Political Machinations

However, though the tide seemed to be running with the environmentalists' drive for a strong conservation bill, the U.S. Senate has a tradition of not passing any bill that impacts a particular state when the senators from that state have strong objections.  This gave Alaska Senators Stevens and Gravel leverage, and instead of taking up the House bill, they persuaded the Senate to write its own bill. The tactic was to use every opportunity to delay the bill so that the deadline of December 1978 would pass before Congress could produce a bill. As the Senate diddled over its Alaska bill for months, environmentalists became increasingly concerned. Some began to think that Stevens and Gravel would sidetrack the whole process and six years of work would go up in smoke. 

As the deadline drew near, Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus made it clear that he would use any means he had to protect all the lands under discussion if Congress failed to produce legislation. Meanwhile, in the last hours of the 95th Congress, Gravel took to the Senate floor to filibuster a compromise to extend the deadline by two years. On October 14, the session expired with no Alaska land conservation bill. 

With the conservation bill dead, state government officials quickly moved to select more land. The state still had 43 million acres left to select under the Statehood Act. In early November, the state filed an application with the BLM for 41 million acres. Nearly one-quarter of the selections were in proposed new federal conservation units under H.R. 39.

Next Page

To navigate through the textbook, click on the next page button or go to the navigation menu on the top left.