Alaska's Challenge to the Imagination

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 149-152

149

Alaska’s Challenge to

the Imagination

By Oliver Houck

The Quiet World: Sa ving Alaska’s Wildernes s Kingdom, 1879-1960,

by Douglas Brinkley. Harper. 592 pages.

From the July/ August 2011 issue of The Environment al Forum.

Project Chariot seemed an excellent

idea. e Atomic Energy Commission

would detonate an atomic bomb 100

times more powerful than the one dropped

on Hiroshima in the Alaskan arctic, at a place

named Ogotoruk Creek, around which the

agency would withdraw 1,600 square miles

of la nd and water, just to be safe. e blast

would create a deep water port for shipping

coal and oil reserves from the North Slope.

With the exception of the native Americans

who lived there, primarily the Gwich’in, and

whose creation story was linked to Arctic car-

ibou, there was little protest from Alask ans.

As for the Gwich’in people, father-of-the-H-

bomb Edward Teller declared that “when we

have the harbor we can create coal mines in the Arctic and they can become

coal miners.”

e project met unexpected blowback in the lower forty-eight. Rising con-

servation organizations called it “the worst idea yet conceived by ma nkind.”

Albert Einstein called it “lunac y.” Congressional hea rings were held. e

commission began to crawsh. Further study was needed. e project quietly

died. A nd so here, in miniature, another piece of the rich and tumultuous

conservation history of Ala ska had played out, a remote but highly symbolic

battle between the forces of exploitation and those with a completely dier-

ent view of life. Douglas Brinkley’s e Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilder-

ness Kingdom, 1879-1960 documents this struggle up to a watershed moment

fty years ago, the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His is an