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and fresh. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that the “world laughs in flowers.” Nowhere was this metaphor truer than in the Arctic, where primroses and forget-me-nots bloom in the summer along the Sheenjek River, suffusing its banks with pink and purple. Botany and animal life fill every page of My Wilderness. In the chapter on the Brooks Range, Douglas wrote about seeing caribou hooves crush grass, befriending an arctic ground squirrel (Spermophilus parryii), and watching grizzlies dig hummocks. There are scenes of golden eagles nesting near his base camp, and happy-go-lucky pintail ducks scouring for food in the velvety hummocks of the range. To Douglas, Arctic Alaska—like Antarctica—was too precious to permit destructive oil-gas and mining activity, particularly since the future would bring clean energy.

Douglas made clear in My Wilderness not only that the Eisenhower administration should create the Arctic NWR, but that its 8.9 million acres should remain untouched by civilization. It would be a laboratory for biologists intent on discovering the natural order before man changed the rhythm of creation. Douglas had done the math in 1960 and had learned that only 2 percent of American land was roadless or a wilderness. Fuming at utility corporations, federal agencies, stockmen, timber barons, and oil-gas executives—“the modern Ahabs” who saw a cliff and thought in “terms of gravel”—Douglas insisted that the Arctic must remain a living wilderness for both scientific observation and aesthetic wonderment.1 “Potbellied men smoking black cigars, who never could climb a hundred feet,” Douglas said, referring to the intrusion of corporate developers into the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, “were now in the sacred precincts of a great mountain.”2

My Wilderness was illuminating about Arctic life and, considered simply as literature, elegantly written. Douglas wrote about 300-year-old white spruces, about wild cranberry, and about measuring a wolf’s paw print (six inches by 5.1 inches). At an Arctic campsite in the upper reaches of the Sheenjek River alongside Last Lake (the latter designation credited to the Muries), Douglas went fly-fishing and recorded the experience. The reader could almost feel the grayling tug at the line. As camp chef for a few nights, Douglas cooked grayling for dinner on the creek-side grill for fellow members of the Sheenjek Expedition of 1956. There was also a sense of urgency in My Wilderness regarding alternative sources of energy. Fossil fuels, he worried, were choking the planet to death. My Wilderness was also clearly the work of an erudite globetrotter. Without showing off, Douglas compared the wolves of Sheenjek Valley to wolves he had previously studied in Afghanistan and Persia. Alaskan wolves, in fact, found a very effective defender in Douglas. “The sight of a wolf loping across a hillside,” Douglas wrote, “is as moving as a symphony.”3

Ethel Kennedy—whose husband, Robert F. Kennedy, was murdered in 1968 while running for U.S. president—fondly remembered Douglas’s nonstop promotion of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. To Douglas, the region from Big Sur in California to Homer, Alaska, 3,000 miles away, was an ecotopia. When he talked about the lush green zones along the Pacific coast, he would also promote the notion of a “wilderness bill of rights” to protect “the region’s rivers and lakes, the valleys and ridges,” from “mechanized society.”4 In 1962 Robert and Ethel Kennedy had joined Douglas and his wife Mercedes for a week of camping in the Olympics. Douglas loved cooking rainbow trout for the Kennedy party and gave his recipe as follows: “Set rock at 45 degree angle, and heat upper side with fire; salt and pepper trout and roll in flour and place on heated face on rock; do not turn; rock will cook underside and campfire will cook topside; serve when trout is deep brown.”5

“Bill had an enormously open mind around the campfire, talking about the world,” Ethel recalled. “He didn’t pontificate. He was refreshing. He took us to the rain forests—which, I might add, are appropriately named. We