The Future of the Wild Lands of Alaska LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR LOWELL THOMAS, JR.
Nine years ago on Christmas Eve as the United States spacecraft Apollo 8 circled the moon, on-board cameras televised the mother planet, 371 910 kilometers away. Captain James Lovell remarked that the earth looked like a "grand oasis in the big vastness of space." To the millions of viewers watching the image of their blue and white sphere floating in a sea of blackness, the point was obvious: like Apollo 8, earth too is isolated and fragile - the only body in the universe known to support life. The maintenance and preservation of wilderness is essential to knowing and maintaining the fragile life web on which all of us depend. Perhaps this is nowhere more apparent than in the land of Alaska - my home for the past seventeen years. Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of Alaska - the fortyninth addition to the United States of America. But first - my definition of wilderness as taken from the United States Wilderness Act of 1964: "A wilderness ... is ... an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Alaska was named the "great land" by an early people, to convey its immense scale and variety, as well as its overwhelming beauty. It is a sprawling land of superlatives: 1 517 733 square kilometers, 74 060 kilometers of shoreline, 151 875 million hectares spanning twenty-one degrees of latitude and fortythree degrees of longitude, and spread over four time zones which encompass 3 864 kilometers. About twenty per cent larger than South Africa, Alaska is a land of "continental magnitude." Its physical features are as awesome as its immensity: three million lakes 16,2 hectares or larger, 4,4 million hectares of glaciers and icefields, 10 000 streams and rivers totalling over 587 650 kilometers in length, 100 volcanoes with forty-one active, seven mountain ranges with nineteen peaks topping 4 256 metres and 6 177,3 metre Mt. McKinley, the tallest mountain on the North American continent and almost 304 metres higher than Africa's Kilimanjaro. A member of an 1898 expedition to Alaska, Henry Gannett wrote: " ... nowhere else on earth is there such abundance and magnificence of mountain, fjord and glacier scenery ... The Alaska coast is to become the show place of the entire Earth and pilgrims not only from the United States but from beyond the seas will throng in endless procession to see it. Its grandeur is more valuable than the gold or the fish, or the timber for it will never be exhausted." Yes, it is one of earth's last relatively unspoiled wildernesses - a land both blessed and burdened by her riches. We possess both the natural resources essential to American industry and to other Pacific rim nations in the coming decades, and the spiritual resources of spectacular wilderness, 95