[100
years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a
National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and
other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]
On three
factors that help explain the unique life and legacy of the “Grandmother
of the Conservation Movement.”
1)
Alaska: Born Margaret Elizabeth Thomas in
Seattle in 1902, Mardy and her family moved to Fairbanks, Alaska when she was
9; although she briefly attended colleges in both Oregon and Massachusetts, she
would return to Alaska to finish school at the Alaska
Agricultural College and School of Mines[ (becoming its first female graduate
in 1924). While her life,
inspiring marriage (on which more momentarily), and conservation efforts would
take her to many other places for much of the rest of her life, Alaska always
remained a focal point, as illustrated by her successful 1956 campaign to
create the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge and her late 1970s testimony in support of
the Alaska
National Interests Lands Conservation Act (signed by President Carter in 1980).
Alaska is of course hugely singular on the American landscape, but it’s also
long served as an exemplification of the broader need to protect public lands,
and no one has been more instrumental to those efforts than Mardy Murie.
2)
Her Marriage: She was Mardy Murie because of Olaus
Murie, a biologist and fellow conservationist she met in Fairbanks and married (at
sunrise in the village of Anvik) the same year she graduated college. I’m not
sure any single detail could better capture their genuine partnership than the
fact that their
honeymoon consisted of a 500-mile dogsled journey around Alaska to research
its wildlife and ecosystems. The lifelong, deeply inspiring partnership that
developed from there would eventually take the Muries to Moose, Wyoming (near
Jackson Hole), where the ranch that served as both their home and their
research base has since become a National
Historic Landmark (linked to Grand Teton National Park) as well
as an operating
scientific and conservation school. Mardy’s activisms weren’t defined
(and certainly weren’t circumscribed) by her marriage, but they were absolutely
complemented and amplified by it, as were his.
3)
The
Wilderness Act: While it doesn’t really make sense to boil centuries-long
movements down to individual moments or laws, it’s nonetheless fair to say that
one of the most significant such turning points for the environmental and
conservation movements in America was the 1964 passage of the
Wilderness Act, the first law to create a national legal definition of
“wilderness.” That act was written by the then-Executive Director of the
Wilderness Society, Howard
Zahniser, and in both its creation and its nearly decade-long fight for
passage represented a collaboration between many of the leading voices in that
longstanding organization—a community that featured Mardy and Olaus Murie
throughout their lives. While Olaus had tragically passed away in 1963, Mardy
attended the ceremony at which President Lyndon Johnson signed the
Act, as is only appropriate for an activist without whom every 20th
century conservation effort would look different and far less successful.
Next
AlaskaStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?
