The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [277]
The Kennedys learned on the trail just how devoted Douglas was to deep silence and utter seclusion. To Douglas, the great American outdoors was quiet medicine for the shattered urban soul. Douglas, in fact, knew a lot of U.S. veterans who ended up staying in Alaska because the open land offered healing and solace. In a marvelous extended essay published by the Orion Society, the poet Terry Tempest Williams called Alaska’s wildlife refuges, with their liberating effects, the “open space of democracy”; Douglas would have liked that phrase.7 Men who had seen combat in World War II—such as Morton Wood, who ran the Denali Lodge with his wife, Ginny Wood—needed the Alaskan wilderness to spiritually heal after seeing so much blood spilled. Wild areas such as the proposed Arctic NWR, Douglas believed, could bring God back into the lives of disillusioned ex-soldiers like Wood. These war veterans would backpack for days, weeks, or even months. Fresh air was the real curative for a soldier. The clean air off the Arctic Ocean, for example, was far more healthful than the psychotherapeutic drugs or morphine distributed at a dozen facilities similar to Walter Reed Hospital. A profound sense of humility fell over people on the tundra. The soul became whole again. Many veterans of World War II and the Korean War were proud that so much of Alaska was public land—it was wild America for the people.
With regard to the politics of wilderness, however, Douglas was a pragmatist, not a dreamer. He understood that with regard to conservation, no important cause was ever permanently won or lost. The combat always had to be renewed and the rationale for preservation reiterated. Every time America went to war, opportunistic companies, capitalizing on national fears and anxieties, claimed that the Tongass should be clear-cut or that Cook Inlet should become an oil field. Executive orders and legislation, once so potent, would over decades become dim and faded documents with none of their original preservationist passion. Thus Sitka National Historic Park—America’s great totem pole field—was seized in 1942 by the U.S. military, which removed huge quantities of gravel from the park’s shoreline, devastating the environment. No part of wild America was safe when an economic crisis arose. Every new generation would have to fight for the integrity of the Denali wilderness or Glacier Bay. The money-grubbers, Douglas believed—those who couldn’t recognize God’s artistry—were always going to swarm like a plague of locusts onto the land, destroying its splendor. The mistake conservationists made was believing in total victory. No wild place was ever safe from Moloch.
To the Muries the fight for the Arctic NWR was about the Brooks Range and coastal plain, caribou calving areas, and polar bears’ denning. Douglas concurred with these sentiments. But he also saw the preservation of those 8.9 million acres as a victory of the quiet world over the sonic boom. He wanted corporate noise polluters regulated, fined for selfishly stealing people’s right to quiet so that their boards of directors could become multimillionaires. In his opinion in United States v. Causby, Douglas agreed with a chicken farmer who claimed that noise from U.S. military airplanes had caused his poultry to die of panic. Douglas also felt that he personally had a God-given right to ride horseback on a “precarious mountain trail” without a sonic boom or the roar of jet engines frightening his mount and putting himself in danger of being tossed.8
II
On February 26, 1960, just a few weeks after My Wilderness was published, the Alaska Conservation Society (ACS) was founded. Realizing