10   WILDERNESS IN ALASKA

To many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, the very word “Alaska” connoted the romance of wilderness. Remote, far to the north, land of the Inuit and northern Indians, arena for trappers, miners, and other adventurous types, Alaska was the “last frontier” and the “platonic ideal” of romantic wilderness.1 Few roads traversed the Alaska landscape (compared with the “Lower 48,” as Alaskans called the rest of the United States; Hawaii was not yet a state), and many species banished from the rest of the country were there—wolves, bear, moose, caribou, wolverine, and countless others. Alaska, the “Great Land,” was a remnant of what America must have been before pioneers and settlers and developers had advanced the frontier and changed it. The territory was vast—570,374 square miles, 365 million acres. People were few, the census of 1950 counting a mere 128,643 residents, or 284 acres per Alaskan.² These people were scattered across the vast landscape, concentrated in a few cities like Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, but many also lived in small villages and isolated homesteads. Indians and Inuits traveled the bush in search of salmon and caribou while, as the population grew in the 1950s and 1960s, sportsmen from the Lower 48 sought trophy fish and game, their floatplanes touching down in even the most remote corners of the Great Land. Even so, it seemed to many that Alaska was empty, a place that evoked the feeling of “a truly virgin land, a wilderness on a continental scale.”³ Alaska was, in the popular imagination, wilderness.

THE FIRST STAGE

The world changed nearly everywhere after World War II, and Alaska was not exempt. The war came to Alaska as the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands in 1943 and the U.S. military responded with a defensive buildup and ultimate repulse of the invaders. The Alaska Highway, built as part of this defensive effort, linked Alaska to the Lower 48 in 1942 and was opened to the public in 1948. Tourism in Alaska began, only a trickle at first. The normal boom-and-bust economy of the territory was stabilized by a continuing postwar military presence. The Cold War demanded a northern line of defense against the Soviet threat, and this led to the development of a chain of early warning stations across the wilderness north. The 1950s saw the culmination of a long push for Alaska statehood, which finally came in 1958. When Congress created the new state, it granted land that the new government could use to build its economy and its system of public education and to meet other needs, as had always been its practice in enabling statehood. In Alaska's case, Congress was especially generous: 102,550,000 acres could be selected from the public domain as state land, to join a million acres earlier granted to the territory. Alaska officials slowly began to select land, hampered by limited knowledge of what portions of this land might be most economically useful and by a limited financial ability to manage the land selected. With twenty-five years under the statehood act to choose its land grant, the state was in no hurry to make its selections.4

There was, however, a problem. Alaska Natives were scattered across the state, living in small, isolated villages and supporting themselves to a large extent with a subsistence lifestyle. They hunted, fished, and gathered to meet many of their needs, as they had for millennia. As the state proceeded to claim what it thought the most productive land, conflict with these people grew. Natives feared that development of state land claims would threaten their subsistence way of life. Native claims to land had been ignored since cession and throughout Alaska's history as a territory. Congress continued to ignore them in the statehood act. Alaska Natives had not been organized enough to press their case in these earlier times, but as concern among them grew over the threat of state land claims after statehood, they organized and their political voice grew too loud to ignore.

In 1966 the Alaska Federation of Natives requested that Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall impose a freeze on the transfer of lands to the state pending resolution of conflicts over land claims. While he had been resisting such a freeze for three years, the growing political power of the Alaska Natives led Udall in 1966 to stop transfer of all land until the issue could be resolved. How might such resolution be achieved? Some thought it should be through the courts, while others favored legislation. When, in 1968, oil was discovered on the North Slope at Prudhoe Bay and plans were drawn up to transport that oil across Alaska in an 800–mile pipeline, resolution of the conflict seemed imperative to all involved, especially the oil interests. Another Alaska economic boom depended on it. A quick legislative solution was necessary.

The interest of a third party was at stake in this dispute: the American public. If land was to be allocated to the state and to Alaska Natives, which part of the public domain was it in the “national interest” for the federal government to retain and protect? What rationales might be used to “reserve” some portions of Alaska's public domain lands from selection by either the state or Alaska Natives? Proposals had appeared over the years for national parks in Alaska, and one park (Mount McKinley) and two monuments (Katmai and Glacier Bay) had been established. Park proposals had been forwarded in the 1930s and 1940s for Admiralty Island, Lake George, and portions of the Wrangell-St. Elias mountains. In 1950 the Park Service initiated the Alaska Recreation Survey, which yielded extensive knowledge of potential Alaska parklands and, among other ideas, the first proposal for an Arctic Wilderness International Park in the area that was ultimately to become the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Other studies in the early 1960s, some under the aegis of the Park Service, yielded knowledge of preservation and recreation potentials in Alaska. National Park Service planner Ted Swem made his initial visit in 1962, returning in 1963 with wilderness advocate and writer Sigurd Olson. All of this contributed to a rudimentary and limited information base that the Park Service would tap when the question was posed as to what areas should be protected in the national interest.

When George B. Hartzog Jr. replaced Conrad Wirth as director of the Park Service in 1964, he realized that the greatest and perhaps only potential for significant growth of the national park system was in Alaska.5 He selected Ted Swem as his assistant director for cooperative activities and placed him in charge of planning and new area studies. He also appointed a special task force to analyze “the best remaining possibilities for the Service in Alaska.”⁶ Over the next several years, the Park Service extended its effort and presence in Alaska. An Alaskan field office opened and teams studied potential new areas for the national park system. In 1970 the service set out to determine how adequately the system illustrated the nation's human and natural history and, where there were gaps, to recommend how to fill them. As part of this national effort, the Alaska office developed a National Park System Alaska Plan that identified a long list of historical, natural, and recreation areas in the state that should be studied for possible inclusion in the National Park System.

A GREAT OPPORTUNITY

As the Park Service worked to assess the potential for parks in Alaska, Congress attempted to resolve the impasse over land claims as quickly as possible. A bill passed the Senate in 1970 that contained a provision directing the secretary of the interior to conduct “detailed studies and investigations of all unreserved public lands in Alaska … which are suitable for inclusion as recreation, wilderness or wildlife management areas within the National Park System and the National Wildlife Refuge System.” The secretary would advise Congress of such areas and withdraw them from land selection pending Congress's decision as to whether to add them to the park and refuge systems.7 The bill died in the House. The following year forces again mobilized to pass a bill settling the land claims issue. An Alaska coalition was formed by conservationists, and Stewart Brandborg, testifying before the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, argued that the native claims legislation should include a provision like that in the earlier bill for identification, preservation, and establishment of “areas of national significance as units of the National Park and National Wildlife and National Wilderness Preservation Systems.”⁸ Intensive lobbying by conservationists of Senator Alan Bible, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation, Hartzog, and others resulted in Bible sponsoring a national interest land amendment to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). After much maneuvering the ANCSA of 1971 was passed and signed by President Nixon. It authorized withdrawal by the secretary of the interior of up to 80 million acres for study for possible inclusion in one of the conservation systems.

The section of ANCSA significant to national parks and wilderness was 17(d)(2). It directed the secretary to withdraw up to 80 million acres within nine months. Lands withdrawn but not recommended for inclusion in the conservation systems would be available for selection by the state and native regional corporations; areas recommended for inclusion would remain withdrawn until Congress acted, not to exceed five years from the date of recommendation. Approval of ANCSA thus launched a nine-year campaign that would result in “one of the most significant pieces of conservation legislation in American history” and vastly enlarge the national park system and national park wilderness.9

As the work on the Alaska d-2 withdrawals began, wilderness preservation was not an overt and principal concern. Conservationists and many Park Service people engaged in Alaska work simply assumed that protecting land of national significance in Alaska would protect wilderness. Few land areas in the United States (or anywhere in the world outside of Antarctica) were wilder and less affected by human activity than these Alaska lands. Since the Park Service was under a congressional mandate to review parkland everywhere else in the system for potential inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System, it expected that the issue of wilderness would be addressed, if not in whatever legislation established new Alaska parks, then in the way Congress had recently stipulated for new parks outside Alaska such as North Cascades.

The first task was to identify the lands for withdrawal. Hartzog appointed Ted Swem to coordinate the effort, and Swem called in Richard Stenmark from the Alaska office. The recently completed National Park System Plan with its history and natural history themes was applied as a way to identify areas that would form a system in Alaska consistent with goals of the national system. Within days, drawing upon the information gathered in the Alaska park studies of the past several decades, Stenmark had a list of candidate areas (including twelve natural and ten historical and archaeological areas). These were sent forward by Assistant Secretary Reed to Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton, who announced on March 15 that he was signing public land orders for 273 million Alaska acres. Of these, 33.5 million acres were to be studied as additions to the national park system. The Park Service was generally, though not entirely, pleased with Morton's recommendations, for he had modified the agency proposals to satisfy political interests. Some areas identified by the Park Service were excluded, such as parts of Gates of the Arctic in the Brooks Range, portions of the Wrangell Mountains, and Kenai Fjords.

Still, these March recommendations were preliminary, and with final recommendations due in September, the federal agencies continued to work furiously to assure that the best lands were being recommended for withdrawal. Under the overall direction of the indefatigable Ted Swem, five Park Service teams took to the field to fine tune the recommendations, the final versions of which were due in the secretary's office in late July. When the secretary announced final withdrawals in September, included were 41,685,000 acres of potential park additions. Since any new park unit would be established by Congress, detailed legislative recommendations had to be drawn up, and this would, over the next four to five years, involve a herculean effort. By 1978 the Park Service and its consultants had completed 176 studies, with 61 still in progress.

Conceptual master plans and environmental impact assessments had to be prepared, and in the process National Park Service planners realized that Alaska posed special problems and opportunities. Among the usual problems was the tight time frame. They could not be as thorough in their analysis as they would like. The Park Service could not proceed slowly as it had in wilderness reviews because it had clear congressional deadlines and a onetime opportunity for massive expansion of the national park system, and would do nothing to jeopardize that opportunity. A unique problem was that people used some of the potential parkland for subsistence. Throughout American national park history the guiding policy had been that people did not inhabit national parks (except of course the park managers and concessionaires judged essential to provide the park experience to the public). When indigenous people hunted and gathered or otherwise “inhabited” a potential park, they were removed before the park was established.10 This would not be acceptable in Alaska for various reasons, principal among them that the indigenous people there had achieved an unparalleled level of political clout that had forged the very opportunity at hand. Also, by the 1970s, a sense of social justice had emerged in Americans that simply would not tolerate massive dispossession of people in the United States even for such a cause as wilderness preservation. Some Alaska park planners saw the possibility of a new kind of park, a chance to affirm an indigenous heritage value. A new concept of national park was necessary that could include inhabitants.

At one stage of the exploration of Alaska park potentials, Alaska Natives offered a proposal unique in the history of the national park wilderness story. In April 1973 the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) proposed a park that would be co-managed by natives and the Park Service and would protect wilderness and thus the subsistence base of native people in the Central Brooks Range. The natives would combine their land selections with federal lands, thus creating both a wilderness and a cultural park, which they proposed be called the Nunamiut National Wildlands. Emboldened to make such a proposal by the guarantees of subsistence hunting and gathering in ANCSA, they seem to have thought that their interests would be served by a wilderness park that would protect subsistence resources. According to park planner John Kauffmann, “Retention of wilderness conditions, for the local people or for visitors, was the underlying management principal” that would be applied to this “Nunamiut National Wildlands.”11

The Park Service authorized Kauffmann to discuss this proposal with the Nunamiut, and the ensuing negotiations changed the ASRC proposal and fleshed it out. The national park, which would be divided into an east and a west unit, would be called Gates of the Arctic National Park. The Nunamiut National Wildlands would lie between the two units and would include the native village of Anaktuvuk Pass. Management of the park would institute new approaches: subsistence hunting would be allowed; “fair-chase hunting” by sportsmen would be permitted, strictly limited to travel on foot, with no high-tech air and radio aids, with a wilderness stay of ten days minimum required; visitors could fly in, landing only in designated places, with reservations and permits required; the Nunamiut National Wildlands would be similarly managed, but it would be co-managed by the service and the natives, with subsistence hunting given priority over any sport hunting. No development for visitors would be allowed anywhere in the complex.¹²

This radical proposal was dead on arrival in Washington, DC. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rejected the Nunamiut National Wild-lands designation, stating that it would not accept a proposal that relinquished some of the federal authority to parties outside government. The idea that national and native interests might coincide within a wilderness park appealed to some in both the Park Service and the native community. In the end it was not seriously considered, and even John Kauffmann, who was initially intrigued by the possibility of a much larger park with the native lands included, grew cool to the idea, fearing that the wildlands designation might be an invitation to later development. He knew that the natives were hard-nosed negotiators who sought a proposal that would in every way maximize their situation, and granting them co-management of any part of the area posed at least the potential of future erosion of wilderness. Kauffmann moved on to other plans.

Theodore Catton, in his study of the relationship between national parks and native people in Alaska, argues that this episode was an important step toward the realization that new models of national parks might be necessary in Alaska. Could there be “inhabited wilderness” parks in which indigenous people could practice their traditional lifestyle, even though it clashed with long-established canons of national park management? The very idea of hunting of any sort in national parks had been taboo since the 1890s. Yet in Alaska, subsistence hunting had been practiced for millennia, and was the land not still wild? Some conservationists came to the position that humans belonged, in the subsistence sense, in Alaska wilderness. Catton writes that some “sought to broaden the primitivist wilderness aesthetic so as to include an appreciation of contemporary native life. One spoke to the NPS's mandate of preserving natural conditions, the other to the service's mandate to provide for the enjoyment of national parks by wilderness users.”¹³ In the end, Catton concludes, the National Park Service “indicated that it did not want the law to declare subsistence to be a park purpose (as the Nunamiut National Park proposal did) but only a permitted use.”¹⁴ When legislation was finally approved in 1980, the question of whether subsistence was a purpose of new Alaska parks was unclear. But what was clear was that the parks were to be both wilderness and subsistence landscapes.

Another opportunity in Alaska, the Park Service saw, was that it might be possible to draw boundaries to encompass entire watersheds, intact habitats for wildlife, or even ecosystems. Development and the politics of park designation elsewhere in the United States precluded such possibilities, but vast areas in Alaska were undeveloped. Achieving protection on such scales required extensive data to support rationales, more data than the park planners had yet available. Details of boundaries and rationales for drawing them according to “ecologic” criteria would have to appear in legislative proposals. All of this required exploration of literal and figurative new ground by the Park Service.

On December 17, 1973, Secretary Morton forwarded proposed “final” Alaska land legislation to Congress. He recommended that 83,470,000 acres be added to the conservation system, 32,600,000 of which would be new park system units. If approved, the recommendation would double the size of the national park system. Traditional subsistence uses would continue in all d-2 areas. All park areas except Yukon-Charley National Rivers were placed off limits to appropriation, and a three-year wilderness review was required. Morton's proposal to continue sport hunting in six of the proposed park areas was especially controversial.

This legislation proposed by Morton pleased no one. The state complained that it would “lock up” too much land and cripple its economic prospects, and it pledged to sue to stop the proposal from going anywhere. Conservationists thought too much land of national significance had been left out. They drafted alternative legislation proposing 119,600,000 acres, 62 million for national parks. The Park Service saw the Morton package as “bitter sweet.”15 While the park system would double in size, some areas the Park Service thought of park quality were to be managed by other agencies or not included in a conservation system at all. The sport hunting provision, included by Morton to mollify the politically powerful Alaska hunting lobby, troubled them greatly. The Morton proposal thus set the stage for an epic conservation struggle that was to stretch over the next seven years and generate national controversy.

This first stage of the Alaska national interest land process had not been about wilderness preservation. The issue of what might be in the national interest had been raised because of the likelihood that some of America's finest scenery and wildlife might be lost to the state and native corporations that were more interested in development for their own benefit than in the interest of the people of America as a whole. As in the earlier stages of national park history in the Lower 48, the wilderness quality of the new parks was assumed. John Kauffmann, in describing how he and many of his Park Service colleagues saw their work in Alaska, affirms their strong commitment to wilderness preservation:

For National Park Service planners, preservation with use was an ideological inheritance of our profession at a time when there was much talk about recreational demand—practically imperious demand. Yet here were resources, fragile and finite, physical but also experiential, dependent upon our devising a management strategy that would allow them to endure forever, forever in the finest quality, offering discovery and solitude no matter how many people might seek recreation in the Great Land. It was, in a way, a wilderness trust fund, capable of yielding unforgettable dividends only if the capital were not invaded.16

The Alaska Park Service crew in this hectic time believed they had an opportunity unequaled in the history of their agency and that opportunity lay not only in providing for recreation but in protecting a unique part of the American heritage—truly vast wilderness.

The Morton bill launched a national debate about what Alaska lands should remain in the public domain and to what purposes they should be allocated. While this was being played out, the tide of interest in wilderness preservation was flowing strongly in the conservation community, and the issue was before Congress as the wilderness reviews mandated by the Wilderness Act progressed in the stop-and-go way that has been described. The Alaska lands at issue were wilderness, and protection of them would be de facto wilderness preservation. The first task of all concerned—the Park Service and conservationists—had been to retain as much of the land they judged of national significance in the public domain by keeping it closed to selection. Whether it would be park, wildlife refuge, wilderness, or some other designation would be the focus of the next stage of the process.

THE PUSH FOR ANILCA

The deadline Congress had given itself approached inexorably after this rush of effort, but for various reasons Morton's proposal languished for three years. During this time Nixon resigned the presidency and Gerald Ford succeeded him. Neither administration seemed to have an inclination to push the Alaska legislation. The Park Service, conservationists, and interests opposed to the proposals prepared in the meantime for the day when the issues would be engaged. Movement finally came with the election of Jimmy Carter as president in November 1976. Conservationists met within a week of the election to begin the process of drawing up a new Alaska Lands bill.17 Working with the staff of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, chaired by Democratic Arizona congressman Morris Udall, the Alaska Coalition prepared a bill quite different from the Morton proposal—it adopted park and refuge boundaries identified as areas of ecological concern by the agencies back in 1973.¹⁸ On January 4, 1977, Udall and seventy-five cosponsors introduced H.R. 39.

This bill was a conservationist wish list: set aside more than 115 million acres in the four national systems, over 64 million in the National Park System; create twenty-three wild and scenic rivers with the National Park Service administering them; add 46 million acres to the wildlife refuge system; and authorize millions of acres of “instant wilderness,” including virtually all national park areas in Alaska. This last proposal, which proved to be among the most controversial of the bill, would exempt d-2 lands from the wilderness review procedures established by the Wilderness Act.¹⁹

The sponsors of this legislation knew it would not be approved as introduced but intended that it define the issues for the debate. Opposition came from many directions—native corporations, Alaska politicians, and especially development interests. Alternative bills were drawn up and introduced by these opponents. In September President Carter's secretary of the interior, Cecil Andrus, offered amendments that scaled back H.R. 39 and reduced “instant wilderness” to 31 million acres. Over the next eight months the debate raged in the House. The Park Service analyzed the proposal, and Director William Whalen recommended amendments that slightly reduced recommended new park acreage to 51 million acres. He supported the “instant wilderness” designation in some proposed parks, including Gates of the Arctic, Wrangell-Saint Elias, Admiralty Islands, Lake Clark, Glacier Bay, Kenai Fjords, and Denali. Other national park system areas should, in his view, be studied for wilderness designation.

The new House Committee on General Oversight and Alaska Lands held hearings on H.R. 39 in spring and summer of 1977 and revised the bill. Overall acreage added to the four systems was reduced slightly to 104.7 million acres, with National Park System acreage increased to 45.7 million. Instant wilderness was proposed for 81,700,000 acres. The full Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs considered the bill in March 1978, making additional revisions, though 75 million acres of instant wilderness remained. Since the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries had responsibility for wildlife refuges, the bill was then referred to it. Several differences between the committees were resolved and a compromise bill was drafted. It was introduced to the House floor on May 17, 1978. After three days of debate the House passed the bill by a considerable margin of 279–31. Ten new national park units would be created along with additions to three existing areas totaling 42,720,000 acres.

With the ANCSA deadline for d-2 legislation fast approaching at the end of the year, action shifted to the Senate, where the strategy of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was to delay the process in hopes that as the deadline approached the opportunity for compromise in his direction would increase. He was successful; the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources reported an Alaska bill on October 5, just eight days before Congress was set to adjourn. This bill, which recommended 88 million acres to the conservation systems, including over 43 million acres to the National Park System (of which 30 million would be instant wilderness), was not acceptable to the Carter administration, conservationists, or supporters of H.R. 39 in the House. Despite eleventh-hour efforts for a compromise, the Alaska bill died.

Anticipating the possibility that this might happen, the administration had been studying how it might protect the d-2 lands in the face of congressional inaction. In mid-November the state of Alaska forced federal action by filing for selection of 41 million acres, including more than 9 million acres of d-2 land. Two days later Secretary Andrus, invoking the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, withdrew 110,750,000 acres. On December 1, Pres i dent Carter designated seventeen national monuments in Alaska that included 41 million acres to be added to the National Park System. Before he was finished, Carter found a way to protect every acre being considered for protection by Congress.20

The 96th Congress would next engage the issue. If it did not, the executive action would stand, which no one, including the Carter administration, thought would or should be the result of all this maneuvering. Everyone wanted congressional resolution of the issues. Midterm elections had changed the composition of Congress, with seventy seats in the House changing hands and the party out of power (the Republicans) making gains. Morris Udall reintroduced H.R. 39 with ninety-one cosponsors, his bill affirming the Carter administration actions and deleting compromises made to pass the earlier version. Over 85 million acres of instant wilderness were now proposed. After much wrangling, H.R. 39 again passed the House on May 15.

The Senate did not begin work on a bill until October, and that bill was the one considered the previous year that had been unacceptable to supporters of H.R. 39. The Senate Energy Committee reported this bill, and efforts began to strengthen it on the Senate floor. The effort stalled, and floor debate was postponed until the following year. When Congress reconvened in January 1980, hope for quick action was again stymied and the prospect loomed of yet another stalemate in the 96th Congress. Finally, in July the Senate took up the bill, but Senator Stevens blocked progress with many amendments. His stalling tactics were buttressed by a filibuster by Alaska colleague Mike Gravel. Finally, on August 19, 1980, the Senate passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act by a vote of 78–14. Supporters of the House bill, led by conservationists, considered the Senate bill weak and hoped to strengthen it in conference, but this could not be accomplished before the November elections. Ronald Reagan won the White House and Republicans gained control of the Senate. The House then approved the Senate bill as the best possible under the circumstances, and on December 2, 1980, President Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA).

ANILCA

While ANILCA was less than many conservationists had sought and was, in their view, flawed in many ways, it was a massive and historic statute— the largest ever in the scale of resource values being protected. It added over 53 million acres to the National Wildlife Refuge System, added parts of twenty-five rivers to the Wild and Scenic Rivers System with others designated for study, and created two national monuments to be administered by the Forest Service. A whopping 56,400,000 acres were added to the National Wilderness Preservation System and 43,600,000 acres to the National Park System, a large portion of which were instant wilderness. National park units included in the legislation are detailed in Table 2.

The total National Park System wilderness instantly established in Alaska was 32.4 million acres (later determined to be close to 33 million). By this time Congress had established twenty-five wilderness units elsewhere in the National Park System totaling 2,975,353 acres. The National Park Service found itself manager of nearly 36 million acres of congressionally designated wilderness, the government agency charged with the management of more official wilderness land than any other in the world.

The 179 pages of ANILCA were divided into fifteen titles, the first of which explained the goals of the legislation. Titles II through VII described the specific units to be protected and for what purposes. Title II(4)(a), for instance, dealt with Gates of the Arctic National Park and included the following statement of the park's purpose:

The park and preserve shall be managed for the following purposes, among others: To maintain the wild and undeveloped character of the area, including opportunity for visitors to experience solitude, and the natural environmental integrity and scenic beauty of the mountains, forelands, rivers, lakes, and other natural features; to provide continued opportunities, including reasonable access, for mountain climbing, mountaineering, and other wilderness recreational activities, and to protect habitat for populations of fish and wildlife.21

Boundaries of park, preserve, and wilderness were described. The purposes of all new National Park System units were stipulated, as were wilderness areas where there were any, and other specific provisions were made, such as, “Subsistence uses by local residents shall be permitted in the park, where such uses are traditional, in accordance with the provisions of Title VIII.”²²

This matter of subsistence was a significant departure from traditional national park policy. Title VIII added a third dimension to the mandates under which the Park Service had managed its domain since its beginning. In addition to the charge “to conserve the scenery and national and historical objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of same,” the Park Service in Alaska would have “to provide the opportunity for rural residents engaged in a subsistence way of life to continue to do so.” Elsewhere in the national park system the policy was that people could not harm or remove any park resource under penalty of law, so Congress worded this provision carefully. Section 803 defined subsistence as “the customary and traditional uses by rural Alaska residents of wild, renewable resources for direct personal or family consumption as food, shelter, fuel, clothing, tools or transportation; for making and selling of handicraft articles out of non-edible by-products of fish and wildlife resources taken for personal or family consumption; and for customary trade … by administratively designated local rural people.”23 People would be consuming national park resources, especially wildlife. They would also be doing this in designated wilderness using tools banned elsewhere in the National Wilderness Preservation System, such as motorized vehicles, and constructing and maintaining cabins. The Park Service would have the authority to regulate or limit such activity when it was judged a threat to the wilderness character of a park, but this discretion would, given the history of Alaska, ANCSA, and ANILCA, require extremely careful exercise and would be subject to great political pressure.

These first eight titles stipulated how the national interest lands were to be allocated, and the final seven specified the rules and implementation procedures that Congress thought necessary to achieve the first eight. These latter titles were the product of compromise in which Alaska development interests and Alaska Natives fought for their causes. ANILCA must be consistent with the Alaska Statehood Act and ANCSA regarding oil and gas development, transportation access and planning, and federal and state cooperation. There were twenty-eight separate and detailed administrative provisions. Considering all its provisions, ANILCA had greatly enlarged the National Wilderness Preservation system, but in doing so had posed many new and complicated challenges for wilderness planners and managers.

The legislation set deadlines for the agencies to start work on their new responsibilities in Alaska. The Park Service was instructed to prepare management plans for all its new areas within five years, with explicit orders to describe how it would manage these vast new areas. Congress recognized, in its instructions, that there were “unique conditions in Alaska” that should be considered and thus activities forbidden elsewhere—principally motorized access and cabins—might be allowed. The Park Service was also instructed in Title XIV to review, in the same period, the suitability for wilderness designation of all national park lands in Alaska not designated as wilderness by the act. This was application to Alaska of the policies and procedures of wilderness review elsewhere in the National Park System.

The Park Service was delighted to achieve some of its dreams for Alaska, but now it faced some serious challenges. Foremost among them was politics, for even as it set out to implement the provisions of ANILCA an administration hostile to the legislation's goals came into office. During his presidential campaign Governor Ronald Reagan sharply stated his opinion of the Carter-Andrus withdrawals of 1979:

Our government in the last year or so has taken out of multiple use millions of acres of public lands…. It is believed that probably 70 percent of the potential oil in the United States is probably hidden in those lands, and no one is allowed to even go and explore to find out if it is there. This is particularly true of the recent efforts to shut down part of Alaska.24

When Reagan became president he appointed James G. Watt, a pro-development conservative, as his secretary of the interior. The new secretary was, to say the least, not helpful as the Park Service and other agencies tackled the mandates and challenges of ANILCA. The service went about its work under several severe handicaps. First, the administration saw to it that the effort was inadequately funded. The Park Service had to staff the new areas, carry out wilderness suitability studies, and prepare general management plans, among other tasks, with few new resources. By the middle of 1983 the Park Service had been allocated only twenty full-time employees to staff the more than 50 million new acres of national park and preserve land in Alaska. Whatever the shortcomings of its efforts might be, they were not the result of the stalling that had marked Park Service wilderness review efforts elsewhere in the National Park System. Here the agency was enthusiastic and committed to setting up new wilderness parks, and its problem was an administration that did not want such parks. The Reagan people could not repeal ANILCA, but they did everything they could to slow its implementation by pinching the resources necessary to achieve it.

A second problem involved the regulations necessary to implement ANILCA. Broad guidelines were set up in the legislation—the executive branch had to promulgate the detailed regulations necessary to achieve the goals of the legislation. Here was another opportunity for administration stalling and reducing, and the Watt people took advantage of it whenever they could. Yet another opportunity lay in the discretionary parts of the legislation that they could use to achieve their goals. The Reagan administration was oriented to development, as had been ANILCA opponents. It leaned toward development rather than preservation wherever it could in addressing the discretionary parts of the act. This put the Park Service on the defensive when it needed to be on the offensive in the sense that it needed to be planning for long-term management of its new areas. The new parks in Alaska might be different in some respects from those elsewhere in the system, but the mission to protect the park resources was well established. The Park Service had plenty of precedent and legal authority to preserve its parks, and it needed all of it. It found itself in this period protecting the Alaska parks from the government rather than for it, though it could not, of course, say so.

On the wilderness front, the service faced two immediate tasks: to set up management of the vast wilderness units created instantly by ANILCA and to do the wilderness suitability reviews as directed by Section 1317. Doing the wilderness management was both a short-term, on-the-ground challenge and a long-term planning problem. ANILCA had drawn lines on the maps and stipulated that areas within those lines would be managed the same as the rest of the National Wilderness Preservation System as stipulated by the Wilderness Act, except where otherwise directed (as with subsistence hunting). So the Park Service needed to put people into the field to see that this was done. The planning task involved the preparation of general management plans for all the areas, which would include planning for wilderness management.