Honoring President Jimmy Carter and his Conservation Legacy 

Caption: The author (left) visits with the Carters on the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy: Debbie S. Miller, Alaska Wilderness League Board Member

We are grateful to honor one of Alaska’s greatest conservation heroes, President Jimmy Carter. As a young farm boy growing up during the Depression in Plains, Georgia, Jimmy ran barefoot in the fields and understood the meaning of conservation and making do. Life was simple. People walked or rode on mule-drawn wagons. Newspapers were used for tissue in the outhouse. Carter wrote in his memoir, “Hour Before Daybreak,” that “the most persistent impression as a farm boy was of the earth. There was a closeness, almost an immersion, in the sand, loam and red clay that seemed natural and constant.”

His rural upbringing, hunting and fishing traditions, and a deep appreciation for the great outdoors stayed with him through life. President Carter was the first world leader to address climate change concerns. Long before the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, President Carter implemented vehicle fuel efficiency standards that saved millions of barrels of oil, reducing carbon emissions. Conservation was a priority in his White House.

When Congress stalled in their work to protect important public lands in Alaska, Carter used his executive authority under the Antiquities Act to protect 56 million acres of Alaska’s wilderness in the form of monuments. That one action doubled the size of the National Park System. While some Alaskans protested and burned the President in effigy, many others hailed his decision, which ultimately pushed Congress into action.

Under President Carter’s leadership, following his monuments designations, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), the greatest piece of conservation legislation in U.S. history. With the stroke of his pen in 1980, this law set aside more than 100 million acres of conservation lands and waters in Alaska – an area the size of California. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had any president protected so much public land.

The “fierce debate and compromise” necessary to pass ANILCA, as Carter remembered in his 25th-anniversary reflection, was well worth the political capital. “Alaska’s parks were perhaps the last ones of large size that will be created anywhere in the United States, protecting natural landscapes on an ecosystem scale.”

This sweeping act created or expanded 13 national parks and preserves, 16 wildlife refuges, 26 wild and scenic rivers, and many wilderness areas. It also protected the hunting, fishing and cultural traditions of Alaska’s Indigenous people whose lives have depended on the resources of their homelands for thousands of years. Carter clearly saw the value of safeguarding these beautiful and wildlife-rich public lands for future generations, and we are so grateful that he did.

In 1990, 10 years after the passage of ANILCA, President Carter and Rosalynn Carter had the opportunity to make a special trip to America’s largest and wildest refuge, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the protection of which was made possible under President Carter’s historic law. During this well-timed visit, the Porcupine caribou herd aggregated on the coastal plain. The Carters witnessed the astonishing procession of more than 100,000 caribou marching by them on the tundra. It was unthinkable to consider industrial activity in such a sensitive area. “Oil development can never happen here,” Carter boldly said.

Later that day, when asked what he felt most proud about during his presidency, he responded immediately, “The Alaska Lands Act!”

Soon after his trip to Alaska, Carter joined Alaska Wilderness League’s Board of Directors as an honorary chair.

“The Alaska Wilderness League provides leadership on protecting the Arctic Refuge and keeps other groups in the coalition invigorated,” Carter said in 2013 at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Over the past 30 years, Alaska Wilderness League has continued its work to protect the Arctic Refuge and other federal lands in Alaska, honoring President Carter’s conservation legacy.

There is no place in the world that is quite like Alaska, and we can thank Jimmy Carter for protecting America the Beautiful in its purest form.