The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [38]
“Is my share of Alaska worthless to me because I shall never go there?” Leopold asked. “Do I need a road to show me the arctic prairies, the goose pastures of the Yukon, the Kodiak bear, the sheep meadow behind Mt. McKinley?” Leopold answered his own question: no. As the twentieth century progressed, the new land ethic wasn’t about building modern roads or hunting game in “lovely country.” It was about “building receptivity” for ecosystems in human thinking, so that treasured landscapes like the Chugach and Tongass, the Yukon Delta, and Saint Lazaria could survive industrialization.57
Chapter Three - The Pinchot-Ballinger Feud
I
On September 6, 1909, while on safari in the northern foothills of Mount Kenya, Theodore Roosevelt—less than six months after leaving the White House—received three cables announcing that Commander Robert E. Peary had reached the geographic north pole. Peary’s telegraphed message was sent from Indian Harbor, Labrador, and read: “Stars and Stripes Nailed to the Pole.” Roosevelt, on a ten-month safari to British East Africa, accompanied by his twenty-nine-year-old son, Kermit, and a retinue of eminent naturalists, was delighted for Peary. America had beaten the Russian explorers to the world’s rooftop. Voyages of discovery toward the geographic north pole had always held a special fascination for Roosevelt. The ex-president considered collecting scientific information about the Arctic region a sign of national greatness (the modern-day equivalent would be NASA going to the moon). Roosevelt had followed Peary’s adventures with keen interest during his eight months in British East Africa. Prophetically, the great Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen had told Roosevelt at a dinner in Washington, D.C., “Peary is your best man; in fact I think he is on the whole the best of the men now trying to reach the Pole, and there is a good chance that he will be the one to succeed.”1
Roosevelt had been riveted by Peary’s heroic stories of dogsledding and building igloos between 1886 and 1891 in the Arctic light, and he considered Peary’s book Northward over the Great Ice (1898) a valuable contribution to exploration literature. In 1905–1906 Peary, then a U.S. Navy lieutenant, had patrolled the coast of upper Greenland in the ship Roosevelt—another point in his favor. In 1908 President Roosevelt had boarded Peary’s ship to bid him godspeed on his historic voyage to the north pole.2 Now, with his Arctic Club expedition and his successful historic dash to the north pole, Peary had outdone himself. All his life, Peary had sought glory—the one heroic deed that would reverberate forever in history. “Too much credit cannot be given him,” Roosevelt wrote to his friend William Robert Foran. “He has performed one of the great feats of the age, and all his countrymen should join in doing him honor.”3
Barry Lopez, one of America’s finest writers, meditated in his Arctic Dreams (which won a National Book Award) on Peary’s obsession with the north pole. Lopez remarked on the hardships Peary endured for the sake of Arctic exploration: leaving his wife behind, determining to prevail over blizzards, camping on permanently frozen ground to which he clung like a dwarf plant, not seeing another human being for months at a time, facing many desperate moments, always running out of provisions, being forced to kill sled dogs for food, making astute solar observations in order to stay alive. Literature is replete with such quest stories. But Peary’s undaunted attempt to find the geographic north pole transcends