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141 N ews of Stewart Brandborg’s departure from the Wilderness Society spread quickly through the ranks of the wilderness community in the winter of 1976. Within weeks, the Wilderness Society’s Governing Council began to receive letters from activists across the country. Many expressed their outrage: “What a strange way to reward a leader!”1 “You have, no doubt, brought joy to the hearts of the exploiters.”2 They praised Brandborg ’s leadership, his “bold and imaginative” training sessions, and his ability to “weld, enthuse, and train workers from all environmental organizations.”3 But the problems that had been mounting at the Wilderness Society had not gone entirely unnoticed. Other members remarked that the Wilderness Society ’s administration was sloppy, tensions with the field staff were growing, and the organization was losing its momentum.4 One longtime associate summed up the Wilderness Society’s ordeal as one that demanded the council’s “judgment and courage.” Despite Brandborg’s unfailing commitment, “the job had, perhaps, outgrown him.”5 In the aftermath of Brandborg’s departure it would take the Wilderness Society four years to right itself. Three executive directors would come and go. Membership would drop to two-thirds of what it had been in the mid-1970s. The society’s budget would remain in the red. Yet, at the moment of the Wilderness Society’s crisis, the wilderness movement itself faced its greatest opportunities. In the spring of 1976, Chuck Clusen, the Sierra Club’s chief public lands lobbyist, sent a confidential letter to Michael McCloskey, the club’s executive director. He noted that Brandborg’s departure and the staff turnover had crippled the Wilderness Society’s legislative program. If the wilderness movement was to advance, Clusen noted, the Sierra Club would have to make “additional extra efforts during the period of the Society’s lapse.”6 Clusen, like many others in Washington, D.C., realized that the legislative and legal advances for wilderness protection in the mid-1970s had set the stage for three major wilderness reviews: Alaska’s “national interest” lands, the national forest “roadless areas,” 5 / Alaska “The Last Chance to Do It Right the First Time” 142 chapter 5 and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. In the 1960s, wilderness advocates had hoped to protect 35 to 55 million acres of wilderness. The new wilderness reviews encompassed nearly 200 million acres of land, from the arid expanses of southwestern deserts to the wilds of Alaska. Of these reviews, Alaska was most pressing: its December 1978 deadline for congressional action was less than two years away. The campaign for Alaska became a focal point of American environmental politics in the late 1970s. With the Sierra Club in the lead, the environmental community organized under the banner of the Alaska Coalition—which emerged as a well-oiled advocacy machine, spanning dozens of national organizations and 1,500 local and national affiliates; its cogs and gears linked the nation’s environmental constituency with a professional lobbying campaign in Washington, D.C. This tight coordination meshed the old and the new in environmental advocacy: it encouraged the citizen involvement that had been important to Stewart Brandborg’s vision of the wilderness movement. Its national scope, professional coordination, and financial resources marked the increasing sophistication of the mainstream environmental movement. That synergy would sustain the Alaska Coalition and its campaign through its denouement in 1980. Environmentalists and historians alike have heralded the Alaska campaign in the late 1970s as a highpoint for wilderness protection. The historian Roderick Nash described it as the “greatest single instance of wilderness preservation in world history.”7 But that viewpoint obscures the pivotal role of the Alaska campaign in American environmental politics. When the campaign began in the mid-1970s, wilderness advocates enjoyed strong support from the Carter administration and Democratic allies in Congress. Buoyed by such a favorable political moment, wilderness advocates advanced ambitious plans for Alaska, emphasizing the unparalleled opportunity to develop scientifically informed conservation plans for the nation’s wildest lands. Such ambitions ran up against the changing landscape of American environmental politics, however . As the future of Alaska drew the nation’s attention in the late 1970s, the campaign itself opened up deep divisions over the place of local, state, and national interests in public lands protection and governance. Native Alaskans, such as the Eskimo and Inupiat, affected both the protection and the development of Alaska’s public lands in ways that reflected their divided interests. As the Alaska Coalition...

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