Opinions

The ANWR fight continues across generations

If celebrity means getting in the news and staying in the news, as wags have cracked, the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge has achieved celebrity. ANWR has been in the news since the 1950s, when Alaska and stateside environmentalists began lobbying for a wildlife reserve extending from the Brooks Range north to arctic salt water.

The environmentalists’ lobbying was successful with the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Range in early 1960, the waning days of the Eisenhower administration. The range was about half the size of the 18-million-acre refuge the range became part of in 1980 during the Carter administration. In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s day, there actually were Republican environmentalists, some moneyed eastern sportsmen who, If 60 years old or more in 1960, might have met Teddy Roosevelt, the president who brought environmental stewardship to the Republican Party during two terms in the White House.

But, if ANWR has been in the news since I was a boy, much of the news has been about a custody dispute. ANWR belongs to whom? And who decides what happens there?

Formally, in law, ANWR is U.S. government property. Presidents have said so. Congress too. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is ANWR’s primary custodian and caregiver, although other agencies do become involved. In the 1950s, there was talk within the Eisenhower administration of placing the original range under the National Park Service. Leading environmentalists, Olaus and Margaret Murie for instance, resisted this. They believed talking about the park service would provoke unnecessary hostility to any protected reserve.

Hostility toward creating the range spread anyway, especially in Alaska. When Congress held hearings in Alaska in June 1959, Sen. Ernest Gruening railed and mocked. Before our current junior Sen. Dan Sullivan said his first words as an Ohio toddler (“federal overreach”), our junior senator of yesteryear had mastered a lesson fundamental to Alaska political life: No elected official ever went broke attacking Washington. Feeling his oratorical oats, Gruening went on to say, “I don’t believe we should conserve moose for the sake of future moose. We preserve them so future generations ... can see moose and photograph moose, and hunt moose if they wish to.”

Gruening wasn’t the only one on a rhetorical roll. Wenzel Raith, a young man from Duluth, Minnesota, who testified in Fairbanks, invoked Daniel Boone, Kit Carson and Davy Crockett before telling lawmakers, “It is the mollycoddles, the frothing sentimentalists who seem most to favor this proposal.” Raith believed “those who usually hide behind their mama’s skirts have teamed up with the horse-trading politicians to swaddle us in red tape and put us in the care of some pantywaist professor who probably has to have his wife check to see if his pants are zipped.” (I met Raith decades later at the Fairbanks Pioneer Home. He was quiet and subdued, a lovely fellow.)

Sen. Bob Bartlett, our senior senator, was restrained. He made his disapproval of the range clear without raising his voice. In Fairbanks, my dad, Fabian, testified before the lawmakers and received Bartlett’s blessing for his concern about distant bureaucrats taking over Alaska. Bartlett noted Fabian was a good speaker, good writer, and the senator liked that in a man. I am sure Fabian appreciated the flattery. (My dad was especially good with metaphors that amused an audience, as when he said, “There’s more ax grinding in Washington than in the tool room of a lumber camp.”)

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Olaus Murie, long affiliated with the Wilderness Society, expected this kind of resistance from politicians and probably would have cut Raith and my dad some slack because he knew that they, like himself, were Minnesota boys who grew up loving outdoor life. But that didn’t mean Olaus had any illusions about his struggle. He knew what he was up against, telling Gruening by letter that Alaska was “the happy hunting ground of greedy special interests, whether it be for gold, salmon, or oil.” And in a letter to Assistant Secretary of the Interior Ross Loeffler, he said, “If you have followed the fortunes of Alaska since it became a state, you cannot help but realize we are in the grip of a group whose motto might be ‘always ask for more and give nothing in return.’”

And so it goes. The records since the 1950s, published and unpublished, are in good measure Alaska elected officials — and business leaders — exchanging prose salvos with environmentalists, bureaucrats, and members of Congress. This makes the question of who has the right to ANWR easily answered: my side — that is, the side of whoever is opining at the time.

Congressional Republicans unsuccessfully voted to open ANWR to oil drilling at least 50 times before succeeding in December 2017. Not long ago, the Trump administration held a lease sale, putting up land for drilling in the coastal plain, the so-called 1002 Area. The state of Alaska was an active bidder and now holds several federal leases. This is a bizarre twist, given the Dunleavy administration’s near-religious commitment to private enterprise.

The Biden administration is expected to intervene. Olaus Murie’s successors have court options.

The ANWR debate has been part of Alaska since before statehood, and will continue after Alaskans my age have disappeared like the snow in spring.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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