The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [30]
On public lands leased from the U.S. government in Alaska, Roosevelt preferred mining coal from the ground rather than dynamiting mountains in search of coal seams. When he could—as in the cheerful cases of designating Crater Lake (Oregon) and Mesa Verde (Colorado) as national parks—he worked in tandem with Congress. But if legislators resisted him, he steamrollered over them, invoking the new Antiquities Act to protect, for example, the Grand Canyon of Arizona or Devils Tower of Wyoming. The Antiquities Act gave any U.S. president the prerogative, on behalf of scientific investigation, to prevent public land from being exploited. On eighteen occasions Roosevelt used this act to set aside national monuments by means of executive orders. In addition, Roosevelt issued executive orders creating fifty-one federal bird reservations, four game preserves, and more than 150 national forests. Roosevelt had also introduced a host of modern wildlife protection laws. Calling in 1909 for a World Conservation Congress, Roosevelt wanted to protect the world’s oceans against overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution from oil and sewage. Because Alaska had so much shoreline, he saw it as an ideal place to usher in a new marine conservationism, one enlightened by the image of Earth as a single pulsating biological entity, in peril from industrialization. (As the historian T. J. Jackson Lears has argued in No Place of Grace, Roosevelt was antimodern in his belief that “country life” was superior to urbanization.23)
By the time of his address to the Arctic Brotherhood in 1903, Roosevelt had already made a first bold preservationist strike in Alaska. On August 20, 1902, he set aside the Alexander Archipelago, a 300-mile-long group of forested islands off the southeastern coast of mainland Alaska (named after a former head of a Russian fur-trading company). On that day more than 4.5 million acres of Alaska were protected in perpetuity. Muir, Merriam, Grinnell, and Burroughs had been eloquent about the Alexander Archipelago in the Harriman Expedition’s reports. These islands contained huge rugged mountains, high tundra, plunging valleys, and blindingly green rain forests. The fir-timbered islands in the Alexander Archipelago were an incubator for tens of thousands of hermit thrushes (Catharus guttatus), pine siskins (Spinus pinus), harlequin ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus), northern goshawks (Accipiter gentilis), black oystercatchers (Haematopus bachmani), and a large number of whale species. There was no such massing of wildlife anywhere else. In his memoir Travels in Alaska, Muir said that the Alexander Archipelago, whose melting glaciers were powerful enough to carry mountains to the sea, was his new “home” of “pure wilderness.”24 Native tribes called the archipelago the “Great Raven’s World” (the raven being considered cleverest of all animals). This lavishly diverse land was interlaced with spectacular inlets, fjords, glaciers, mountains, estuaries, thick meadows, muskegs, and high tundra.25
Roosevelt also saw this new Alaska reserve—modeled after the Thousand Islands reserve of upstate New York—as a preemptive strike against Great Britain and Japan, whose cold-blooded market hunters were still clubbing fur seals in American waters around the Pribilofs. “We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” Roosevelt said, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”26 Roosevelt also wanted to make sure the land rights of the Native Alaskan peoples—the Inupiat (in the Arctic), the Tlingit, and the Haida (in the panhandle)—would be protected. On a map, the Alaska Panhandle looked like an extension of British Columbia. But now, owing to William Seward