Why We Need An Arctic Refuge National Monument
by Jimmy Carter
Fall 2000
When I was President there were four maps with which I was thoroughly familiar. One was the land around
Jerusalem from the Golan Heights, East and West Jerusalem, all the occupied territories, including the Sinai
Desert. I knew it almost by heart. I also learned about the land in the Panama Canal Zone. I learned about a
small place in Iran, the streets that surrounded the embassy in Teheran where 52 hostages were held. And I
learned about Alaska. Those were the four maps that are most vivid in my mind.
I remember the names of people who were so deeply involved in the political contest that has affected every life represented in this room. I remember Mo Udall and I remember Cecil Andrus and I remember Scoop Jackson and I remember Paul Tsongas, and I remember Senator Roth, I remember Bob Byrd and others who played a vital role, maybe a forgotten role, almost, in what finally occurred. Those were names that still mean a lot to me. I remember Senator Stevens and Senator Gravel, who weren’t much help in those days. And I have to say I remember Ronald Reagan and James Watt and Congressman Young and Senator Murkowski. But the memories overwhelmingly have proven to be pleasant.
I don’t believe there’s ever been an issue so contentious in the U.S. Congress that involved more powerful interests marshaled against one another in a debate that really began as soon as Alaska became a state. How would it be possible to treat the state of Alaska with respect and to allot to the state a substantial portion of the land that belonged to the people in this particular part of America? How would it be possible to honor the Natives who have been here since time immemorial and treat them fairly? How would it be possible to protect the incredible and unmatched beauty of Alaska as contrasted with the entire rest of the world? And how would it be possible to protect the interests of the rest of our country?
When I first knew about it, it was the Alaska lands bill. I didn’t really understand ANILCA. But I learned quite soon that the N-I part of Alaska was dominant. And many Alaskans may not agree with me. National interest is not just Alaska. And I think it was that national interest element in the ANILCA legislation that was predominant. It was not because of Mo Udall, it was not because of me, it was not because of Cecil Andrus or the others that I’ve mentioned. It was because the entire nation of America, certainly including this beautiful state, came forward in this hard-fought battle and ultimately prevailed to a substantial degree.
The House of Representatives while I was President was always compatible with what Cecil Andrus and I wanted to see occur, but the Senate of the United States was where the contention focused and where the powerful special interests, not all benevolent, most benevolent, focused their attention. We passed a very good bill through the House of Representatives, but we found in the first two years I was in office that it was not possible to get it through the Senate. We were faced with a deadlock, and I felt that the time was running out for me.
I had a meeting with Cecil Andrus, and he and his attorneys, some of them here, had found a 1906 Antiquities Act where a President had the right to designate a certain small portion of America to be a national monument. And all of you are familiar with monuments like the Statue of Liberty and so forth, you know. This is a national monument. So we decided in a private meeting in the White House that I would utilize the Antiquities Act to declare national monuments. And I did so in 1978.
The monument that I declared in the conglomerate form encompassed 56 million acres — a little larger than the state of Minnesota. And it was that exhibition of determination and that total protection of those precious areas, some of which we were willing to concede in the legislative process, that forced the opponents of ANILCA to be more cooperative. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act was passed and signed a month after I was defeated for reelection. I don’t believe that there has ever been more of a focus of powerful interests on any legislation than this one. One hundred six million acres were put in conservation areas. Fifty-seven million acres were placed in wilderness designation, which is a special category which protects them to an extraordinary degree. Forty-six million acres were allotted for Native Alaskans. And 104 million acres were designated for the state of Alaska, five times more than had ever been granted to any state when it became part of the United States of America. Ninety-five percent of all the known oil reserves were made available for exploration and extraction. Ninety-five percent.
After I was out of office and even during the campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan looked upon this as a land grab. And he carefully chose his Secretary of the Interior to subvert and to repeal, if possible, the historic legislation. James Watt represented the views of those who had opposed this legislation since it was first introduced. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but the struggle to subvert the basic elements of ANILCA is still going on, led, unfortunately, by members of your own congressional delegation. Not entirely, but they represent the basic threat.
There were other pieces of legislation that were important to me then to protect America’s energy
capabilities, and to reduce the amount of oil that we had to import. I was very much aware of that.
One of the things that I tried to do was to insist on conservation of energy that we consumed, and we passed
even after the 1980 election legislation that mandated that automobile manufacturers had to increase the
efficiency of their automobiles. Each average fleet had to have increasingly high miles per gallon of gas
consumed. One of the first things that happened when my successor took office was that he reduced those
restraints. And even with a liberal interpretation of the amount of oil possible in one of your precious and
untapped areas, by reducing the miles per gallon by one and a half miles per gallon, that more than
consumes all the oil that could possibly come from the Arctic Wildlife Refuge area.
Well, what’s going to happen to Alaska as a result of ANILCA? A lot of predictions were made that Alaska
would go to hell if this much precious land was taken away from the developers and the oil companies. I
noticed recently that your population has grown by 50 percent, tourism has more than tripled. Your tourists
who come here now bring more wealth into your state than the timber production and fishing, but the tourists
don’t really come here to look at the back of the neck or to elbow aside others pouring off the tour ships into
the small villages along the coast, and the tourists don’t come here to see oil wells, nor to hear the constantnoises of helicopters and
snowmobiles. They come here to find a different form of human pleasure and enjoyment, a solitude, beauty, sights that are not available to a Georgian or to a person from New Mexico or
Maine or Ohio or Texas. The beauty of Alaska is still threatened.
Let me point out that Alaska in recent times has prospered. You’re the number one state in the percentage
of your children who finish high school. You’re the number one state in household income, you’re the number
one state in longevity, so I think that Alaska is doing well. Maybe not entirely because of, but certainly not
impeded by, the prices of ANILCA.
I’ve had a chance to learn about this state. For a long time I mainly knew it through maps over which we
pored, studied, plotted for hours at a time, day after day in the conference room of the White House as we
negotiated and planned our tactics in getting the legislation passed. Since then I’ve had a chance to go to
the tops of some of the mountains in the Brooks Range. I’ve gone from there to the coastal region. I’ve stood
in front of the migrating Porcupine herd. I have been on a peninsula in the Beaufort Sea within 100 yards of
muskoxen circled facing outwards when they heard the noise that Rosalyn and I made in hiding behind some
tundra. I have sat on a glacier and looked across a small valley at a herd of 32 Dall sheep. I’ve been very
close to a den of wolves and seen them in their natural habitat. While fishing, I’ve been within 100 yards of a
mother grizzly. I’ve fished in the vicinity of Lake Iliamna and some other places several times, and I wrote a
book about that one experience because I caught a rainbow trout on a very small fly that was 31 inches long
and weighed 12 pounds. So you can see I’ve had some wonderful experiences in Alaska, maybe enjoyed
your state even more than some of you. But I have learned since leaving the White House what a wise
decision the U.S. Congress made in approving the ANILCA legislation.
It was not perfect. We had to compromise to some degree, which is almost always the case with important
legislation. My most grievous disappointment was that the Arctic Wildlife Refuge area was not completely
protected. We still have an agenda to fulfill. Some mandates of ANILCA have not yet been fulfilled. We didn’t
expect them to be carried out under President Reagan or President Bush, but even since they left office and
we have Democrats in the White House, some still remain to be done. One that’s mandated by the legislation is to assess all of the parks to see which need to be set aside as
wilderness areas, which totally protect them. That has not been done. The one estimate is that there’s still
100 million acres of land that could be set aside as wilderness areas. And this is a premise with which
President Reagan did not argue. That is still a responsibility of the Park Service, or at least the Secretary of
the Interior. James Watt issued a directive that no BLM lands could be included in the wilderness areas.
James Watt’s mandate still prevails. I would like to see all of James Watt’s mandates reversed.
The Tongass Forest area provides now about 300 jobs in the timber industry, which are very important, I know, for those people, those families involved. It costs the U.S. taxpayers, including you, about $65,000 per year to support each one of those jobs. I think the balance of the Tongass Forest region should be prevented from building further roads.
One of the most difficult parts of ANILCA that we had to negotiate laboriously was how to deal with Native
subsistence claims. The key word was traditional. When we established five major parks, maybe more, we
crafted legislation that said that the Secretary of the Interior would determine in those parks which rights of
Native families to hunt and fish should be preserved, and the point was what have they traditionally done. So
obviously, the next step was to require that the Secretary of the Interior determine in all those parks what
were the traditional rights of Native families. James Watt said all those parks should be declared open for
these rights whether they were traditional or not. The Secretary of the Interior still has that responsibility
unfulfilled.
Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn converse with Alaska writer
Debbie Miller and her daughter Casey at their camp near the Okpilak River in 1990.
The site is in the foothills of the Brooks Range near the seacoast. Debbie Miller is the author of Midnight Wilderness: Journeys in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (softbound, $14.95), published originally in 1990 and
recently reissued by Alaska Northwest Books. The book vividly details both the grandeur and vulnerability of the second-largest of America's national wildlife refuges
and makes a fervent argument for its protection against industrialization. Part of the
royalties from sales of the book will be donated to the Alaska Conservation Foundation, which supports efforts to protect the refuge.
There are two more points I want to make. I think I’ll just concentrate on one. The Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge should be declared without further delay a national monument. And it should be given full wilderness
status. And if you don’t do anything else in the next few weeks, I hope that every one of you will write a letter
to President Clinton and tell him that we are just as interested as he in the legacy that he will leave behind.
Some have said that this would not be a legal step. I disagree with that strongly, and I think the attorneys who helped to draft ANILCA would agree. This would be a protection not permanent. Anytime either I or other Presidents declare an area to be a monument area, the Congress by a simple bill can reverse that decision. Also, when I decided with Cecil Andrus’s help to declare monument areas in Alaska, it was contested in the courts, and the U.S. District Courts ruled that it was completely constitutional and legal. So this is something that President Clinton can do.
I wouldn’t depend on the next four years. I don’t know how the elections are going to turn out. I don’t know
who will be the next President. I don’t know whether we’ll have a Democratic or a Republican majority in the
House and Senate. But I would like to see another Mo Udall chairman of the Natural Resources Committee
in the House and maybe somebody like Paul Tsongas the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee in
the Senate, and I would like to see a President who’s an environmentalist, and a Vice President who has not
just received $20 million from the oil companies as retirement benefits. This issue is not yet resolved. And I don’t really believe that ANILCA could be repealed. And I think that the
basic elements of it will withstand political attacks. In my opinion, what needs to be done is to fulfill
completely the mandates of the ANILCA legislation. The Secretary of the Interior should carry out his duties
as prescribed in the legislation. President Clinton should exert his authority. The people of Alaska should
realize that the legislation was designed to protect the integrity and the sovereignty of the state of Alaska as
all other states have their sovereignty protected, that Native claims should be honored, and that the nation’s
jewels should be protected. It’s an ongoing challenge for us all. Not just Alaska lands conservation interests,
but interests that include the entire nation.
Of all the things I’ve ever done, nothing exceeds my pride in having been committed to play a small part, at
least, in the passage of this legislation.
Jimmy Carter is a former President of the United States.
Editors
Note. Gov. Tony Knowles responded to former President Jimmy Cartersstatement
that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) should be declared a national
monument.)
The text of the
Governor’s letter follows:
An open letter to
the Honorable Jimmy Carter Former President of the United States
Dear President Carter
As a former
governor, you hopefully will understand my anger and disappointment about your
comments Wednesday in Anchorage urging designation of national monument status
for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Alaskans welcome
visitors to the 49th state with warmth and hospitality. However, I feel you
abused this welcome by your actions yesterday. Without any meaningful dialogue
with the people of Alaska, you used our state as a media prop and platform to
project your message to President Clinton. I can only guess how you would have
felt as governor if a figure of national prominence had come to Georgia to use
your state in a similar manner.
The essential
needs of Alaska working families all across this vast and beautiful state depend
on the responsible development of our natural resources. For us, environmentally
responsible oil and gas development in a tiny portion of the Arctic Refuge means
jobs, the opportunity to improve our schools and other public services, and
address some of the most acute social problems in the country.
For America, such
oil development would reduce our dependence on foreign imports at a time when
crude prices are skyrocketing, and when a gallon of gasoline costs the American
consumer more than at any time in recent memory.
You are wrong to
dismiss the role of the Coastal Plain-the most promising unexplored petroleum
province in North America-in alleviating this situation and creating hundreds of
thousands of jobs across the nation.
You are wrong in
ignoring the pressing needs of Alaska’s Native families, especially those
living on the Arctic Slope, whose lives depend on the delicate care of a fragile
environment for sustenance, and whose hopes are nourished by the jobs,
education, and decent quality of life that oil and gas development has and will
bring to their children. Their long and steadfast support for responsible
development of the ANWR Coastal Plain is discredited by your call for unilateral
Presidential action.
You are wrong in
calling for executive action at the midnight hour instead of an open, public
democratic process of carefully weighing values in the light of day.
You are wrong to
call upon the President to take an illegal action that is prohibited by the
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Ironically that is the very act
whose anniversary you have used as the pretext for your visit to Alaska. The
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act contains the “no more”
clause, requiring Congress alone to enact any future land withdrawals of more
than 5,000 acres in Alaska. Implicit in this provision is the concept that the
American people should determine the disposition of the Arctic Refuge through
their elected representatives in Congress. Just such a congressional debate is
underway.
Mr. President,
Alaskans understand better than most Americans the necessity of maintaining the
health of our land. At the same time, we do not fear developing the resources
found within it. As we have done in the North Slope oil fields, we can develop
the resources of ANWR and create an economic boon for the nation while
protecting our environment.
President Carter,
I respect you as a former president. I greatly admire your dedication to the
causes of world peace and human rights. I hope you will reconsider your
recommendation to President Clinton that he thwart the working families of
Alaska, the law, and the Congress by using his executive authority in the Arctic
Refuge.
Sincerely,
(signed)
Tony Knowles
Governor