Calaveras County, California, Harriet West Jackson prevented timber barons from devastating Calaveras Groves. By 1915, more than 50 percent of the members of the National Audubon Society were women. By the late 1920s, when Herbert Hoover was in the White House, the same was true of the National Parks Association.20
The novelist Edna Ferber, author of So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant, also entered the “wild Alaska” movement in the 1950s. To gather material for her 1957 novel, Ice Palace, Ferber made five trips to Alaska. There is a wonderful photograph of Ferber bundled up in winter clothes, hood covering her ears, hands deep in coat pockets, taken in the Arctic village of Kotzebue. Ferber thought Alaska was pure magic. A love letter to Alaska, Ice Palace was sometimes called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the movement for statehood. With an unerring eye for detail, Ferber wrote about parkas, salmon fisheries, and mining-camp prostitutes; her portrait of Alaska as it was transformed from a territory to a state remains timeless. “Alaska,” she said, “is two times the size of that little bitty Texas they’re always yawping about.”21
In Arctic Alaska, Rachel Carson, Lois Crisler, and Mardy Murie were at the forefront of the conservation movement. They were in 1960 what Roosevelt, Muir, and Burroughs had been in the first decade of the twentieth century. Carson’s Edge of the Sea offered essential scientific arguments for protecting Alaska’s unparalleled marine life. Crisler’s Arctic Wild brought wolves and caribou into the category of spectacular North American animals worthy of federal protection. And in 1960 Murie, disseminating her detailed diaries of the Sheenjek River Expedition of 1956 among friends in The Wilderness Society, helped persuade the Eisenhower administration to protect more than 8.9 million acres (increased to more than 19 million acres in 1980) of the Arctic Range. Murie’s film Letters from the Brooks Range shows her washing clothes in Arctic waters, a modern-day embodiment of the pioneer woman.22 All three women were effective conservationist crusaders in 1959, for they placed the ideas of ecology within the broader context of the cold war and frowned on nuclear testing in far-flung ecosystems such as the Aleutians.
While schoolchildren were watching Disney’s White Wilderness in biology classes and theaters in 1959, Carson sent a letter to the Washington Post warning that the pesticides had arrived and were destroying