unrealistic. Alaska could absorb some more settlers and many more tourists than the 100,000 who now visit the state each year, mainly the southern panhandle. But the state badly needs highways, railroads, hotels, ski areas and more public parks—new lures for urban Americans as well as Japanese, who are relatively near. With rational resource planning to pay the bills for such development, Alaska should face a magnificent future. As Weeden suggests: "The world needs an embodiment of the frontier mythology, the sense of horizons unexplored, the mystery of uninhabited miles. It needs a place where wolves stalk the strand lines, because a land that can produce a wolf is a healthy, robust and perfect land. But more than these things, the world needs to know that there is a place where men live amid a balanced interplay of the goods of technology and the fruits of nature."
In this sense, Alaska is not so much the last frontier as the new frontier: the place to prove that Americans can live in harmony with the environment, not abuse it.
