The Great Land: Boom or Doom

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the usual sentence is six months, suspended. Alaskans see the great land as a gate to self-renewal, freshness, confidence and independence. Says Celia Hunter, a conservationist who lives near Fairbanks: "Life on the outside is not only too crowded but too dull. In Alaska, people feel that what they do and say counts. You don't have quite that in the States. You're individuals here."

Rugged individualism is unavoidable in a roadless land where people routinely fly in frail float planes across massive glaciers, where serious earthquakes regularly rumble and smoking Aleutian volcanoes testify that creation is still in progress. The land's impermanence is matched by its transient population of military men and assorted seekers of fortune in gold, uranium and similar riches.

Home-grown leaders like Alaska-born Elmer Rasmuson, chairman of the National Bank of Alaska, are still relatively rare. More typical is Kansas-born Walter J. Hickel, who arrived penniless in 1940, carved a real estate fortune, became Alaska's Governor and is now U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Those who stay, whether as bankers, merchants or fishermen, share a common pride in having overcome adversity; most dislike "the Outside."

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Alaskan politics is highly individualistic: character is far more important than party affiliation. Jay Hammond, a full-time fisherman and part-time Republican leader of the state senate, comes from a 5-to-l Democratic district. His fishermen constituents admire his strong personality as well as his fishing skill. H.A. ("Red") Boucher retired from the Navy as a chief petty officer, won $25,000 on TV's Name That Tune, married an Icelandic girl he met on the show, and headed for Alaska. Because of his drive and charm, he is now mayor of Fairbanks, the state's second biggest city (pop. 18,000).

Alaska has its share of militant conservatives. This year an officer of the John Birch Society is running for the state's single congressional seat. Yet Alaska's right-wingers are not easily classified. Channel Pilot Clem Tillion, for instance, is an ultraconservative state legislator who voted to liberalize abortion, and shunned the Birchers because "they tried to tell me what to think."

Boundlessly optimistic, Alaskans have fought and subdued a raw wilderness. Now they must decide how to use Alaska for decades to come: whether to turn it into a vast industrial colony, or preserve its natural grandeur—or somehow do enough of both to improve the lot of all. In ten years, Alaska could conceivably be just another paved and polluted corner of the U.S. With rational planning, it could be something dramatically different: a unique blend of wealth and wilderness. To environmentalists, the challenge is clear; this is the last chance for the last frontier.

The catalyst that turned Alaska into what Ecologist Barry Commoner calls "a living microcosm of the whole environmental issue" is oil. For centuries, Eskimos had noticed seepages on the North Slope; but after World War II, oil companies searched the Slope in vain. By early 1966, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) alone had spent $4,500,000 drilling one dry hole.

Whan ARCO Chairman Robert O. Anderson decided to try just one more time, he was mindful that the U.S. now relies on foreign sources for 20% of its domestic oil