Kim Heacox

In March 1989, when Katie Gavenus was only two years old, something went wrong in her seaside hometown of Homer, Alaska, south of Anchorage. People spoke in grave tones and prepared for what felt like war. They outfitted their boats as best they could, and solemnly faced the open sea, beyond Kachemak Bay. Their task: to battle back a black tide of crude oil headed their way from Prince William Sound, where the supertanker Exxon Valdez had fetched up hard on Bligh Reef and sliced open.

At stake were their homes and ways of life, and Kachemak Bay itself, which flanks Kenai Fjords National Park. It is one of the most picturesque and ecologically rich pieces of coastline in Alaska.

Barely able to grasp the significance of it all, Katie gave up her favorite blanket for an oiled sea otter.

She never forgot it.

Little wonder then that she grew up a leader, and today, in her final year of high school, is president of Alaska Youth for Environmental Action.

Change the world of a child and you change the world.

Last July Katie addressed a conference celebrating 25 years of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Passed in 1980 after years of intense debate, the so-called “Alaska Lands Act” established more than 100 million acres of national parks, monuments, preserves, and wildlife refuges in Alaska.

The oil never did reach Homer, Katie said. But the impact did. She and others like her have grown up in a new Alaska, one that still debates the proper direction for economic growth and resource protection—and always will—but one that recognizes the progress paradox, how places live and die. How a headless, heartless pursuit of money, security, and growth can impoverish a people more than it enriches them.

You don’t need an oil spill to destroy a place. A slow erosion of the wildness around you will do just fine. Perhaps it is time for a new definition of progress. A new definition of growth.

Not long ago, most of North America was wild. Today, 3.3 million acres are lost each year to sprawl. Do the math and you quickly discover that (at that rate) in 100 years eight percent of the United States will be golf courses, shopping malls, and gridlocked highways.

Since passage of the Alaska Lands Act, 25 years ago this December, a new generation of Alaskans has grown up nurtured by a rich blanket of national parks and wildlife refuges, enriched by the maps of a future wild, open and free, a promise that contains what Wallace Stegner called “the geography of hope.” To these young people the natural, life-sustaining wildness of Alaska is more than a resource. It’s the source. Deeper than any oil.

True, many older Alaskans see freedom differently. They remember the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline days of the early 1970s. They pine for the do-anything-you-want time, before the state was “locked up” in national parks and wildlife refuges. They limit their thinking to their own lifetimes, and repeat history. And in having their way they leave for those who follow not an Alaska as they found it, but an Alaska after they’re finished with it.

Open country is tempting, a land of opportunity filled with opportunists. For a person like Katie Gavenus, the question is: How do we do things differently?

As Bishop Mark MacDonald said at the ANILCA conference, we need to “define ourselves not by what we can have, hold, and take, but by what we have received.” We need to operate from a place of gratitude as much as from pride. “Alaska is not the last frontier, but the first frontier of a new human relationship with the land and sea.”

“Too often our headlines are stuck in the past,” added Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, the first mayor of Anchorage born and raised in Alaska. “Too often we have partisans only out to irritate each other.… Those old battles are history, not current events. The animosity of two sides facing each other should—and has to—end.”

The son of former Congressman Nick Begich, Mayor Begich reminded attendees that while ANILCA designated 104 million acres of “national interest” lands, the Statehood Act of 1959 granted an equal amount of land to the state of Alaska, total acreage greater than the states of Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina together. Much of it open to development. “That should be enough for 600,000 people,” he said.

Yet listen to talk radio in Anchorage and Fairbanks and you hear the same old complaints about the land being locked up. The same I-Me-Mine whine from Don’t-Tread-On-Me Americans made a century ago when President Teddy Roosevelt created Grand Canyon and Mount Olympus National Monuments. Both later became national parks. President Eisenhower took similar heat in 1960 when he established the Arctic National Wildlife Range (renamed the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980).

The Arctic Refuge is “sacrosanct,” said President Jimmy Carter, who signed the Alaska Lands Act and spoke at the July conference. He reminded 1,000 listeners that Eisenhower “was frustrated by members of the U.S. Senate from Alaska who fought what [he] saw as a fair division of lands. In desperation, through executive order, he designated that ANWR should be kept pristine forever. I inherited all that later as president…. This is a 50-year fight…. We need to continue to fight….”

Alaska State Representative John Coghill wrote in the Anchorage Daily News that prior to ANILCA, all Alaskans—specifically landowners, holders of mining claims, and big game guides—had “reasonable access” to federal lands. Now, he said, they do not.

No matter how much access there is, some people still complain. Driven by dissatisfaction, they are thirsty in the rain. Access becomes excess. For every one loud crisis in Alaska, such as an oil spill, there are thousands of quiet ones—incursions into pristine land. Another road here, a road there, an open pit mine, a clearcut, a vein-work of all-terrain-vehicle tracks.

Coghill remarked that the Alaska Lands Act could have done a better job at certain tasks over the last 25 years. Certainly, some missteps have been taken. But if a great journey begins with a stumble, does that invalidate the journey? No. ANILCA was—is—a remarkable accomplishment. It required great conviction and compromise from both sides of the political aisle. It established a rural subsistence priority, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest conservation laws.

Consider its genesis. The Alaska Lands Act was a child of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). That act allocated 44 million acres and one billion dollars to Alaska Natives for economic self-determination through the creation of 13 regional and 203 village Native corporations, with each Native a shareholder in his or her corporations. It also specified in section 17(d)(1) and (d)(2) that “national interest” lands be studied as potential national parks, wildlife refuges, and forests. This vision came from the environmental community, but also from Alaska’s Native elders. Inspired by the 1960s Civil Rights movement, they wanted to preserve the land for future generations, and empower new Alaskan leaders.

Vernita Herdman is an Inupiaq who grew up on the shores of the Bering Sea and now works for The Wilderness Society in Anchorage. “For Natives,” she says, “the most important part of ANILCA is Title VIII, known as ‘the subsistence title.’ Congressman Udall, who led the effort in the House, said that Title VIII was included to protect the Alaska Native way of life. ‘If the focus was to protect non-Native hunting and fishing in rural Alaska, there would be no Title VIII,’ Udall told his colleagues, citing the federal government's trust responsibility to Alaska Natives. Over the years, Title VIII has withstood numerous lawsuits and is regarded as a legal bulwark by Alaska Natives, who rely on subsistence for economic, nutritional, cultural, and spiritual reasons. This history of subsistence is a major reason that we have such reverence for the land,” Herdman explained.

“This is a critical time for the lands that belong to all Americans,” said Eleanor Huffines, Alaska regional director of The Wilderness Society. “All of Alaska’s 16 national wildlife refuges and 13 national parks will be revising their long-term management plans. If we want to see these places protected, the public will need to get engaged in the planning process.”

As anthropologist and author Richard Nelson asked, “Can we promise to pass along an Alaska to future generations as earlier and wiser generations have given it to us?”

Former Congressman Tom Evans (R-DE) asked, “How long will it take the Bush Administration to figure out that conserving and preserving is a ‘conservative’ thing to do?”

After Katie Gavenus made her final remarks, one more student speaker remained. Verner Wilson III, a Yupik Eskimo from southwest Alaska, and a sophomore at Brown University, stepped to the microphone and summarized ANILCA with its six letters:

104 Million Acres

After the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million (about two cents an acre), the United States took possession of 375 million acres. But for the next century, the disposition of most of that land remained uncertain, and only a small fraction was designated as national parkland or protected in some other way. The Alaska Lands Act expanded existing units, including Mt. McKinley National Park (renamed Denali), and created new ones, designating more than 104 million acres as new conservation system units belonging to all Americans. Twenty-six river segments were protected as “wild and scenic rivers.” The National Wilderness Preservation System more than tripled, in one day, from 22.6 million acres to 78.8 million acres. One of the most contentious compromises—and there were many—provided that the Arctic Refuge’s coastal plain would not be made a wilderness area at that time but would be studied to determine how its oil potential compared to its natural qualities. The Reagan administration’s 1987 recommendation to allow drilling ignited the protracted national debate over the coastal plain’s future.

“The Alaska Lands Act was an extraordinary achievement,” says Eleanor Huffines, Alaska regional director of The Wilderness Society. “But much of its potential lies in its implementation, and for 17 of the 25 years since passage, the powers that be in Washington have pushed to maximize mining, drilling, logging, and other development. The process for creating new wilderness areas has pretty much been stymied. Conservationists had hoped for more progress, and we are committed to making the next quarter century better than the first. I do think that the younger generation here is more supportive of the act’s goals; and that, combined with growing appreciation of Alaska’s natural wonders nationally, is cause for optimism.”

Kim Heacox, a former national park ranger who lives in Gustavus, Alaska, writes regularly for Wilderness. His most recent book, The Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska, was published in May.