The Wild, Wild North: Nature Writing, Nationalist Ecologies, and Alaska

Jon Krakauer's 1996 best-seller Into the Wild chronicles the experiences of Chris McCandless, the 24-year-old nature enthusiast who left his suburban Washington, D.C., home in 1992 for a wilderness trek through Alaska's backcountry. Equipped with a 10-pound bag of rice, a small-caliber rifle, and not much else, McCandless fashioned himself into a modern-day American Adam determined to explore the nation's "Last Frontier." The excursion came to an abrupt end four months later, however, when his emaciated corpse was discovered in an abandoned school bus not far from the boundaries of Denali National Park. Krakauer's account explains what drove the young man to embark on the adventure. By coming to Alaska, McCandless hoped to experience uncharted country, to locate an empty space on the map. Although it is doubtful whether blank spots existed anywhere in North America in 1992--or in 1492 for that matter--McCandless nevertheless devised a solution to his dilemma. Like a host of other American Adams before him, he managed to resituate Alaska as a terra incognita awaiting his arrival by simply getting "rid of the map" (174). ¹

Between the time of its appearance in 1993 as an article in Outside magazine to its publication as a book in 1996, Krakauer's story elicited numerous responses, including many from Alaska residents who derided the author for glorifying what they saw as nothing more than a young man's folly. For these readers, McCandless represented just another ill-advised tenderfoot who ventured unprepared into dangerous country, hoping to discover answers to his life but finding instead "only mosquitoes and a lonely death" (72). Over the years, scores of marginal characters have taken to Alaska's backcountry, many of them never to appear again, others living to tell their stories (72). Accounts of surviving the wilds of Alaska have become such common fare that Eric Heyne suggests we should consider Alaska literature as synonymous with tourist literature (9). Shaped by the enthusiasm of the newcomer, this writing has done much to position the region as a unique terrain in the popular American imagination. ²

One need not look further than the events of 11 years ago to see how this myth of Alaska has been played out in a national context. After the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound during the spring of 1989, a great public outcry arose as the nation witnessed images of dying wildlife, oil-drenched beaches, and polluted seas on nightly television and front pages of newspapers. Considered one of the world's only remaining wilderness areas and one of its most popular tourist destinations, Alaska has been understood as the nation's "Last Frontier," a region whose history has yet to be written and whose "virgin lands" have yet to be explored. As the oil spill threatened to disrupt Alaska's wilderness status, Prince William Sound came to signify the profound environmental catastrophes facing the US in the late twentieth century. According to many news reports, the disaster was most tragic because it took place in an area whose natural beauty was said to surpass all others. If the region was a relatively unknown location for most Americans before the disaster, in the weeks and months following the spill, the media ensured that Prince William Sound became a household name through stories tracing its decline from a formerly pristine ecosystem into a place of extreme pollution.

Although few reports questioned the accuracy of these depictions, a look at the oil industry's own record of operations in Alaska indicates that the Exxon Valdez spill was just one of many environmental disasters taking place in the history of Prince William Sound's industrial development. The 1989 disaster, for instance, marked the four-hundredth spill in the region since oil began to be transported from the North Slope...