The Class Menagerie

David B. Williams is a freelance natural-history writer based in Seattle. He is the author of The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle and has written for Smithsonian, Popular Mechanics, National Parks, and The Seattle Times.

We arrive back in Fairbanks early in the evening on Aug. 8. Everyone takes showers and we all eat Thai food a few blocks from campus. The conversation centers on our trip, with everyone sharing stories of what they saw, heard, smelled, and felt, particularly mosquitoes. None of us had ever experienced such biblical bug swarms. (They were so bad that when I was in the tent their inexhaustible crashing into the walls sounded like rain drops.) We laugh often and bask in a post-trip glow.

The next day we return to in-class discussions. We are at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF). What a change it is to sit inside in a tan conference room. Our first talk is from Roger Kaye, longtime wilderness specialist and pilot for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He recently completed a Ph.D. at UAF titled The Campaign to Establish a Last Great Wilderness: The Arctic National Wildlife Range.

"My main interest is the underlying values that led to the establishment of the refuge. Why is wilderness important?" begins Kaye. "It's not the number of caribou or number of species that is important, but wilderness values." He then launches into a thought-provoking discussion of the history of the refuge. Five people were central to the original idea of preservation: Wilderness Society cofounder Bob Marshall; National Park Service planner George Collins ("the agency's dreamer of the biggest dreams"); NPS "maverick biologist" Lowell Sumner; and naturalist-conservationists Olaus and Mardy Murie.

Marshall was the first to call for protection, writing, "In the name of a balanced use of American resources, let's keep Alaska largely a wilderness!" In 1938, three years after founding The Wilderness Society and one year before he died, Marshall recommended that all of Alaska north of the Yukon River, with the exception of an area near Nome, be permanently set aside. His proposal attracted little interest with world war on the horizon, and in 1943 in Public Land Order No. 82, the federal government declared that all land north of the crest of the Brooks Range be set aside for national defense.

Collins and Sumner emerged on the scene in 1949 when NPS assistant director Conrad Wirth told Collins, "Go to Alaska and see that great piece of the world." At the suggestion of a U.S. Geological Service official, they focused on the north, particularly the land east of the Canning River, now the boundary of the refuge. In 1953, in what Kaye calls the article that launched the campaign for protection, Collins and Lowell wrote, "The northeast Arctic wilderness offers an ideal chance to preserve an undisturbed natural area large enough to be biologically self-sufficient."

A central impetus to Collins' and Lowell's thinking was Aldo Leopold. Collins required all of his planners to read A Sand County Almanac, with Leopold's vision of the land ethic. In Sand County, he writes, "A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state."

Three years after the NPS pair made their proposal for wilderness, the Muries led a scientific party into the Sheenjek River valley. (This was not their first trip into the Brooks Range. In 1924, they explored the Arctic on a 550-mile-long honeymoon journey by boat and dogsled.) The Sheenjek expedition became a catalyst for protecting what became known as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Olaus Murie called it "a little portion of our planet left alone" where one has "the opportunity to study the interrelationships of plants and animals, to see how Nature proceeds with evolutionary processes."

For three years, the Muries and the nascent environmental movement lobbied to protect what Collins and Lowell had dubbed the "Last Great Wilderness." At the end of President Eisenhower's administration, on Dec. 6, 1960, Interior Secretary Fred Seaton signed Public Land Order 2214. It established the 8.9-million-acre Arctic Range "for the purpose of preserving unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values." It was a radical idea.

Kaye reminds us that in the 1950s there was no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act, no Endangered Species Act. The post-war boom was drastically altering the landscape and the range represented what Kaye calls a "legacy of restraint." Never before had a refuge been created for preserving wilderness values. Kaye adds that it was no coincidence that the same people who lobbied for the range were pivotal in the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964. "The Arctic Range was the very ideal of the Wilderness Act," says Kaye.

Kaye's ideas on wilderness are a powerful argument for us all. Throughout our time on the river, we had talked about restraint and wilderness. Following one discussion, my notes read, "Perhaps we can be the people who say No to development. No to our urge to consume. No to affecting the lives of 120,000 caribou. We can say Yes to needing less. Yes, to developing a stronger relationship to the countries that provide us petroleum. What kind of world is it when all the sacred places are no more, when we had the opportunity to show restraint but lacked the courage or imagination to do so?"

When I talk to students and instructors in the days following Kaye's presentation, everyone mentions how it helped to clarify their thoughts. Many of them have come to the same conclusion: that the debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is ultimately about values, about morals, about protecting the land for future generations. Furthermore, they are impressed that what we considered to be such an amazing example of wilderness has been the symbol for wilderness for the past 50 years.

One student concludes, "I liked getting the historical perspective. I didn't know the battle had been going on for so long. It gives me even more resolve to protect it."