The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [279]
Celia Hunter testified on October 20, 1959, before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in Ketchikan, and had made a series of arguments that deeply influenced the acceptance of the Arctic NWR by ordinary Alaskans. Quite convincingly, she showed how tourism had supplanted mining as Alaska’s second-biggest revenue-generating industry. (Military construction was still first.) There was more long-term economic benefit to be gained from tourism than from hiring, say, 100 temporary tie pickers or timber testers. “The years 1958 and 1959 have seen tourist income at least double,” she said, “and estimates as high as triple the figures have been given by the tourist industry. And, yet, in spite of the decline in importance of mining, and the increasing emphasis on tourism, the whole tone of our state administration is set by the mining interests.”9
As with all successful new nonprofits, a hierarchy was quickly established at the ACS. Ginny Wood collected dues and wrote hundreds of recruitment letters. Her work ethic meant a lot of envelope licking and a lot of work through the night and into the morning hours. Conservation politics, she soon learned, involved nonstop paperwork. Throughout 1960 Wood corresponded daily with state senators, college students, restaurateurs, small business owners, outfitters, and travel agents, and, most important, kept the mimeograph machine humming. She pored over territorial records, land deeds, and loads of newspapers to extract information about the Arctic. Wood’s motto, printed on the first newsletter bulletin, was “Alaskans Organize.” And at the Dogpatch headquarters, caulked against winter weather, various funny, quirky aphorisms were taped to the wall: “For God’s sake don’t let them make any more progress!” and “Next week we gotta get organized!”
Wood preferred typing letters to calling people on the telephone; for one thing, letters were cheaper. There were hardly any exceptions to this preference, but whenever Lowell Sumner of the Department of the Interior called, Ginny Wood felt cheerful. She liked robust men who appreciated life to the fullest. Along with the Muries, he always offered the soundest counsel on how to make the principal issues—like saving 8.9 million acres of the Arctic—heard in the right way by the powers that be in Washington, D.C. “We both loved our airplanes as much as the Arctic,” Wood explained about her friendship with Sumner. “Whenever I’d be in the most remote Arctic places like Nome or Barrow or Coldfoot, I’d invariably bump into Lowell. Olaus was very mellow, always taking his biology seriously. Lowell liked to see things from the sky . . . like me.”10
Wood called the ACS newsletter, which began getting mimeographed in March 1960, the by-product of a “subversive” press.11 Because Hunter also did serious fund-raising for The Wilderness Society, she added a wider conservationist net to the homemade newsletter from Dogpatch. By contrast, Wood tended to fill the ACS newsletter with folksy woodlore. Visually, the five-page newsletter was like a church bulletin. People in Fairbanks committed to Ginny Wood were known as Friends of Ginny, or FOGs. The acronym was a perfect fit because Wood flew her Cessna even in the worst weather imaginable, feeling responsible for linking North Slope bush communities to Fairbanks when an emergency occurred. If, say, a physician or funeral director was needed in an Arctic town, Wood always volunteered her pilot services pro bono to fly the person out from Fairbanks. Locally, she was known as an ace bush pilot, an all-around good Samaritan, and an Arctic activist. Nobody ever accused Ginny of harboring any confusion on issues related to conservation.
Hunter and Wood did a few clever things when creating the ACS. Like Edna Ferber in Ice Palace, they boisterously touted Alaska’s unequaled greatness. In particular, they bragged about