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By Root 3130 0

Some parts of Arctic Alaska (the Brooks Range, in particular) had experienced at least twenty periods of glaciation during the past 2.5 million years, and here as everywhere, the fittest species survived. In summer, hundreds of thousands of birds hatched on the Arctic tundra. Tens of thousands of caribou congregated, calved, and migrated along the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea, as they had done during the Pleistocene epoch. As Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in his 1911 book The Arctic Prairies: “The Caribou is a travelsome beast, always in a hurry going against the wind. When the wind is west all travel west, when it veers they veer . . . but they are ever on the move.”19

Olaus Murie, struggling against cancer (a melanoma), understood that there is no peace unto the wicked. Today’s wilderness could be a garbage dump a year later. An oil company, for example, would not hesitate to flout any scruple or ignore any communal value, for profit. The forces of light, the ecologically conscious people who were stewards of God’s land, had to make a public stand over Arctic Alaska. When you’re sick, as Murie was, surviving felt pointless unless there was a last act aimed at helping preserve beauty for tomorrow’s children. Murie knew life was transitory. All biologists understood this unalterable Darwinian fact. If the wilderness movement could establish a huge Arctic NWR, with no roads for hundreds of miles in all directions, where the evolutionary processes were left to continue their natural ebb and flow, then the 1950s generation of conservationists would be able to claim that they had stood up to the postwar industrial beast. By saving Arctic Alaska—or at least a swath of the Beaufort Sea coast, the tundra plain, the glacier-capped peaks of the Brooks Range, and the spruce and birch forests of the Yukon basin—Murie could die content.

Throughout 1957–1958 the proposed Arctic NWR was a bureaucratic conundrum, which the Muries wanted solved. Nobody knew for certain whether to push for withdrawal under the Antiquities Act, as Theodore Roosevelt had done with landscapes such as the Grand Canyon and Devils Tower from 1906 to 1909. Roosevelt’s approach tended to infuriate Congress. This mechanism of executive orders had helped the Alaskan wilderness movement establish Katmai National Monument in 1918, Glacier Bay National Monument in 1925, and Kenai Moose Range in 1941. Bypassing Congress had the virtue of avoiding brouhahas and filibusters. Obviously, this approach also had the appeal of quickness.20 But in the long term, working through Congress also had virtues. “The area will be safer for all time if Alaskans themselves are behind it,” Olaus Murie wrote to Osborn about the Arctic campaign. “That’s why I am so concerned over developing this general Alaskan attitude.”21

The Sierra Club entered the effort in March 1957 during the club’s Fifth Biennial Wilderness Conference, held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. George L. Collins of the NPS, serving as chair, spoke eloquently about the Arctic’s seemingly infinite space with his usual fullness and strength: its exultant grandeur, solemnity, forlornness, abundant wildlife, and dancing northern lights. To most of the conservationists in San Francisco, the Brooks Range was the last great wilderness. The conference served as a clearinghouse for all the best proposals for saving the Arctic. Lowell Sumner spoke about the Malthusian population explosion. Starker Leopold—who had written the fine introduction to Lois Crisler’s Arctic Wild—dealt with the morality of saying no to “big coal” and “big oil.” Howard Zahniser pushed forward his wilderness bill (which had just been introduced in the House and Senate). How amazed Bob Marshall would have been that his wilderness ethos—vast tracts of pristine land with no roads—had gathered so much momentum in the nearly twenty years since his death.

Because the gathering at San Francisco totaled more than 500 people, a small group of Marshall’s admirers reconvened after the event in a boardroom to definitively determine whether to promote the