The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [264]
Fairfield Osborn Jr.—who was president of the New York Zoological Society and whose 1948 book Our Plundered Planet was an eye-opening critique of humans’ reckless stewardship of Earth’s natural resources—was carefully monitoring the Muries’ advocacy of the Arctic Refuge. Osborn worried because the proposal to withdraw more than 8.9 million acres had no proper name, such as Yellowstone or Mount McKinley. “The Arctic Range” sounded like the entire north pole. Perhaps if the proposal was signed into law by Eisenhower, the land could be called the “Pioneers of Alaska Range,” maybe the “Theodore Roosevelt Refuge,” or the “William O. Douglas Reserve.” The problem with the name Arctic National Wildlife Range, it seemed, was that the acronym, ANWR, sounded like a Saudi oil field. Osborn, however, agreed with Olaus Murie that wilderness hunting be allowed on the Arctic Refuge, or Arctic NWR (whatever name was chosen), and that getting the 500-member TVSA on board was essential.
When Lois Crisler discovered that Olaus Murie (of The Wilderness Society) and Fairfield Osborn Jr. (of the New York Zoological Society) were promoting hunting—hunting of her beloved wolves!—in the proposed Arctic NWR, she felt betrayed. She wrote a searing letter to Murie denouncing the “hunting syndrome” as a manifestation of males’ cruelty to animals that shouldn’t be perpetuated in the modern era. Crisler was most disturbed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s predator control program as it affected wolves; it involved carnage unacceptable in the postmodern world. Crisler reminded Murie that he himself had written an article in Audubon magazine calling for a “wholesome impulse of generosity toward our fellow creature.” Using recent ecological studies to make her point, Crisler described hunting as “neurotic behavior,” which was “no longer rooted in the demands of reality.”12 Like Zahniser, she wasn’t impressed with the concept of “hunting magic” as an argument for killing wolves; in fact, the Alaskans she encountered in the Brooks Range when she was writing Arctic Wild were cold-blooded killers.
Because Olaus Murie had defended the Crislers’ and Disney’s Winter Wonderland from accusations of nature faking, Lois’s rebuke stung. Murie, who had devoted much of his life to helping Alaskan wildlife prosper, was now being painted by the Crislers and by Rachel Carson as having sold out to the hunting lobby. Frustrated, Murie wrote to Osborn, who had remained above the fray as a mediator in the dispute, that—unequivocally—environmentalists “should not bring into this wilderness project the controversial wolf question.”13 Killing Canis lupus was a traditional Alaskan ritual that would be stopped only by endangered species laws. By contrast, Alaskans who loved the land wanted the caribou herds to be permanently protected: the caribou were an embodiment of wild Alaska itself. Both Olaus and Mardy wanted to promote the Arctic NWR with Robert Service’s poetry, memorized in grade schools from Ketchikan to Nome—not scold Alaskans for believing that wolves were menacing predators.
Olaus Murie, whose views used to be in the avant-garde of wildlife biology, was now being denigrated as passé. Crisler and Carson represented the new, uncompromising voice of the environmental movement of the late 1950s. No longer were activists interested in making trade-offs with hunters about slaughtering animals for sport. The Crisler-Carson forces considered the Boone and Crockett Club,