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By Root 2997 0

band of conservationist revolutionaries—TR, Hornaday, Pinchot, Leopold, Marshall, FDR, the Muries, the Crislers, and Carson among them—stood up and said no to the exploiters of Alaska’s wilderness kingdom. Their mythos was becoming popular on college campuses in 1960. Some places, such as the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea or Mount McKinley, were simply too awesome to molest. The illustrator Rockwell Kent; the WASPs; the forest beatniks like Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac—Douglas was proud to be in their victorious ranks that December. Refusing to be a cloistered justice, Douglas crisscrossed America dissenting against reckless oil drilling, clear-cutting, strip-mining, and superhighways. He worried that the Arctic NWR and other tracts of wilderness were going to fall victim to legal clauses allowing mining and timbering on federal property. “After they gutted and ruined the forests, then the rest of us could use them—to find campsites among stumps, to look for fish in waters heavy with silt from erosion, to search for game on rivers pounded to dust by sheep.”39

But because of the Arctic NWR Douglas felt a strong current of optimism in the air. With Kennedy coming into the White House, the stage seemed to be set for a new environmental movement. Ecological consciousness was becoming mainstream. Rachel Carson was near finishing Silent Spring, and Stewart Udall was tapping talents like the novelist Wallace Stegner to help him write the classic ecological manifesto The Quiet Crisis. The new “green” movement was spreading worldwide. The legacy of John Muir was still strong; his name was becoming almost as well known as that of Paul Revere or Betsy Ross in schoolrooms. “Knowing of people’s love of beauty and their great need for it, Muir gave his life to help them discover beauty in the earth around them, and to arouse their desire to protect,” Douglas wrote in Muir of the Mountains. “The Machine, Muir knew, could easily level the woods and make the land desolate. Humankind’s mission on earth is not to destroy: it is to protect and conserve all living things. There is a place for trees and flowers and birds, as well as for people. Never should we try to crowd them out of the universe.”40

Muir, who preached the gospel of glaciers, surely would have said, “Amen.”

Acknowledgments

Since graduating from Ohio State University in 1982 I’ve traveled to Alaska many times. Kayaking around Glacier Bay National Park and hiking in the Chugach Mountains have become two of my smarter summer habits. Back in 1994, as a university history professor, I brought students on my natural-gas-fueled “Majic Bus” all the way from New Orleans to Fairbanks. We would go up the Alaska Marine Highway—which offered overnight ferry service from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to Haines, Alaska—on the most amazing and visually impressive journey imaginable. Glaciers, bald eagles, horned puffins, blue whales, 10,000-foot snow-crested peaks, and lush forested islands were just part of the breathtaking experience of journeying through the Inside Passage described by John Muir in Travels in Alaska. We read classic books by Jack London, Mardy Murie, and John McPhee along the way.

I was hooked on Alaska. From this Majic Bus journey I learned that there is no more beautiful state flag than Alaska’s bright gold stars on a field of blue, that the town of Homer truly is the “Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea,” and that the wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) should be reintroduced into the Yukon Flats NWR. I’ve also become convinced that in the age of climate change the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) belongs on the endangered species list, and that Teshekpuk Lake, whose name means “the largest lake of all” (located in the National Petroleum Reserve of the western Arctic), should be designated a national park or national monument.

Out of all the books I’ve written, this is my favorite because it brought Alaska back into my life so fully. The Quiet World was conceived as the second volume of my multivolume Wilderness Cycle (the inaugural volume was