The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  If the United States faced a spiritual crisis in 1955, McClure believed, it was because many Americans insisted that animals didn’t have souls. To most Alaskans, for example, harpooning a whale, shooting a wolf on ranch property, and slaughtering polar bears for fun were economic propositions. McClure, whose poetry combined biology with mysticism, challenged the reckless treatment of wildlife in his long poem “Point Lobos: Animism.” Biologists and physicists admired his poems. Drawing on the scientific writings of Ernst Haeckel, who argued that all living entities were sacred, McClure hoped to teach Americans to treat ecosystems with reverent respect. Native Alaskans, for example, thought themselves equal to the polar bear, perhaps even inferior, but never better. “What I was interested in was the intersection of science and poetry,” McClure recalls. “There was too much distance between them, when in reality they have a lot in common.”43

  The breakthrough poem at the Six Gallery was McClure’s “For the Death of 100 Whales.” McClure said that slaughtering whales was immoral. In April 1954, Time magazine had published an article about how the U.S. troops stationed at a NATO airbase in Iceland had gone on a rampage, slaughtering whales en masse with machine guns. They killed 100 whales, causing a wave of blood to ooze across the choppy waters. Making artistic use of this troubling story, McClure claimed that the cold-blooded killers were the troops, not the innocent whales, and protested against the carnage. The poem chastised the “mowers and reapers of sea kine”; the closing verse was:

  OH GUN! OH BOW!

  There are no churches in the waves,

  No holiness,

  No passages or crossings

  From the beasts’ wet shore.44

  IV

  When Allen Ginsberg, bespectacled and brazen, took the stage at the Six Gallery, the bohemians in attendance whooped like warriors. His underground reputation for poetic drama had preceded him. While Ginsberg wasn’t a nature poet, his long signature poem “Howl”—exploding with shamanistic prophecy45—was a bardic condemnation of modern city life, a fiery indictment of society’s destructive forces. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold had written that when a wolf howled, it was “an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.”46 This was the insurgent Ginsberg at the Six Gallery, chanting with conviction, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”47 With this apocalyptic poem, a new American consciousness—a paradigm shift—was happening.

  Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” was the highlight at Six Gallery. His sizzling words would ricochet from San Francisco to Singapore and beyond for the next decade. Some critics believe the beat generation was born that evening, with Ginsberg boldly putting the modern condition on trial. But Kerouac didn’t see it that way. Long before Ginsberg chanted “Moloch,” other poets—such as William Blake (in “London”) and T. S. Eliot (in “The Wasteland”)—had expressed the same ideas. The real breakthrough, Kerouac’s keen poetic ear told him, came from the last reader: Gary Snyder.

  Rocking back and forth, mesmerized by every line, Kerouac thought Snyder’s “A Berry Feast” (later published in The Back Country) an important statement of human love toward animals. McClure’s “For the Death of 100 Whales” seemed fueled by anger, which never solved much, whereas Snyder exuded a love of bears and coyotes. When Kerouac wrote about the event at Six Gallery in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, he described Snyder (the character Japhy Ryder) as a “great new hero of American culture.” Kerouac intuited that Snyder represented an avant-garde new way—actually a revivification of an ancient way—of looking at nature holistically. “And he had tender lines, lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries, showing his love of animals and great mystery lines about oxen on the Mongolian road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature,” Kerouac wrote of Snyder. “And his anarchistic ideas about how Americans don’t know how to live, with lines about commuters being trapped in living rooms that come from poor trees felled by chainsaws (showing here, also, his background as a logger up north).”48

  Snyder shared with Ginsberg the belief that atomic bombs would destroy the world—that this genie had to be put back into the bottle. The most controversial line in Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems came from “America”: “America go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” It was unclear whether the obscenity laws of the time allowed such language to be put in print. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agreed to defend City Lights Books, which had published Howl and Other Poems (with an introduction by William Carlos Williams). It was the U.S. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, always for freedom of speech, who insisted that books like Howl had to be protected by the First Amendment against would-be censors. “None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militarists’ silence, to the intellectual void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness,” McClure wrote in Scratching the Beat Surface. “We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”49 At its core, Ginsberg’s “America” was a burlesque of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

  On November 1, 1956, when “America” was published in Howl, Ginsberg didn’t know that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was establishing the “Plowshare Program” to “investigate and develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.” An Inupiat from Point Hope Village, Alaska, would watch anxiously from a bluff as two men in a boat started unloading supplies on a spit of land jutting out into the Chukchi Sea. Before long, other Inupiat would gather around the boats asking, “Who are you?” The answer baffled them: the visitors were “surveyors” of the AEC.50

  The AEC had chosen a site at Ogotoruk Creek, about thirty miles southeast of the Inupiat Eskimo village of Point Hope, as a nuclear test ground. Rumors swirled through Point Hope about the planned detonation. Would the residents get radiation sickness? What was the timetable? Would the people be paid reparations?

  The truth was that the AEC did plan to detonate an atomic device, 100 times more powerful than the bomb used at Hiroshima, in Arctic Alaska. Ground zero was Ogotoruk Creek. The scheme—which later became infamous—was called Project Chariot. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, was overseeing the project. As the director of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California–Berkeley, Teller publicly announced the program on June 9, 1958. The AEC would detonate a 2.4-megaton atomic device on the northwestern coast of Arctic Alaska. According to Teller, there were two reasons for the explosion: to stay competitive with the Soviet Union, and to create a deep-water hole, which could thereafter be used as the Arctic harbor for the shipment of coal and oil extracted on the North Slope.51

  Following Teller’s stunning announcement, Lewis Strauss, the feisty chairman of the AEC, asked for 1,600 square miles of land and water in Arctic Alaska to be withdrawn from the public domain. Teller himself came to Alaska to promote another supposed reason for Project Chariot: jobs. Alaska could become an oil producer like Texas or Saudi Arabia. New federal funds would come pouring into Alaska. Traveling around Alaska to win support from various chambers of commerce, Teller promised that “the blast will not be performed until it can be economically justified.”52 Doctor George Rogers, an Alaskan economist, recalled having breakfast with Teller in Juneau that summer. “He gave me the pitch again [for Project Chariot],” Rogers recalled. “Then I said, ‘Well, the Native people, they depend on the sea mammals and the caribou.’ He said, ‘Well, they’re going to have to change their way of life.’ I said, ‘What are they going to do?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when we have the harbor we can create coal mines in the Arctic, and they can become coal miners.’ ”53

  But many Alaskans asked smart questions of Teller as he went around the territory. Undaunted by his well-earned fame as a nuclear scientist, they wanted answers: Wouldn’t it take decades for such a port to be operational? How would the m
oney generated trickle into working people’s bank accounts? Meanwhile, the national conservation groups seized on Project Chariot as the worst idea ever conceived by mankind. Albert Einstein called it lunacy. Alliances of concerned citizens were organized to save Arctic Alaska from becoming a nuclear testing ground. “I was running the Camp Denali lodge when I learned about Project Chariot,” Virginia Wood recalled. “This was a turning point for me. I knew we’d have to organize against the Project. That was beautiful country up there, the homeland to the Native Alaskans! I voted for Eisenhower. . . . I think. But I knew this one was wrong. That whole Arctic area needed to be left alone.”54

  The AEC was surprised by the backlash against Project Chariot in Alaska. Because the territory was preparing for statehood in 1959, the assumption was that only the Inupiat would complain—and they didn’t matter in Washington, D.C. Recognizing that a potential economic boom wasn’t a compelling argument, the AEC shifted gears. John A. McCone, now chairman of the AEC, testified in Congress before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that they were seeking an alternative to the Alaskan harbor because they couldn’t find a corporate partner.

  The AEC now went back to the drawing board. What was needed, they determined, was a Project Chariot Environmental Studies Program. Being out of tune with the ecology movement, the AEC had underestimated the impact Lois Crisler and Walt Disney had made on the American psyche with regard to Arctic Alaska. The environmentalists had depicted Project Chariot as bombing polar bears, caribou, seals, and whales—species the American people cared deeply about. The AEC had gotten ahead of itself. When Teller went around Alaska, he repeatedly claimed that the fish around Point Hope wouldn’t be affected, that nuclear testing wouldn’t be harmful to humans, that there would be no seismic shock, and that the people of Japan had already recovered from radiation sickness—none of which was true. Teller, for all his talents, may not have been entirely sane.

  A group of scientists at the University of Alaska, led by William Pruitt, stepped up to dispute the AEC’s scenarios. Never resorting to emotionalism, giving only the biological facts, Pruitt correctly noted that the food chain in the Arctic was hypersensitive and fragile. Caribou became his Exhibit A. Recent nuclear fallout in the Pacific had already affected the tundra; North Slope caribou suet in the late 1950s had a level of strontium seven times higher than the cattle in Texas or Oklahoma. Because caribou grazed on lichen and other rootless plants, the amount of nuclear dust they ingested was extremely high. They ate radioactive lichen “straight up,” before it was integrated with other earth compounds. The same scenario applied to many of Alaska’s migratory birds.55

  Once Professor Pruitt had presented these counterarguments in a public forum, the Inupiat angrily entered the debate. Caribou meat was the staple of their lives—material, cultural, and spiritual. On the North Slope, the Gwich’in people had a creation story, passed down for 1,000 years, that the caribou had absorbed a chunk of human heart and the Gwich’in, reciprocally, held a piece of the caribou heart in their own bodies. In this way, each would always know what the other one was doing. Their relationship went beyond symbiosis; they were one. Upon felling a caribou, Gwich’in hunters offered a prayer of appreciation to their brother species, immediately biting into the heart at the “kill spot” to show honor and gratitude. That was the burden and joy of Gwich’in history. Would Gwich’in hunters get radiation sickness, after Project Chariot, from eating caribou heart? If the caribou died off, would the Gwich’in also die? Furthermore, because the caribou were so far-ranging, the impact of the project would be broader. Caribou migrated more than 500 miles around Alaska each spring, and not only the Gwich’in depended on them for sustenance. All the North Slope tribes who relied on caribou as a food source would become ill.

  With emotions running so strong, the Eisenhower administration ordered the AEC to tone down the rhetoric. While Project Chariot wasn’t canceled, it was “deferred.” Still, rumors circulated in the beat and Native underground in the late 1950s that the U.S. military had injected Eskimos with radioactive iodine-131 as part of a research program to learn whether soldiers “could be better conditioned to fight in cold conditions.”56 Evidence for this claim is rather scant. But in any case many Native Americans in Alaska were feeling empowered to fight for the ecological integrity of their region.

  There is no paper trail to clarify what President Eisenhower thought of Project Chariot; he may have pulled the plug on it himself. Douglas L. Vandegraft of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believed that Eisenhower had a quasi-purist view of the Arctic and Alaska; in fact, he wasn’t keen on seeing either the north pole or the south pole developed for economic purposes. What interested Eisenhower was atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Project Chariot, however, was too dangerous—and absurd.57

  The 1950s were a time when faith in science—and the urge to explore new frontiers, using new technological developments—was soaring. The United States had sent a Jupiter-C rocket into space for the first time in 1956; and in 1957 the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik. Despite the cold war, a remarkable event occurred in December 1959. President Dwight D. Eisenhower led the way to set Antarctica aside as a scientific preserve. All militarization of Antarctica was banned. This agreement—promoted by the United States—was considered the first major arms control treaty of the cold war. Forty-seven countries concurred in making Antarctica a sanctuary. Perhaps Eisenhower wanted to do the same with the Arctic?

  V

  Ginsberg’s poem “America”—epitomizing the spirit of the First Amendment and the impulse to “speak truth to power”—was clearly applicable in Alaska. But what Kerouac loved most about the reading at the Six Gallery was how Snyder made the coyote—the Native American trickster figure—into a protagonist. With suburban developers chasing the coyote out of its homelands in the West, Snyder placed Canis latrans on a hillside, wiser than humans, scoffing at the idiocy of clear-cutting, bulldozing, and despoiling the natural world: “The Chainsaw falls for boards of pines/Suburban bedrooms, block on block/Will waver with this grain and knot,/The maddening shapes will start and fade/Each morning when commuters wake—/Joined boards hung of frame/A box to catch a biped in.” As Snyder’s Coyote watches a “Fat-snout Caterpillar, tread toppling forward/Leaf on leaf, roots in gold volcanic dirt . . .” all he can say is “Fuck You!”58

  But Snyder doesn’t end “A Berry Feast” with the long-suffering coyote losing out to what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher of City Lights Books, called “the omnivorous corporate monoculture.”59 Instead, the deity Coyote, after grievances accumulate, watches the world being restored, as a new generation adopts The Wilderness Society’s ethos of leaving nature alone: “From cool springs under cedar/On his haunches, white grin long tongue panting, he watches: Dead city in dry summer, Where berries grow.”60 The Coyote and the poets themselves were messengers, perhaps fools, certainly brilliant trickster figures filled with creative power; their ideas about ecology were revolutionary. “The idea of saving wilderness for wilderness’s sake came from West Coast consciousness,” the poet and cofounder of the Fugs (a rock band) Ed Sanders recalled. “Ginsberg was the first one to use universe in poems. But it was Gary Snyder who taught us to think in terms of river systems, not boundary lines.”61

  Besides Thoreau, Blake, and Zen, the West Coast beats also developed an affinity for old Rockwell Kent. Considering himself a conservative, an ascetic, and a political socialist, Kent became a target for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. When forced to testify before a Senate investigations subcommittee, Kent took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to state whether or not he was a communist. Once the most popular illustrator in America, Kent now found himself blacklisted, and his Wilderness was removed from libraries as subversive literature. New York galleries and museums in the late 1950s refused to show his Alaskan work. Defiantly, Kent donated his paintings, illustrations, and manuscripts to the Soviet Union. Today many of his Alaskan paintings and illustrations are on permanent display at the
State Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg.62 Only one painting—his portrait of Virginia Hawkins—remained in Seward, Alaska.

  Ferlinghetti—publisher of Howl and Other Poems—also had a fierce ecological consciousness in the 1950s. However, he was concerned more about Malthusian theory than about the wilderness per se; he considered overpopulation “the root of all the other ecological problems.” Why were rain forests in the Tongass being destroyed? To make more houses for people. Why might Point Hope be bombed? Because an oil port was needed to fuel people’s vehicles. Why was air pollution becoming a health hazard in Los Angeles? Because more automobiles were needed. “No matter what subject you brought up in the 1950s,” Ferlinghetti recalled, one “can trace it back to overpopulation. This is the basis of all ecological problems.” Ferlinghetti, through City Lights Books, provided an open forum to any ecologically minded poet seeking to promote environmental awareness. His getaway home in Big Sur became a haven for talented artists who wanted to contemplate sea, forests, and air. Working closely with McClure—who developed a friendship with the British molecular biologist Francis Crick, one of the codiscoverers of the helical structure of DNA in 1953—Ferlinghetti published what some scholars consider the first true ecological periodical in America: Journal for the Protection of All Beings. “What Alaska had going for it,” Ferlinghetti believed, “was that unlike California, it hadn’t been overrun with people. Nature still had a fighting chance.”63

  Crick was also a Malthusian. But what attracted him to McClure was the almost molecular swirl of vivid words and surreal images in McClure’s poems about nature. McClure also seemed almost intuitively able to understand key concepts about human consciousness, and he and Crick shared an interest in peyote. “The worlds in which I myself live,” Crick said, “the private world of personal reactions, the biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of meat by chance and necessity. If I were a poet I would write like Michael McClure – if only I had his talent.”64