Pioneering Conservation In Alaska

A companion volume to Environmental Conflict in Alaska, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska chronicles the central land and wildlife issues and the growth of environmental conservation in Alaska during its Russian and territorial eras. The Alaskan frontier tempted fur traders, whalers, salmon fishers, gold miners, hunters, and oilmen to take what they could without regard for long-term consequences. Wildlife species, ecosystems, and Native cultures suffered, sometimes irreparably. Damage to wildlife and lands drew the attention of environmentalists, including John Muir, who applied their influence to enact wildlife protection laws and set aside lands for conservation. Alaska served as a testing ground for emergent national resource policy in the United States, as environmental values of species and ecosystem sustainability replaced the unrestrained exploitation of Alaska's early frontier days. Efforts of conservation leaders and the territory's isolation, small human population, and late development prevented widespread destruction and gave Americans a unique opportunity to protect some of the world's most pristine wilderness. Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska illustrates the historical precedents for current natural resource disputes in Alaska and will fascinate readers interested in wildlife and conservation.

This is an innovative and collaborative life history of one of Alaska's pioneering wildlife biologists. David R. Klein has been a leader in promoting habitat studies across wildlife research in Alaska, and this is his first-hand account of how science and biological fieldwork has been carried out in Alaska in the last sixty years. This book tells the stories of how Klein did his science and the inspiration behind the research, while exposing the thinking that underlies particular scientific theories. In addition, this book shows the evolution of Alaska's wildlife management regimes from territorial days to statehood to the era of big oil. The first portion of the book is comprised of stories from Klein's life collected during oral history interviews, while the latter section contains essays written by Klein about philosophical topics of importance to him, such as eco-philosophy, the definition of wilderness, and the morality of hunting. Many of Klein's graduate students have gone on to become successful wildlife managers themselves, in Alaska and around the globe. Through The Making of an Ecologist, Klein's outlook, philosophy, and approach toward sustainability, wildlife management, and conservation can now inspire even more readers to ensure the survival of our fragile planet in an ever-changing global society.

Born in Washington in 1917, Ginny Hill Wood served as a Women's Airforce Service pilot in World War II and flew a military surplus airplane to Alaska in 1946. Settling in Fairbanks, she went on to cofound Camp Denali, Alaska's first wilderness ecotourism lodge. This title presents an oral history of Ginny Hill Wood.

The last book on Alaska politics came out over twenty years ago, long before the rise of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and the decline of oil revenue and fisheries. With Alaska Politics and Public Policy, Clive Thomas has pulled together a diverse team of specialists to update and expand our understanding of the political and policy realities of Alaska. This comprehensive volume lays out a detailed map of a political landscape that's physically huge, environmentally diverse, and constrained in economics and population. This book, the most comprehensive on Alaska politics and public policy published to date, explores how beliefs, institutions, personalities, and power shape Alaska politics and public policies. Understanding how these elements interact helps explain why and how some issues get dealt with by government in Alaska, why others get little attention, why some are tackled but cannot be resolved, and why others are not addressed at all. Combining the human element with the interrelationships within the political system gets to the very nature of politics. The book ranges from covering the basics of Alaska politics to providing detailed treatments of the factors shaping politics and the operation of government to providing in-depth analysis of issues and policies. Alaska Politics and Public Policy provides a wide range of information and analysis to a broad readership--from those with very little knowledge of Alaska politics to Alaska politics junkies. The book also includes an extensive glossary of terms related to Alaska and its politics. Two types of people were asked to contribute to the book: One group is political scientists and other social scientists. The other includes past and present state elected and appointed officials, as well as other political practitioners and observers, such as lobbyists and journalists. This combination of contributors enables the book to provide both conceptual and hands-on insights into its comprehensive coverage of topics ranging from the role of Alaska Natives to the influence of interest groups to the reality of the state's dependence on oil to the ambivalent attitude toward the federal government to the likely potential of the Arctic in Alaska's future.

Alaska often looms large as a remote, wild place with endless resources and endlessly independent, resourceful people. Yet it has always been part of larger stories: the movement of Indigenous peoples from Asia into the Americas and their contact with and accommodation to Western culture; the spread of European political economy to the New World; the expansion of American capitalism and culture; and the impacts of climate change. In this updated classic, distinguished historian Stephen Haycox surveys the state’s cultural, political, economic, and environmental past, examining its contemporary landscape and setting the region in a broader, global context. Tracing Alaska’s transformation from the early postcontact period through the modern era, Haycox explores the ever-evolving relationship between Native Alaskans and the settlers and institutions that have dominated the area, highlighting Native agency, advocacy, and resilience. Throughout, he emphasizes the region’s systemic dependence on both federal support and outside corporate investment in natural resources—furs, gold, copper, salmon, oil—and offers a less romantic, more complex history that acknowledges the broader national and international contexts of Alaska’s past.

No American state is more antistatist than Alaska. And no state takes in more federal money per capita, which accounts for a full third of Alaska's economy. This seeming paradox underlies the story Stephen Haycox tells in Battleground Alaska, a history of the fraught dynamic between development and environmental regulation in a state aptly dubbed "The Last Frontier." Examining inconvenient truths, the book investigates the genesis and persistence of the oft-heard claim that Congress has trampled Alaska's sovereignty with its management of the state's pristine wilderness. At the same time it debunks the myth of an inviolable Alaska statehood compact at the center of this claim. Unique, isolated, and remote, Alaska's economy depends as much on absentee corporate exploitation of its natural resources, particularly oil, as it does on federal spending. This dependency forces Alaskans to endorse any economic development in the state, putting them in conflict with restrictive environmental constraint. Battleground Alaska reveals how Alaskans' abiding resentment of federal regulation and control has exacerbated the tensions and political sparring between these camps—and how Alaska's leaders have exploited this antistatist sentiment to promote their own agendas, specifically the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Haycox builds his history and critique around four now classic environmental battles in modern Alaska: the establishment of the ANWR is the 1950s; the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s; the passage of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act in 1980; and the struggle that culminated in the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990. What emerges is a complex tale, with no clear-cut villains and heroes, that explains why Alaskans as a collective almost always opt for development, even as they profess their genuine love for the beauty and bounty of their state's environment. Yet even as it exposes the potential folly of this practice, Haycox's work reminds environmentalists that all wilderness is inhabited, and that human life depends—as it always has—on the exploitation of the earth's resources.

Aunt Phil's Trunk Volume Five features dozens of short stories and hundreds of historical photographs that share the history of Alaska from 1960 to 1984. This fifth book in the Alaska history series highlights the first 25 years of statehood when the optimistic citizens of the Great Land created a government from scratch in just a few years and dealt with many challenges. Aunt Phil s Trunk Volume Five shares firsthand accounts of survivors who experienced the 1964 Good Friday earthquake and the devastating tsunamis that followed that 9.2 temblor. It also features stories about the discovery of black gold on the North Slope in the late 1960s, and how Alaska s Native people fought for their land and won the largest settlement ever granted Native Americans. That agreement cleared the way for oil companies to build an 800-mile pipeline through some of the most rugged and remote country in the world during the 1970s.