 Radio Script 1999 __________________
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INTRO: Around the world, only a handful of places remain that are largely untouched by human development. Roger Kaye is a wilderness specialist and a pilot with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He's finishing a study on people's perceptions of one such wild place--Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Arctic Science Journeys producer Doug Schneider has more. STORY: Tucked in the northeast corner of Alaska is 19.5 million acres of mountains, unnamed valleys, boreal forest and coastal tundra. Called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it's an area so remote, only a few thousand people have ever seen it. One person who has is Roger Kaye, a wilderness specialist and pilot with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is, he says, the epitome of a truly wild place. KAYE: "People view that what we hold in trust in this place is perhaps the closest proximation to wild, free, and untrammeled ecological and evolutionary processes left on this planet. There may be other places in the world that may be as untouched or as wild and free as this, but certainly none on American soil. It is our nation's finest representation of a wild place." Yet beneath this Arctic oasis is thought to lay billions of barrels of oil, and at the surface there's considerable pressure to open the refuge to development. Kaye--a doctoral student in Northern Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks--took a closer look at the reasons the refuge founders had for establishing the area as wilderness in 1960. He also examined the values people share today for wanting the refuge protected. KAYE: "Well, what I'm looking at is how the Arctic Refuge is perceived by people who value it as wilderness, which is the purpose for which it was established. There's several data sources (that I looked at). One of which is the writings of the founders of the place--the first people who proposed it (the refuge). These include Olaus and Marty Murie, and a number of other prominent biologists and scientists in the 1950s and early 1960s. I looked at the specific attributes of wilderness that they saw, that they found in this place and sought to perpetuate here." There were, as one might expect, some common threads that connect those who supported the refuge then and those who support the refuge today. Among them is the belief that some places ought to be held in trust for future generations. KAYE: "It's a very symbolic landscape to many people. It represents not only our heritage--the type of landscape that our cultural values were forged in--but it's also a symbol of restraint to many people. It represents the willingness of our society to restrain the march of technology and economic development someplace. And many people who will never come here have simply written and said it's an inspiration in that it shows we can successfully restrain our impulse to develop, to expand, to influence natural landscapes in some place." Another persistent theme, says Kaye, was the notion that for a place to be considered wild, it must have attributes of wildness. Defining exactly what wildness is proved to be difficult for many of the people Kaye interviewed. KAYE: "When you start doing in-depth interviews with people and looking at their set of experiences and their remembrances of them, it's a background knowledge. It's sometimes held at the edge of awareness. People begin by saying 'Gosh, I really can't express it--this meaning, this experience and the significance it has for me. But there's something there that I just don't have the words for.' This is a very common quality. But nevertheless, just knowing that this is a wild place, that it is not manipulated or controlled for people but that it is there for itself is very important for people's perceptions and experience. They report that if that aspect were lost, a major component of this experience they have and the value it holds for them would be lost." One case study Kaye says helps illustrate this point was related by a person who experienced a remote area outside the refuge where wolves were sterilized to lower predation rates on caribou. KAYE: "This was right after a wolf control plan was implemented. It became very controversial and it was decided not to kill any wolves, but to capture wolves, sterilize them and release them. So this person did this trip and he found wolf tracks, but he found it very haunting and disturbing just knowing that the wolf that made those tracks may have been altered, may have been changed due to this human desire to increase prey species. Its wildness had been lost and it changed the whole character for him. Later that summer he did a trip in the Arctic Refuge where that doesn't occur. He said he saw as much wildlife, that wasn't the difference. And there was not a scenery difference, but there was a sense of wildness that was present in the Arctic wilderness that was totally diminished in an area that had been manipulated for human purposes. That's a quality that people find very difficult to express, it's rather inexplicable for many people. But it does come out in the telling of their experiences of what is important to them." Although Kaye's study was academic, he says his findings will enable federal refuge managers to more appreciate the range of values wilderness holds for people. OUTRO: This is Arctic Science Journeys, a production of the Alaska Sea Grant Program and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I'm Doug Schneider. Our thanks to the following individual for help in the preparation of this script:
Roger Kaye If you'd like more information about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, check out this web site:
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge If you'd like more information about wilderness, check out these web sites:
Wilderness Watch
Wilderness Support Center
World Wide Wilderness Directory
The Wilderness Society
U.S. National Park Service
Alaska Public Lands Information Center
Arctic Science Journeys is a radio service highlighting science, culture, and the environment of the circumpolar north. Produced by the Alaska Sea Grant College Program and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Alaska Sea Grant Homepage The URL for this page is http://seagrant.uaf.edu/news/99ASJ/12.20.99_Wilderness.html |
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