The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [275]
On January 3, 1959, Eisenhower signed the official proclamation transforming Alaska from a territory to a state. This time Eisenhower stood with a number of Alaskan dignitaries—senators-elect E. L. Bartlett and Ernest Gruening; representative-elect Ralph Rivers; the former territorial governor Mike Stepovich; the acting governor, Wayne Hendrickson; and Bob Atwood, publisher of the Anchorage Daily Times. Also present, and beaming with joy, was Fred Seaton. Signing pens were handed out by the handful. An American flag with forty-nine stars was unfurled—now a collector’s item because Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959. As Eisenhower had feared, Alaska’s first two U.S. senators were indeed Democrats. The first two senators from Hawaii were Oren E. Long (a Democrat) and Hiram Fong (a Republican), so the addition of the two new states brought three Democrats and only one Republican to the Senate.
What nobody knew for certain throughout 1959 was what Alaskan statehood meant for the wilderness movement. But Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society and Ira Gabrielson of the Wildlife Management Institute kept up the intense lobbying effort. In May they got a big break. Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington, a Democrat, introduced legislation to create the Arctic NWR. The Department of the Interior would be the administrator of the refuge, through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Predictably, Senator E. L. Bartlett denounced the legislation as a federal land grab in the new state. A fight was under way.
To ecologists of the late 1950s, something larger was at stake in the debate over the Arctic NWR: the planet Earth. If the last great wilderness was wrecked by humans, exploited for profit, what did that say about the future of the Amazon, Serengeti, or the Yangtze River? Shouldn’t some places remain inviolate? The politics of the Arctic NWR fight coalesced in such a way that if the environmental movement suffered a loss, a dozen growing wilderness nonprofits would lose the momentum they had achieved in the controversy over Dinosaur National Monument. With the world population predicted to be 7 billion by 2010, wouldn’t some truly wild places be needed as ecological buffers? Hadn’t Eisenhower done the right thing by declaring Antarctica a free zone? Shouldn’t the same type of global preservation take place in the Arctic?
Was the Atomic Energy Commisson’s Project Chariot really going to explode approximately 2.3 megatons of nuclear bombs and other nuclear devices—equivalent to about half of all the explosives of World War II—to construct an artificial harbor at Cape Thompson on the North Slope? Was Edward Teller so committed to nuclear weapons that he didn’t care about radioactive contamination from the blast? It was the threat of Project Chariot that impelled Ginny Wood and Celia Hunter—the two WASP pilots from Washington State—into grassroots conservationism in 1960. If Seaton needed petitions for the Arctic NWR signed by Alaskans to deflect criticism that the Eisenhower administration had turned as soft as the Sierra Club, they could gather the signatures. They would do anything to prevent Arctic Alaska from becoming an atomic test range or an American version of a Saudi oil field.
Epilogue: Arctic Forever
This is the place for man turned scientist and explorer, poet and artist. Here he can experience a new reverence for life that is outside his own and yet a vital and joyous part of it.
—WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS
I
For anybody planning a trip to what became the Arctic NWR, William O. Douglas’s engrossing My Wilderness, published in early 1960, should be mandatory reading. When he was north of the Brooks Range—the great watershed dividing the Arctic from the Alaskan interior region—Douglas felt as if a time machine had taken him back to the beginning of the world. Everything was primordial, uncontaminated,