So, whose land? There are no easy answers. Wherever and whatever the environmental battlegrounds, protagonists on either side of a particular issue have almost always posed them in black and white. Their resolution rarely is.
In the summer before his death, John F. Kennedy wrote the introduction to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s book, The Quiet Crisis. Kennedy urged: “We must do in our own day what Theodore Roosevelt did sixty years ago and Franklin Roosevelt thirty years ago: we must expand the concept of conservation to meet the imperious problems of the new age.” 45
Some of the dominant issues of our own new age—this next frontier—appear obvious and urgent to all: whether or not to drill for oil in ANWR, build a natural gas pipeline across the Brooks Range, or maintain the balance of the salmon harvests. Other issues are subtler but have just as long-term ramifications. What is the ultimate carrying capacity of the land—whether in downtown Ketchikan when umpteen cruise ships dock or amid the yellow snow on the West Buttress of Denali?
A whining turbo-prop flying far too low flashes through the Gates of the Arctic—well below the rocky arêtes of Bob Marshall’s twin pillars of Boreal Mountain and Frigid Crags. Yes, those on board will say, we’ve been above the Arctic Circle. Gates of the Arctic? Yeah, we saw them.
Down below, ten days into a Brooks Range crossing, a solitary group of five backpackers can only stare skyward and gawk. Even the grandest of scales can be threatened. Who is to say, however, that the five pairs of footprints are not also an intrusion, a disruption of Nature’s balance? Who is to say that they and those who will follow them in increasing numbers are not inexorably changing the land? Are a few dozen oil wells on a few thousand acres out of19.5 million more of a threat to the land’s sustainability than half a million tourists at Denali or new bridges and improved roads stabbed straight into the heart of the Wrangell Mountains?
There are no easy answers. Those who profess to have them either have never seen the land or have failed to try to understand it. What is certain is that whatever answers are applied to this land today, their impacts will be increasingly profound—and increasingly irrevocable. Whether one cheers the change or bemoans it, Alaska stands poised once again to cross the next frontier.