Jimmy Carter shaped modern Alaska in profound, lasting ways

They burned him in effigy in Fairbanks. At the state fair dunk tank, they fired baseballs at pictures of him and the Ayatollah. But President Jimmy Carter shaped Alaska’s future so effectively that today, 44 years after passage of the epic conservation law that stirred pickets and protests, many Alaskans may wonder what the fuss was all about.

Alaska without the national parks and ever-wild landscapes that make it a world-famous travel destination? Unimaginable.

Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, was the only U.S. president to hang a map of Alaska on the wall of the Oval Office. Judging by what he wrote about his later trips north — often just to fish, hike and birdwatch in the wilderness — it can probably be said that he was not only the president with the biggest impact on Alaska but also the one with the deepest love for the state.

The law that Carter called his greatest domestic achievement, and the source of so much controversy here, was the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA, which Carter signed into law on Dec. 2, 1980, as one of the last acts of his presidency. The law doubled the size of the national park and refuge systems, protected 25 wild rivers and classified 56 million acres of Alaska as wilderness. It was also the basis for federal protection of rural subsistence hunting and fishing.

The lock-up law would be the ruin of Alaska — so said the dominant voices of Alaska politics and business. They fought the proposed measure for a decade, arguing that it would close off mining, oil drilling, logging and other economic opportunities. The protest howls were loudest in 1978, when the president unilaterally created 55 million acres of national monuments in Alaska because Congress had thus far failed to act.

For the national environmental movement cresting in the 1970s, on the other hand, Carter fit the moment. Officials in his own administration shook their heads at the president’s unusual level of engagement with small details of the Alaska bill. Insider accounts of those years say Carter’s love for the natural world was driven above all by the Sunday school piety that later shaped the good deeds for which his ex-presidency became known.

“I have never been happier, more exhilarated, at peace, rested, inspired, and aware of the grandeur of the universe and the greatness of God than when I find myself in a natural setting not much changed from the way He made it,” Carter wrote in his 1988 book about his experiences in nature, “An Outdoor Journal.” The book includes a chapter on Alaska.

Jimmy Carter entered the White House at the moment in history when Congress was carving up Alaska’s vast federal lands, a process that included the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971) and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline authorization (1973). The Native claims act gave Congress until 1978 to do something about conservation lands in Alaska.

Headlines from those years featured the once-familiar names of politicians now passing into history books — Mo Udall, John Seiberling, Scoop Jackson, and the state’s conservation-minded Republican governor, Jay Hammond, along with its fractious congressional delegation: Ted Stevens, Mike Gravel, Don Young. All gone now.

Historian Stephen Haycox, in his book “Battleground Alaska,” describes how the myth of Alaska unanimity was undermined at congressional hearings in Alaska in 1977, when half the people who showed up in Anchorage and Fairbanks testified in support of preserving wilderness. Stevens and Young dismissed those conservation advocates as “not real Alaskans” — a challenge to political legitimacy no longer flung around the 49th state with the same vigor, after four decades of in-migration and demographic shifts.

Anger at Carter nevertheless reached its peak here in 1978, when the president invoked the Antiquities Act to create national monuments in Alaska. Carter called it a placeholder move, shielding land from development until Congress passed permanent protection. Protesters called it tyranny. Government rangers showed up in a few rural communities and were shunned. Loggers and mining claim holders and hunting guides studied the maps with dismay. Politicians ridiculed the idea that Alaska’s wilderness was the kind of antiquity meant to be protected by the 1906 law. The national monument declaration was deemed the ultimate “federal overreach.”

But Carter’s strategy, developed with his Interior secretary, former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, forced Congress back to work. Despite the ear-burning rhetoric, Alaska’s leading Republicans, Stevens and Hammond, worked on the inside to find a compromise rather than get run over.

Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic adviser, has described a meeting where Stevens came to the White House to argue about a proposed park boundary. Carter unrolled detailed maps on the Oval Office floor and, on his hands and knees, pointed out how the watershed in question didn’t flow the way Stevens thought.

By the summer of 1980, the House had passed a strong bill backed by conservationists, while a compromise bill supported by Stevens had passed the Senate. The two sides were still far apart.

One night that July, Carter landed in Anchorage on Air Force One, on his way back from meetings in Japan. Hammond and the director of his sportfish division had arranged a quick fishing trip for the president. In his diary, Carter described how the trout streams were blown out by rain so they flew in a helicopter to fish grayling in a lake and its outlet. He was thrilled that a tiny “Irresistible” fly he tied himself outfished the Alaska guides, who gathered around to see what he was using.

Four months later, Ronald Reagan clobbered Carter in the presidential election. The nation’s swing to the right settled the fate of ANILCA. The House in its lame-duck session accepted the Senate version of the bill, so Carter could sign the finished product before he left office.

The new law protected 104 million acres of Alaska in various conservation categories — nearly a third of the state.

In the years to come, the law’s evolving set of rules would continue to generate headlines in Alaska over cultural touchstones — everything from the fishwheel of Katie John to the bulldozer of Papa Pilgrim.

Even so, the overarching bitterness of the 1970s appears to have faded among the general public. For one thing, few of Alaska’s current residents have personal memories of the fight. The state Department of Labor recently ran a check to see how many current Permanent Fund dividend applicants also applied as adults in 1982, the first year of the dividend program. The answer: less than 12%.

Moreover, a booming tourism industry has transformed Alaska, with 2.5 million visitors spending nearly $3 billion here in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, according to the Alaska Travel Industry Association.

The town of Seward was the first to execute a political turnaround, quickly warming to the draw of their new neighbor, Kenai Fjords National Park. By 1990, the summer sugar-high of tourist dollars had so transformed the town that the newly arrived chamber of commerce director, asked why Seward old-timers once opposed the national park, guessed that the naysayers must have been “people who have the habit of being opposed to development of all kinds” — unwittingly reversing Don Young’s old complaint about posy-sniffing environmentalists.

“Tourists now bring in more wealth to the state than fishing or timber,” Carter said in 2000, when he visited Anchorage for ANILCA’s 20-year commemoration. But he cautioned against over-tourism: The visitors weren’t coming here to see the backs of the necks of other tourists filing off cruise ships. “They come to find a different form of human pleasure and enjoyment — solitude, beauty, and sights that are not available to a Georgian or to a person from New Mexico or Maine or Ohio or Texas.”

On that same visit, Carter made a pitch for protecting the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development. It was the biggest piece of unfinished ANILCA business, and still politically hot. The pitch prompted Gov. Tony Knowles, a fellow Democrat, to snub the former president during that visit.

The ANWR coastal plain was finally pried open to oil leasing during the Trump administration. But the long-ballyhooed oil rush has failed to materialize so far, in the face of continued opposition and rising global concerns over burning and tapping new sources of fossil fuels.

Even the dual federal-state management of subsistence fish and game, once deemed impossible and unsustainable, has endured despite decades of lawsuits and political initiatives.

To be sure, some conflicts around Carter’s legislative legacy remain. The state, for example, has pushed to extend its predator control programs into the national preserves created by ANILCA.

A particularly hard knot to untie has been the proposed road through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. Conservationists argue that the isthmus of land between the isolated communities of King Cove and Cold Bay was set aside as wilderness under ANILCA, and that no president can trade it away for a road corridor.

In 2022, when a federal court temporarily upheld a Trump-era land swap to allow the road, Carter himself took the extraordinary step — as a 97-year-old ex-president — of jumping into the appeal, filing an amicus brief on his own behalf.

“My name is Jimmy Carter,” he wrote to the appeals court. “In my lifetime, I have been a farmer, a naval officer, a Sunday school teacher, an outdoorsman, a democracy activist, a builder, governor of Georgia and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. And from 1977 to 1981, I had the privilege of serving as the 39th president of the United States.”

Carter argued that the bill he signed into law struck a final balance between conservation and development. Congress did not intend for future administrations to re-balance those concerns according to their own changing priorities. There is no “get out of ANILCA free” pass, he said.

The case was dismissed when the Biden administration dropped the old road plan, leaving the legal question unresolved. Discussions over the road continue.

Most of Carter’s trips back to Alaska after his presidency were not political. One time he traveled with his wife, Rosalynn, to stand in the midst of a vast caribou herd on the Arctic coastal plain. He especially relished a 1985 trip with his 9-year-old grandson. They spent a week in the Iliamna Lake region at a fishing lodge.

In the Alaska chapter of “An Outdoor Journal,” the former president recalled campfire conversations on that trip with Alaskans worried about changes to their way of life. He also devoted a dozen paragraphs to the hooking, chasing and landing of a 12-pound rainbow on a tiny #10 yellow stonefly nymph.

The book ends with a return to Carter’s family cabin and a description of the cycles of nature in the mountains of north Georgia. In the face of his own mortality, Carter wrote, he found reassurance there in “God’s miraculous creation” and the words of Ecclesiastes:

“A generation goes and a generation comes, But the earth remains forever.”

Former Anchorage Daily News reporter Tom Kizzia is the author of “Cold Mountain Path,” “Pilgrim’s Wilderness” and “The Wake of the Unseen Object.”

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