The Conservation Debate

The House assigned the bill to a subcommittee for "General Oversight and Alaska Lands."  The subcommittee held hearings in the spring and summer of 1977 in five cities in the Lower 48 - Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as communities in Alaska. The Alaska Coalition publicized the hearings widely before the Congressmen arrived in each stateside city. As a result, over two thousand people testified, almost all of them speaking in favor of the bill and for protecting wilderness in Alaska.

H.R. 39 proposed that Alaskan Natives would continue to have access to traditional resources within the conservation units. One hunter from the village of Minto told the Congressmen that if their generation failed to protect the land," God might forgive them, but their children would not." But while villages in Alaska wanted protection from development, many in urban Alaska seemed determined to keep Alaska open to development.

The Anchorage Times complained about "locking up" Alaska's mineral resources, making the national parks' riches accessible only to "butterfly chasers" and backpackers. Alaska was "pioneering country," former Governor Hickel told a New York Times reporter; it didn't need "a no-growth approach." "Is a trapper's cabin on a bend of a remote river an unsightly thing or something of beauty," he asked. Tom Snapp, editor of a Fairbanks weekly paper, wrote, "We were supposed to be taken in as a state on an equal basis, but we're not going to be allowed to develop the way other states develop their resources."

The belief that Alaska was a "frontier society" that could generate its own economic well-being was at the heart of much of the criticism of the Udall "lock-up." Hickel believed that Alaska's resources should belong to Alaskans. To develop Alaska, the resources would be used as the base of an economy that could expand, providing jobs and material comfort for all those who wanted to live in the state. He could not understand why the opportunity for development should be stopped.

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