The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [336]
* Sheldon’s voluminous personal papers are now housed at different locations: University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Smithsonian Institution, Dartmouth College, and the Boone and Crockett Club.
* Today the Great Bear Wilderness, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and the Scapegoat Wilderness form the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, totaling more than 1.5 million acres.
* According to the raptor ecologist Joel E. (Jeep) Pagel of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, in Asia golden eagles are known to hunt wolves. In North America, however, golden eagles have never been seen to seize a wolf, although they do eat coyote pups.
* Olaus Murie, however, was a fan of Ernest Thompson Seton, who had been his literary hero during his boyhood. He once encountered Seton at an event in Washington, D.C., and said, “Oh, my, I know all your books. My friends and I grew up with them. We just lived Two Little Savages, along the Red River in Minnesota. We did everything you wrote about in there, and we built a tipi but we could never make the smoke go up right.” Seton replied, “I never could either.”
* In 1980, Denali National Park was expanded by 4 million acres. Today it encompasses a total of 6,075,107 acres. The original 2 million acres are commonly called the “old park” and are designated wilderness.
* Some scholars believe that it is impossible to overcome polio. But the historian David Oshinsky, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning work on polio, knows that this is indeed possible.
* Snyder did like computers. He even wrote a poem for his Macintosh, designed by Apple Inc.
* Nike and New Balance, perhaps influenced by Brother Asaiah, did design a “barefoot shoe” post-Y2K with a special Vibram Fivefingers sole; it was like a latex glove for the foot.
* In the 1920s five federal game wardens had been appointed to the Aleutians: Doug Gray, Frank Beals, Donald Stevenson, C. C. Loy, and D. A. Friden. None had a college degree.
* What would become the Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960 was later enlarged from 8.9 million acres to 19.3 million acres and redesignated the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA). As Roger Kaye points out in Last Great Wilderness, throughout the 1950s the designations range and refuge were essentially synonyms. Oil-gas companies call the area ANWR. Environmentalists call it the Arctic Refuge. I prefer Arctic NWR.
* On September 29, 1957, the New York Times ran a story saying that Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton planned to virtually disallow oil and gas drilling in wildlife refuges.
* The Eisenhower Presidential Library provided me with a batch of Eisenhower-Arctic NWR articles that inform this chapter.
* In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt delegated his authority to withdraw public lands to the secretary of the interior. In 1952 that delegation was amended and Executive Order No. 10355 was issued, delegating to the secretary of the interior central authority over operation of the federal government’s withdrawal process. Thus the secretary’s action in a public land order (PLO) is equivalent to that of the president. Nevertheless, in a “big deal” such as the Arctic NWR, a secretary would certainly discuss it with the president before signing the order.
* Little could Douglas have known that President Jimmy Carter would pay him the honor of redesignating the Arctic NWR as William O. Douglas Arctic Wildlife Range. The new name, however, stuck only for ten months in 1980. When the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act became law in December 1980, Congress renamed it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).