Roger Kaye oral history transcript

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Roger Kaye - Final
Hello, my name is Norman Olson. I am a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service employee and a volunteer at the Service’s National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Today is Tuesday, November 18, 2008, and it’s about 5:00 in the evening. My guest is Roger Kaye and this interview is being conducted at the National Conservation Training Center. Roger is a current Fish and Wildlife Service employee and lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. As a personal aside I might mention that Roger and I worked together in Alaska in the 1980’s and have quite a few shared Alaskan experiences. Roger, I wonder if we could begin by having you tell us your full name and please spell it for us; what your current position is with the Service; when and where you were born and raised; when and where you went … first went to college and the degree you received; how you wound up in Alaska; and how you came to work for the Service when you were there.
RK OK Norm, my name is Roger Kaye, last name K A Y E. Currently I’m the Wilderness Specialist … I think the only one of my kind in the Fish and Wildlife Service … Wilderness Specialist and pilot assigned to Arctic Refuge. Let’s see, I was born and raised in Minnesota, went to the University of Minnesota, got a degree in the spring of … in May of ’74 and a few days before graduation I took off for Alaska, so I didn’t attend my graduation, I came right up here. How I wound up in Alaska, well, you know, I guess somehow I always knew I’d end up in Alaska, ever since I was in middle school probably. But I found the time after I graduated from college and a job opened up … I saw … actually I contacted Celia Hunter and Ginny Wood, they had a wilderness camp, and I heard from somebody that they might be hiring people. So before I graduated I wrote to them and they hired me, and … I think for the sum of $700 or $800 for the season, maybe it was a thousand … but I came up and worked at Camp Denali in the spring and summer of ’74. Then I went to graduate school for a year and during graduate school I was very frustrated. I had enough of academics and I really wanted to do lots of stuff. You know, I had this vision in the back of my mind that getting out in the wilderness … it was the wilds of Alaska that attracted me … the summer at Camp Denali had wetted I guess my appetite for adventure and doing things … the kind of things that Alaska was about … I wanted to hunt, I wanted to trap, I wanted to do trips, you know … I was in graduate school. So at that time, and that was ’74, the Alaska pipeline was going on and there were stories about people making fortunes and making a lot of money and here I was stuck in school with a student defense loan … absolutely broke … living off lynx carcasses and meat that trappers had donated to me and helping trappers out for meat and so on. And man, I just wanted to be able to go out and do that stuff I always wanted to do … sitting in graduate school hoping for a job. So I quite graduate school after completing one year and didn’t finish my masters at the time and went to work on the pipeline. Job came up in the Brooks Range … Dietrich Camp … seven twelve’s at … it was $13.00 an hour then and that was unheard of and my hope was to get enough money to buy an airplane and enough money to go traveling around Alaska. Which is actually what happened. I worked on the slope and during a couple of what you call R&Rs I came back, took flying lessons, I bought my first plane, finished my license … actually I didn’t even finish my license. Flight instructors were hard to find in Fairbanks, they all were gone on the pipeline. So I got my solo certificate and started flying and started doing trips and later on I finally got my license. I quit the pipeline 2
in early ’77, went outside, I sold my plane and got a bigger plane, a 170, and spent all of the spring, summer and fall of ’77 just traveling around Alaska. Hunting in the fall, but doing trips, fishing trips and backpack trips in areas from south central, southwest Alaska to the Arctic slope and really got to see Alaska and do this stuff. Then the winter of ’77-’78 I settled on a trap line. A friend of mine I had met told me about an area that I could trap, be away from everyone and since I had a plane I put on skis and flew out into the Yukon Flats … it’s now the Yukon Flats Refuge. And I went out on October 25th; I was the first ski plane out. I had never flown on skis and, oh boy, was that fun. I took off from a float pond that was just barely frozen over and flew up there … I came back once for more supplies. I came back at Christmas, otherwise I was there from October 25th through oh, late March I think it was. So that was my summer in search of Alaska and then I did my trap line and the Alaska thing living in the bush. So I did that and I decided to start looking for a job because the pipeline money was running out and I invested in a divorce like a lot of pipeline guys. I had been married at the time and my wife wasn’t to enamored with the Alaska trips, the flying or the construction life style so, anyway, I ran out of money after all that and a job with Fish and Game came up. So I went to work at Alaska Fish and Game and I worked there as a biotech doing surveys and doing various things that biological technicians do for not quite a year … worked for Dave Kellyhouse, my supervisor. Philosophically I really wasn’t that oriented towards Fish and Game. Of course I wasn’t in a management position, just doing the technical technicians work. But still the wolf hunting and the enthusiasm for killing predators in the Flats, it was definitely not mine, but I got along and I had a lot of friends there. The D-2 issue was very strong at that time … there was quite a bit of angst in the Fish and Game office against the feds.
NO Well, the D-2, that … that refers to the section of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that … that called for the national interest lands to be identified, etc.
RK Yeah, that’s right, you’re absolutely right. Anyways, the ANILCA proposals were in the air … everybody knew there would be huge federal enclaves, wilderness areas, parks and refuges and I was more oriented philosophically towards that type of land management and use … more protective. And I wasn’t focused on killing predators or considering Alaska’s landscape as a factory for the production of certain game species, but anyhow … Mike Spindler came by the Fish and Game office and I asked him about jobs that might be coming up with these proposed refuges and so on. And he said, “Well actually we’re going to be hiring … going to be hiring a couple of key persons fairly soon to do research, work with villagers and so on in the proposed refuges.” So he gave me a contact, it was Lou Swenson. I called up Lou Swenson in Anchorage … the regional office … he was a planner. Told him my background and we talked … we talked on the phone for about an hour and a half. And I … it was just an inquiry, but it ended up being an interview, and they really wanted someone who had done hunting and trapping in Alaska and could fly. And that’s not the type of view of the feds … who were all, you know, bird watchers and posy snifters as the state was saying. I had developed a number of contacts in villages … friends in the Fort Yukon area … and had trapped and hunted and fished and could talk guns and stuff and they really wanted somebody who could do that and could relate to Fairbanksans and rural Alaskans in interior Alaska. Anyhow, I had an … actually I had a minor in Anthropology and my degree had been natural history and biological work but I really was actually fascinated by anthropology … so I had an affinity for people and got along pretty well. So anyhow, Lou 3
said, “Well this is the person we need” and I was single and free to travel and nothing I liked more than to fly around and work with natives and do mapping and so on and so he hired me basically over the phone. He almost assured me that if I filled out this, you know, application … he sent me a 171 form … so I filled it out and sent it in and gee whiz, not long afterwards he called me and we settled on a starting date and I was a GS-5 Biological Technician. So I started out … and I think that went through in early ’78, January or February … I had two six-month appointments with a little space in between. So I started with the Service then worked mostly in the Yukon Flats and Kanuti Refuge proposals … they were only proposals at the time of course. There was no refuge division in Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska then, it was refuge planning … it was planning for refuges … because all there was was the Kenai and the … the Clarence Rhode, the Yukon Delta Refuge.
NO Was that the group that Clay Hardy was involved with?
RK Yeah, Clay Hardy was in charge of refuge planning. He had a staff of oh, 8 or 10 people and I worked for him under Lou Swenson actually. Yeah, it was a wonderful … a dream job, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I was actually paid to fly around Alaska and go to different villages and my job was to explain what a refuge would be and what the principles of it were and this was basic stuff. The basic principles of sustained yield and harvestable surplus I’m explaining to native people and as for me, I was the first wildlife quote bureaucrat who’d ever come by. Some had known game wardens in the past and it was usually a bad association. There was a lot of angst, a lot of suspicion. But I had a basically unlimited account and I could go to these villages … many of which you traveled with me to later … in the Yukon Flats and Kanuti and just stayed in the villages … household to household, visiting with people, going out to fish camps with them, going out on their trap lines, explaining what a refuge would be, describing how they could be involved. Describing and trying to be as honest as I could about the advantages of a refuge as proposed and the disadvantages, in that it represented change, there would be more law enforcement and it was an exciting time. There was, you know, a lot of angst, a fear of authority and yet in general many people were open to me and it worked well. And I ended up being able to go all the way down the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the other refuges proposed, the Innoko and Nowitna and Koyukuk and did a lot of that type of work down there because the employees … I was the only one who was interested in traveling and visiting with natives as I had done. So … and I was single and I was free to travel and I loved flying and I actually was able to use my own plane at that time … the Service paid my expenses. Now you can’t do that these days, but at that time … I don’t think you were supposed to but it was overlooked … and anyhow that was my job. I spent a lot of time in the field … I designed a few preliminary moose surveys for the Yukon Flats and we hired natives to work with me on it. I had an unlimited budget, hired natives to go out with me on projects and developed a pretty fair rapport, so …
NO Were you and Lou pretty much a two-man team, working in this part of the Yukon?
RK Well, for Yukon Flats … Lou was the key person for all of the Yukon Flats and Kanuti refuge proposals, but Lou didn’t like to travel and he didn’t like being in villages and he didn’t like to camp too much, so basically I was ideal for it, you know, I did all the fieldwork and he 4
just got the money and the approvals and took care of all the paper work. I just sent him receipts and I got the money back and Lou took care of all the bureaucracy. It was an ideal … I look back at what a carefree time it was.
NO It was a good team?
RK It was a wondrous time, it was a good team and I think we … there was certainly hostility, there was certainly suspicions, hard feelings about the change a refuge would represent to the Yukon Flats and Kanuti and those other areas. But, you know, people appreciated that I took the time I think to camp with them and stay with them and a certain rapport of trust developed and I still have very close friends that I am in contact with. Several of them are elderly now and have been virtual grandparents to my daughters and we spend a lot of time when they come to Fairbanks. They come over and we’ve kept in touch and it’s been really heartening … some of those relationships that we built up over time. Anyhow, that was a magical several years and then of course, in late ‘78 Jimmy Carter used the Antiquities Act to establish Yukon Flats as a National Wildlife Monument. Extreme hostility on the part of the white community and among a lot of trapper friends and I used to work with the Fairbanks sportsmen’s community. I worked with the Alaska Trapping Association, which I have been a member of and been active with and others. And there was actually a lot more hard feelings and I guess uncomplimentary things said about me in Fairbanks and in the villages. Some of the trappers, some of the outdoorsmen, some of my former colleagues at Fish and Game thought that I was a virtual traitor, in fact they used that word … that I had left the state and went to the feds, you know, and the fed takeover … especially after the Antiquities Act was used. A lot of people talked about the lockup, they warned sportsman about the permit society and word was getting out to native communities as state … some state biologists and others, pilots, were telling natives things that weren’t true. That if it became a refuge it would be locked up, you couldn’t trap, you wouldn’t be able to build a cabin, you know, you’d have to carry a brief case of permits around … it was outrageous. It was a hard time in some ways … working with folks in Fairbanks but … and the rural communities to a lesser degree … but it was an exciting time. We got through the Antiquities start and then, of course, as things went on it was more and more likely we were going to get some kind of a bill, ANILCA bill. Then on the other hand, the tide was changing … Jimmy Carter wasn’t very popular; Reagan was obviously looking very popular … as it was we may not get anything. Well, Reagan got elected, as you know, in 1980 … conservatives swept … it was a landslide you know … it was a bad omen for the conservation community, which I had been involved with personally. At the same time I was on the board of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center and worked with several conservation groups who I was philosophically aligned with … so they were very worried that we may not get any lands for Alaska at all. And of course the great compromise occurred. We did get, with the, you know, the eleventh hour an Alaska lands act that was very much a compromise, it was not what we were hoping for … we being people in Fish and Wildlife Service and the environmental community. We were of course, very disappointed … the two main things was the Tongass … which I wasn’t involved in … the compromise there … and then the Arctic Refuge. The compromise there was that HR-39, the initial bill, was changed and deleted wilderness designation for the coastal plain. And of course, the proponents for development didn’t get the development provisions they wanted in the law, but we didn’t get the wilderness either. So there are a number of other compromises as you 5
know, but we finally got a lands bill and after that refuges were established … a refuge division … and I ended up working for Yukon Flats.
NO Yeah, I remember when I … when I interviewed Fran Mauer in Fairbanks a couple years ago he talked … he talked about this period and he mentioned that there were protests at the regional office and that sort of thing.
RK Oh yeah, there were protests in Fairbanks, especially after the Antiquities Act was used and the monuments were established. Jimmy Carter was burned in effigy on several occasions, there were protestors here and around and there was a great Alaska protest at Cantwell. And yeah absolutely, it was a very bitter time for a lot of Alaskans who, you know, just couldn’t accept the change and I guess they simply, in my view, weren’t very visionary. In fact, there were abuses … off road vehicles, intrusive uses and practices that simply could not continue to occur and maintain the basic values of these places and it was not sustainable and without these conservation units these kinds of qualities would be lost I think.
NO I remember and I’ve heard this … I think I’ve read it several places … about Jay Hammond talking about that time, you know, making the statement … which is interesting for an Alaskan to say … that private ownership of the land was the ultimate lockup.
RK Yeah exactly, yeah he did and, you know, Hammond was a moderate, he was not … I think personally he favored wilderness and in fact if you read his biography he did … but politically at the time as governor he favored a cooperative compromise that didn’t come to pass … it wasn’t practical … but he was caught in the middle … but he was very reasonable. But most people in the state were extremely critical, they forecast the end of hunting, a permit society, the end of life as they knew it and of course, it didn’t come to pass. People are hunting in refuges … in fact in the Arctic Refuge where I work by all accounts hunters say that hunting is much higher quality and much better managed than off in state lands. Partly because we have a limited hunting guide system, a system of guide units that precludes competition between guides within areas. I think a lot of hunters have acknowledged … privately to me anyway … that well, they were kind of wrong and it was good for hunting in the long run and it helped prolong ethical hunting, more ethical than occurs in other lands and for people who want a quality hunt a refuge is a good place to go. So many people have come around and others don’t … haven’t of course and I still … you hear comments about how bad the refuges and parks in D-2 was but as a matter of fact there isn’t much opposition anymore. Most people … the grim forecast of what was going to happen just hasn’t come to pass to a large degree.
NO Speaking of Yukon Flats, when it was established as a monument was there some sort of management, a refuge manager or a monument manager?
RK Well, at that time, the Service needed people quickly and I don’t think there was much of a selection process … I don’t know if there was much competition … but Yukon Flats got a monument manager and a monument was a very unusual designation. Of course, nobody knew what a monument was, there was no such thing as Fish and Wildlife monuments. So it kind of got made up as we went along. But there were legal obligations to develop regulations for these 6
new monuments and my task was … right after they were established … to go out and go to … in fact I remember I got a call from … it wasn’t Lou … somebody in the regional office … saying, you know, the Antiquities Act was just implemented and you need to go out and inform the villagers. And they mailed or sent by airliner a packet and told me to charter a plane … I went to Al Wright’s and chartered a plane and flew to nine villages in one day. Seven in the Yukon Flats and … maybe it was more than that but … yeah, it was Yukon Flats, Kanuti and Galena area for Koyukuk and Nowitna refuges. And I went to every village in one day with chartered flights from like 6 in the morning till late at night … it was in the summer as I recall … there must have been a lot of daylight. But anyhow, I had to quickly leave and the Service needed to say that they immediately notified all affected communities. So I went, but you don’t have much time for a meeting because you had to get them all done so quickly. But anyhow, we did that and then shortly after … a month for the Yukon Flats … a monument manager was hired, Red Sheldon.
NO OK. We can talk about Red maybe a little bit later. So when … when did you actually start working for the Flats … for the Yukon Flats … what was now the new Yukon Flats Refuge?
RK Well, it became a refuge in 1980, so I was technically … you know, in December of 1980 when ANILCA passed is when it turned into a … it was made … the monument was actually much bigger than the refuge … the monument.
NO That’s right. In fact I remember when I started working in the regional office in Anchorage in ’82, we actually had a geologist on the staff, Phil Bigsby. And I understood that he was hired and brought on the staff because of the fact there was … on the south side of the White Mountains … there were mining … a lot of mining claims there.
RK The monument was made much larger than the refuge proposal and the reason was it was basically a bargaining leverage. They wanted to force the state’s hand … with the state delegation, the two senators and the congressman … to … let’s just get this resolved. So we’re going to keep these monuments, these huge monuments, and tie up this … in like the Yukon Flats … tie up the mining lands in the foothills to the south as a kind of a bargaining chip. And so we inherited lots of mines and mining problems. There was no background in the Service for dealing with mines and Gary Radcliff was actually the person that was hired on staff to … he was a mining engineer and his job was to go out and talk to these miners about how a refuge monument … a wildlife refuge monument … because nobody had any idea what it was, these were unprecedented … how they might affect miners. So he’s going out there telling these angry miners about it, knowing that by all accounts this was going to be just a temporary designation until we got a final lands act and it would be converted. Well, as people suspected the problem was all for naught because in fact when ANILCA passed, the Yukon Flats Refuge went back to the original size of the proposal. Anyhow I stayed with the Yukon Flats until … oh, 1982.
NO Yeah. Who was … who was on the staff at that time when … when you were there, you know, in those early days at the Yukon Flats? 7
RK Those first days I was the only employee. I had the whole place to myself. I was primarily a GS-7 by then and here I was essentially in charge of the Yukon Flats Monument, which was about 9 million acres. I had the place all to myself. Then a manager was hired and then a biologist … Scott McLean was the biologist and later Lou Swenson transferred to Fairbanks as the assistant refuge manager or deputy. So there was four of us for a while then.
NO OK. And … and Scott came from BLM, is that right?
RK Scott came from BLM.
NO OK. OK. Were you hired actually as the pilot for the refuge?
RK No, I didn’t start … I was a pilot all that time and actually I used my airplane for a lot of work in those days when you could … or it was overlooked. I started flying in 19 … lets see, in late 1985, the summer of, no, the summer of ’84 … I was in the Yukon Delta and I was hired by Arctic Refuge to come back to the interior and to serve as … at the time it was Pilot/Assistant Refuge Manager with the understanding I’d primarily be working with wilderness issues.
NO Yeah, so the time actually you were working at the Flats and out in the Yukon Delta you weren’t actually a Service pilot?
RK No, no.
NO That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that. So what was your job at the Flats?
RK At the Yukon Flats?
NO Yeah, at the Yukon Flats during that period?
RK Oh, at the time, let’s see, one of the big projects was to develop regulations. We were going through the regulation making process for the new refuges and I had always served of course, as the native liaison, so I was constantly traveling to the villages, going out on trap lines, mapping trap lines, working out what provisions would be needed in regulations to accommodate local uses and to accommodate other types of uses. Looking at cabin issues, collecting data on cabin use and trapping, fish camps, mapping out locations of allotments and places where natives owned cabins on now refuge lands. And the trauma of getting them to accept permits … explaining why, you know, a permit is required … it’s really not an onerous thing but it was quite shocking to a number of natives. People like Richard Carroll Senior, who’s quite elderly now and when we get together we still joke about this … but he was one of those early natives who shortly after I started in ’78 took me into the house and said, “Come on up to my camp and I’ll visit with you.” And we became friends and he was very open, very objective and he really didn’t like a lot of aspects of the lands act and the changes, but he saw it was for the best of the people in the region. And after we got to his cabin I said, “You know Richard that’s hard to get people to fill out papers and get a permit for their cabin even though it gives them legal rights to 8
something that I know they have a right to by tradition but they have no legal right to it.” If they’d just fill out a cabin application we’d give them a cabin permit that gives them total legal rights to that place, something they can pass down and then it’s protected nobody … if they don’t use it it’s still protected in the Fish and Wildlife Service. There’s a lot of advantages to it as well even though it’s kind of a connection to the bureaucracy and Richard listened to that and said, “Well, I’d like to get a cabin permit, I got two cabins.” I said, “Well, can I take pictures?” And what I used to do when I went to these villages … you may remember this … I had slide shows and I’d use them to illustrate our issues because natives are visual people and so I had pictures of trapping and pictures of traps and snares and boats and, you know, allotments and I’d talk about this particular issue. You know, your allotment … here’s a picture of a guy and an allotment … that’s like Abe Stevens on his allotment … and so, you know, this is private land and we don’t have rights to go on it if you don’t want us to. It’s totally yours, you know, and so I’d use all these pictures. And I said, “You know Richard, it would sure be nice if you’d fill out an application for a permit, but could I photograph you and use you as a model to show that you … you’re a very prominent leader in Fort Yukon and if I could show a picture of you filling out a permit application people wouldn’t think it’s so onerous.” He said, “Oh, yeah, go ahead.” So I got several pictures of him filling out a cabin permit and I used that in slide shows across the villages and people said, “Oh, wow, Richard he’s a pretty smart leader and he’s getting one maybe I will too.” And so that’s how the cabins got under permit and in the long run everybody wanted them because they saw in many cases outsiders were moving in to the country … outside trappers … and they were kind of taking over some trespass cabins that people didn’t own rights to. And they’d say, “Oh, it’s a good thing, I get legal rights to my cabin” and so … anyhow I worked on projects like that. And I did educational stuff in the villages, some outreach in the … the city of Fairbanks and a couple of other areas too. Started doing surveys … I designed the first moose surveys and flew some winter surveys and there were a few projects like that. It was very diverse … very exciting.
NO I remember when I first started working at the Flats … it was the second project I think I worked on, I started actually working on the Kenai … the CCP at Kenai in ’82 … but that fall of ’82 Mike Evans and I came to Fairbanks and met with you folks at your office … refuge office in Fairbanks and we planned scoping meetings for that fall. And I think that’s the first time I ever really traveled with you is when we went out and held some of those scoping meetings. I showed you some pictures a little while ago from some of those trips.
RK Yes, we actually met in Kenai before that and then you came up. Yeah, we traveled to a few of these villages and we met folks and … yeah … and we got launched into planning with that.
NO Well, the thing I always remember about that was the very first meeting we had … which was in Fort Yukon … we had a native gentlemen stand up and he was slightly drunk … he’d been drinking … and rambled on and on and no one could quite understand what he was saying and that was sort of my first experience with …
RK Well, that was Steve Ginnis … and he became a leader and became president of the Tanana Chiefs Council afterwards. But I do remember that and he got up and, you know, was a 9
leader … an upcoming leader … and he was drinking like some of those folks do every now and then. And rambled on … and accusations … and you know, it’s one of those things you have to stand back and say gee, you know, there’s a lot of change here and its really hard for these folks to adapt to it and I represent change. And so we were targets of this.
NO Well, I remember Mike Evans, who actually grew up in Alaska, in Anchorage and had a lot of feeling I think for Alaska and at that meeting, when that happened, you guys just sort of let him talk and it went on for awhile and eventually the people that were sitting around him said, you know, hey sit down, sit down.
RK You remember it was Albert Thomas. Now Albert was a former policeman, big stocky guy, one of the Thomas brothers. Well I knew him and he felt sorry for us. He didn’t entirely like the refuge idea himself … he was a friend and he rescued us from that. I remember he did … enough is enough and they ushered Steve out of the building and that took care of it for us. That happened actually several times to me that folks would not tolerate that to much and … yeah …
NO Yeah, I figured this was probably a good move. I learned certainly that you did need to kind of let the people take care of it … not say you sit down, you can’t talk any more … you needed to really let the local folks take care of it.
RK Yeah, and on the other hand, even though some of those folks were drunk and angry … alcohol was kind of a catalysts for opening them up to saying what was really on their mind and I think he spoke for a lot of people who were more stoic or not willing to express the angst that they felt. But I think some of those things that were said in a kind of drunken rage very much reflected how some people thought and it was good to hear that … to know what they thought and the intensity that they felt it. So it wasn’t all bad, it was an expression of how people were and it helped us understand what was underneath the surface in some of those situations.
NO Yeah, because it was, definitely was … well you and I … I think went from that meeting in Fort Yukon, did a couple of other meetings and I remember we had a meeting in Beaver where we flew into Beaver and everyone had been drinking and we had to sort of lay low for a day and we stayed at your friend’s cabin.
RK Well that’s right, yeah … you know, there are always cabins and I stayed with different people in the villages, never stayed in the school, but I always stayed in the homes and there were always several people who didn’t drink who were safe havens to go stay in and you would go there and there would be drinking going on and they would lock the door and you wouldn’t go out.
NO That’s right.
RK And … yeah they … but you know what, it’s so different now but at that time, at that stage in history, with what was going on, there was a lot anger and there’s still a lot of alcoholism, but it’s not as bad as it was at that time. 10
NO Well that’s good. You mentioned Red Sheldon a little while ago and Red being the manager at that time of the old monument and the new refuge. You know, I remember we worked together … as we’ve just been talking about the scoping meetings and everything … and the planning team, the process for the refuge plan and I remember that there were some problems with Red and … is my memory correct?
RK Well, I don’t know, that’s a very kind way of saying it. As you know, there were major problems. I think Sheldon was … now even the early refuge mangers some really poor selections were made by Fish and Wildlife Service. They were, unlike the Park Service which was much more careful in having the best and brightest superintendents, the Fish and Wildlife Service took some of the managers that had problems elsewhere and shipped them up to Alaska and Red was certainly one of them. The staff had nothing but trouble with him, the natives had trouble with him, couldn’t get along … basically was like a few others utterly maladapted to Alaska. I remember he came up with these ideas at Yukon Flats … after he started working in the area … and had dikes and dam and water impoundments and holding structures to maximize and increase production of birds … ducks and geese … which was, you know, the perfect thing to do where he came from, but was utterly inappropriate in an area … a wilderness area like Yukon Flats … in which the purpose for the refuge, in fact, in ANILCA reads to maintain natural diversity. And off we went … I in particular, because I have a wilderness orientation and focus and had been involved with the wilderness groups … that we‘d constantly be arguing with him. And I remember we said, you know, these places are different and if you even look at them, which I don’t think he did … after the Lands Act passed … but you know, these are places to be valued for themselves and for naturalness and wildness and we should be more stewards of this place than managers of wildlife and managers of land … we should be stewards. In fact in this law it’s inherent in section 101 of ANILCA, you read about natural diversity and oh, he would just deny that. He couldn’t get rid of his past and I remember he would say … he said and I’ve even quoted him on this … he said, “You know, the only difference between these Alaska refuges and lower 48 refuges is” he said, “they’re a little bigger and a little colder.” But anyhow we … we fought … he didn’t get along with the staff and with me in particular. The wild … Sheenjek Wild River study was done at this time and I was on the study team. The Park Service was leading this study team at the time … Jim Morrison was the leader … and Ave Thayer was manager of Yukon … of Arctic Refuge at the time and I was involved in the Sheenjek Wild River study. So Ave came and we started in the Arctic Refuge and floated through the Yukon Flats, and our recommendation … which I very strongly supported … that the entire Sheenjek be a wild river including the Yukon Flats section. Now to Red this was an absolute affront and I remember we used to have disagreements in front of people in the villages because I didn’t think he was honest to villagers. He was really dishonest with them sometimes and I couldn’t tolerate that because I would contradict him and, as manager you can’t, you know, but anyhow. But he told the natives that if that becomes a wild river you may not be able to trap along it, or you might lose your cabin, you maybe can’t use your motorboats, which was utterly untrue, it was a lie and I reported him to his supervisors in Anchorage … Don Redfern being the boss, the chief of refuges … who hired the guy in the first place knowing his short comings. And because of that fight, because I decided to report him … and some other baggage … basically I got a disciplinary transfer. One day I got in my mailbox at work … you remember those blue 11
envelopes, you know, that says personal on it … I still remember opening it and it said congratulations on your selection for a lateral transfer to the Yukon Delta Refuge, you’ve got to be there in 30 days. And anyhow, that was the politics at the time and I was a GS-7 at the that time probably … maybe I was still a 5 I can’t remember, but a GS nothing and … so anyhow, I decided because I liked the Yukon Delta and I had been out on a couple of personal trips on my own, I decided to stay with the Service instead of quitting and I went down there and so I worked there for 2 years as the native liaison.
NO When was that, when you went out there?
RK ’82 and I was there through the end of ’84. I was there 2 years and I thoroughly enjoyed it … wonderful people there, Jay Ballenger was the manager … Ron Perry came later … just very good people. The staff were pretty much in tune with the native people … the life style there was very reasonable … a wonderful place to live.
NO Mike Readon was there too?
RK Mike Reardon was there and we were very close partners and Chuck Hunt left … he came back, he had been gone for a while and I worked closely with him.
NO Now you … if I remember correctly … you started the Refuge Information Technician program or the RIT program out at the Delta about that time.
RK Yeah, I did, yeah. Well actually Chuck Hunt … he was a native liaison … a Yupik, a wonderful Yupik guy … but he had a problem with alcohol. He got sentenced to 2 years in prison and so they had a reason to transfer me to Bethel … it didn’t have to be a discipline thing for I had done nothing wrong. So they said we really need a native liaison in the Bethel area … in Yukon Delta … and you happen to be very good at it and we’re going to transfer you … without a promotion of course. So anyhow, I went down there and I had 37 Yupik villages to work with and I was not Yupik. And I’d go into these villages and of course, at that time, you know, in the mid’80’s, there was … many people really didn’t speak English … things are a lot different now but … it was I wouldn’t say unacculturated … but they were very traditional at that time. It was magical country and I had been down there three times on personal trips. I had some friends in Tuluksak and a couple of villages, so I knew that and I really and thoroughly enjoyed it. But I was frustrated by the fact that a white guy just can’t cover this area and we really … you know, what we talked about … we need to hire natives, we need to hire natives. And there was a local hire provision in ANILCA but people didn’t see how to do it. And I looked at that and thought why can’t we fill a special position … a job description … that covers that and hire people to represent their own communities and be a liaison between the Service and the villages, in which they could help do survey work, do things that didn’t require formal training but take advantage of the local hire provisions of ANILCA in a formal way. A couple refuges had made attempts to informally hire natives in a particular title, interpreter or what ever. But anyhow, I thought about it and wrote up a proposal and working with Mike Reardon in particular … who was married to a woman from there … and talked to some of the friends I had made out there … and came up with a proposal that for every three … cluster of three or four 12
villages … we would select one person. We ended up hiring 9 people. Anyhow, I came up with a proposal, the refuge manager thought it was great but I didn’t know if the regional office would buy it. Regional office obstructionalism and delay … you know, you can’t do this … well why not … well we haven’t done it before. Well you know, the regional office, the personnel division and the refuge … Larry Calvert was his name … he was supervisor of refuges, of 6 or 7 refuges. Yeah, he … we didn’t get along … oh, you can’t do that, how are you going to train them? Well, we’re going to bring them into Bethel for an intensive two weeks … oh, they’ll all get drunk and go away, you know you can’t. Well I think we can, we can select people … there will be problems we know this, but you know … anyhow they thought up roadblocks but never the less, we got it through. And then it got to personnel and they said, “We can’t allow anything more that a GS-3”, so we looked and searched. We had to have a title and Refuge Information Technician, with the requirement they be bilingual and serve as interpreters, brought us up to a GS-5/7 level beginning, which was, you know, a decent wage … not really great. Anyhow we surmounted the problems of the regional office … yeah, we haven’t done this before … but so what … and yeah we just stretched things a little bit on the application and the qualifications. Anyhow we did hire 9 people … some quit right away … we knew they would and … but never the less the program was very successful. We got them in, they became dedicated, we lost a couple right away … a couple, shortly after the training, went back to the village, they were called a traitor, a white man, you know, a game warden, and they quit out of frustration. But several stayed on and there’s two remaining, Michael Jimmy and Alex Nick, they still … now we’re talking about 20 some years ago now, 25 years ago … and they are still there and it worked well.
NO Yeah, I remember we … Mike Evans and I were just starting about that same time to look at doing the CCP … the Comprehensive Conservation Plan for the Delta … and I remember we came out when the training … some of the training was occurring. In fact I think you wrote us a memo and we gave you some money … we gave you some of the money out of the planning money to help fund them because we were going to use these … the technicians when we did the scoping meetings. They would be the interpreters at those scoping meetings. So I can remember when that happened and going out there and meeting some of these folks and yeah, it was an interesting program and I think it worked well because they accompanied us on a lot of our scoping meetings.
RK And it’s still working well. We still have quite a few and that’s kind of interesting … so the dilemma of how do you train these people, bring them from the village experience directly into the Service … and you know, we brought them in for intensive training and you know, they stayed with it, we … day long training and then we took them to basketball, we took them bowling, and we stayed with them for a couple of weeks and there was very little alcohol or other problems. But one of the things … challenges was in looking at, you know, how does one do this … you train them up to do this, and so we continue training, but you send them back to be alone in Kwigillingok or Chevak, you know, all by themselves. You know, how do they feel part of this … and so casting about I knew a couple health aides … you know the native health aide program and … I was actually co teaching a course in natural resources through a community college in Bethel and they were running health aide training there. And one of the staff was telling me about it and how they do this net working, and how they teach natives to 13
become very highly proficient, highly proficient technicians … medical technicians or health aides … and I thought wow, that’s the model. So they said, “You could sit in on the training.” So I sat in for many days of health aide training in which … looking at how they teach people to go back into the village … how do you deal with your relatives when they’re part of the problem and so on. And … then the networking, how their program enabled health aides to work together, one would fly to another village and work with that health aide … so they do some camaraderie, you know, some being … not being alone. So I looked at that and so I sat through a great deal of that training and it was kind of fun because some of it was technical and I learned about doing pap smears and stuff like that … but knowing that it could be readapted … much of the success of the RIT program and most people don’t know this … is due to the fact that we looked very carefully at the other successful program. We adapted many of their training techniques, their networking techniques and what they learned when … when somebody’s got a problem to encourage them to call if they feel like there kind of one tree out in the middle of nowhere. You bring them in and you know … let us know when you feel you’re not part of a unit anymore. We’d bring them in for special projects … so anyhow it worked really well in just borrowing from that program.
NO OK. Did Ron Perry come to the refuge when you were there doing all this?
RK Yeah, that’s actually true. Jay transferred to Kodiak and Ron Perry came in and he was a great manager I thought. I thought both of them were very good managers and I thought both … from my background … balanced objectivity with empathy for their situation and so … there was some law enforcement needed, there was some regulations that were unpopular that were needed, but I thought they balanced empathy with peoples plight in these circumstances pretty well. It was a very pleasant place to work … the Yukon Delta.
NO You said … did that model, the RIT model, get to be accepted in any other refuges in terms of following through on what you started?
RK Yeah, yeah the Arctic Refuge had one … Yukon Flats, Paul has been working there oh gosh … Paul Williams … for a decade now, he’s an RIT. There are many other RITs and we have annual RIT training and a couple … a few years ago I went to Dillingham to help do the training that gave the history of the program and how it started. So yeah, it’s still a strong continuing program and the RIT name has not … has been unchanged and I suspect some other aspects of it have, but yeah, it’s still going and two of the originals are still working.
NO Yes … I ran into … I think later on after I’d stopped out in the Delta I’d run into Alex Nick or someone … or Michael Jimmy at the airport … you know, in Anchorage they’d be passing through. They were fun to work with, they were good people and I enjoyed traveling with them. At what point did you sort of decide to go back to … or did the opportunity come up to go back to the Yukon and go back to Arctic?
RK Well, I was really stuck on the Arctic and the north, you know, and I was always intending to go back … as much as I liked the Delta down there. But anyhow, folks at Arctic had … and the Yukon Flats did want to get me back … and the politics in the regional office had 14
to change and some of those folks left. A job at Arctic came up, coincidently they needed a pilot and a wilderness specialist, and so anyhow, I was contacted and you know, there was no pre-selection but they encouraged me to apply and the position was described in a way that I fit it perfectly. So I applied and I got the job at Arctic and that was 19 … end of ’84 and so it was Christmas ’84 -’85 … I had my plane in Bethel and flew back to Fairbanks and started with the Arctic Refuge.
NO Who was it that hired you at Arctic, who hired you at Arctic?
RK Doug Fruge was the deputy manager at Arctic at the time and he made the selection. They were looking for a wilderness background and wilderness interests basically.
NO And Glen … Glen Elison was the manager at that point?
RK Yes.
NO OK. OK. There was a fairly large staff at Arctic.
RK Oh yeah, there was at that time maybe 15 or 16 … actually there were a few more than that. But that was in the height of the 1002 era, you know, 1002 referring to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. And as we talked about the compromise in ANILCA was that the coastal plain of the refuge that has high oil prospects would not be open for drilling, but it wouldn’t be protected as wilderness either. But instead ANILCA mandated a study of the natural values and the oil potential.
NO That’s … that’s the 1002 h section of ANILCA?
RK Yes, the 1002 h section of ANILCA. And so the main project there, or the overriding overwhelming project, was to complete the baseline study that ANILCA mandated for the 1002 area. For the oil potential it was contracted out and a company called GSI did the seismic work with the seismic trains and did the oil exploration part. And then the Fish and Wildlife Service did … with a few cooperators … an enormous number of studies. Virtually every living thing from plants to caribou to musk ox and bears and wolves and ducks, they were all studied intensively, intrusively sometimes, inquisionally I think … and so that was the main focus of the 1002 study for quite a number of years.
NO Yeah, there was certainly a lot of attention being paid to Arctic at that time. It was probably the most high profile and probably controversial refuge in terms of doing planning and everything that was going on because of the coastal plain and oil and gas and everything that was going on. So that was a pretty … pretty intense time I would guess in terms of working there.
RK Oh gosh, it sure was. It was like a war, you could call it a war almost, you know. All our resources were up at Kaktovick and I lived there from May through September for those first few years. And the whole focus … and constantly in the winter even we’d be flying up there … flying support, flying surveys for everything from caribou to musk ox to bears and virtually 15
every living thing that a collar … a radio collar could be put on it there was collars on them and it was … in part it was mandated by Congress and in part it was just the biological bias of the Fish and Wildlife Service … likes to do studies and here was an opportunity to get big money for studies. And to a large degree it was driven … well at least to a degree it was driven not so much by the requirements of the law or the needs of the area, but by the desires of the biologists because here was an enormous pile of money to do projects which is what they like to do, research projects. So sometimes … almost without thought … people would be out there studying and developing projects and studies cause the money was being thrown at them right and left. I remember for instance one example, I remember that I was involved in and I … bothersome to me and I created some problems over it but it was about ‘86/’87 and I was flying spotter plane for a helicopter. I was flying a Cessna 185 and our job was to locate groups of caribou and then the helicopter … we’d radio the helicopter and it would come and capture caribou and put collars on them … and it was a ratio of bulls to cows whatever. So we were flying along fine and then we saw a wolverine and the biologist in my plane told the helicopter, “Oh, we’ve got a wolverine down here.” So over comes the helicopter to dart the wolverine to put a collar on it. But they don’t have a small collar; all they had was caribou collars. I think they weighed 4 pounds and they were much larger than what you would put on a small animal. And if you know anything about a wolverine … which I don’t think these biologists did really know too much, some may have read stuff in classes … but I had trapped them and I had followed them, I knew how they bounded in the snow to make their living. I was appalled by the fact that they tranquilized this wolverine and put a caribou … a 4-pound collar on it. I said, “How in the world is that animal going to make it’s living in the winter, bounding in the snow with a 4-pound … imagine yourself … with 10 percent of your body weight … a backpack on … and trying to break through snow running like that animal” … but there’s no empathy. It was a mercenary, inquisitional study if you want to be honest about it. I went to the refuge manager and complained and he supported the biologists, he always did … its no big deal, you know. But there was a lot of things like that though that were really I felt wrong and it was just too much money with too few conditions, too little ethics, to the biologists. It was a biological playground for a while, so that’s among the things that was intense for some of us … Fran Mauer shared some of these experiences with me. But anyhow that was part of the trauma that that 1002 research orgy I guess … then there is the politics of it all, you know, it was in the national … conservation groups were just focused on that. And again Arctic Refuge emerged as the symbol of naturalness and wildness and …. so everything we did people watched very closely. And you know, during the course of the Reagan years, which was, you know … Reagan was elected in 1980 … so it continued. So all through that early time, you know, it was not a very wilderness oriented but a political environment.
NO Yeah, during that whole period I started working on the Arctic plan in … it was ’86 when Pete Jerome who was the team leader who was working on the project actually transferred out to Togiak Refuge to become the deputy out there. So I inherited the plan, they gave the plan to me, and so I was the team leader during … as the plan was put together but I was really a regional office staffer and I guess I wasn’t always really aware of a lot of the things that were going on, that you refuge folks … who were kind of in the trenches had to deal with on a daily basis. And I guess it wasn’t always stuff just coming down from Washington and Interior. There was … there were internal Service kind of things that were going on and the thing you just 16
described about the biologists playground and the wolverine, there were a lot of other … those kinds of things going on as well that were stressing everyone.
RK Yeah, it was the agency culture too. You know, people talk about the stress and the influence … political interference … and certainly the high level politics certainly played a role in it … that came down on us … the Reagan administration and so on. But there were problems, in my view, very inherent in the Fish and Wildlife Service and its culture. It was to a large degree a hook and bullet outfit … at that time in particular … and a lot has changed for the better in my view. But a large proportion of managers and people in the higher levels at that time asked why did you go into this work it was because of hunting and fishing. And I’ve got nothing against hunting and fishing … I like doing them myself … but I don’t think they appreciated the wider range of values that a wilderness area like Arctic Refuge represents. And I still remember the critism by some biologists and some managers of hikers and floaters and backpackers because they weren’t hunters. And there was a definite bias and that bothered me. I was definitely … although I liked hunting and could talk with them … that I sided with and you know, was closely aligned with these wilderness interests and it was a problem for some people. And yeah, there were times it was I guess so overwhelming, the criticism of wilderness. I remember two top biologists … Jerry Garner and Larry Pank … they were leading the research effort and I remember in the bunk house where we all stayed … it was kind of crowded in there … talking how bad it would be if the wilderness bill passed because they’d loose all of the funding for their research and how much they opposed the wilderness bill and boy, you know, if it’s wilderness all of our funds are going to dry up … we won’t be able to do these studies that we like to do and I thought wow. But that was the kind of thing that practically drove me out of the bunkhouse sometimes and I’d often go and just spend time with the villagers and get away from them. And there were certainly people who weren’t like that … particularly the technicians, the younger folks who were rather repelled by the … that attitude towards wilderness, towards wilderness users, and even towards natives. There was … the first time I ever heard the term “snow nigger” was Owen Vivian a top-level manager in this agency and I often would hear that later in the bunkhouse by managers and it really bothered me. Of course my daughters … I had a couple of daughters who are half Yupik and it really bothered me and they knew that. There was an awful prejudice that went along with this anti wilderness … anti wilderness type people … and anyway definitately a racial bias that was part of that problem of living up there that management wouldn’t address, yeah. Anyhow there were all those political things but certainly not all of the problems we experienced and the stress was political interference. A large part of it was this agency’s culture, which to a very large degree has changed, and I attribute that to a lot of things. I think there’s more specialties now that are outside of, you know, wildlife being big game management. People get in for ecological reasons, interest in endangered species. I think that the Service has diversified and women have come into the system … most of which don’t come with a hunting background and hunter values … have certainly changed the nature of the agency. But at that time it was certainly a different place.
NO You know, it’s interesting …
17
RK Norm you want to take a break for dinner and come back and then we can be here when those folks are here?
NO OK. Let me just pause it.
NO OK, we’re back from our dinner. Wilderness, if I remember correctly back to the plan … the Arctic plan … wilderness became sort of the key issue really of the planning effort. The driving force, you know, there were people opposed to it or people who supported it what have you. I’ve always been curious, where would you … would you actually sort of trace your interest that you’ve always had in wilderness … where do you think the roots lie?
RK Oh, I don’t know. I’ve thought about that myself. As long as I can remember as a kid I liked going out and I liked exploring and I liked going out further and I liked the prospect or the possibility of being lost I guess as a kid. So I don’t know, somehow I got immersed into hunting and doing snowshoeing trips and that type of thing in Minnesota where I grew up. I guess my wilderness ethic as such, kind of was refined when I went to Alaska to work at Camp Denali with Celia Hunter and Ginny Wood. It certainly expanded my notions of what wilderness is and trips and the possibility of even doing trips out of Camp Denali … short ones at first and then longer ones … yeah, it really expanded my sense of what wilderness was … what the potential for Alaska was. They led me to some readings, somehow, I don’t know how … I think it was from Ginny or Celia … I got a hold of Bob Marshall and that soon became more … much of an academic interest. I read Marshall, went to graduate school and started reading more books. I was in a program at the time of outdoor rec management and I was beginning to focus on wilderness pursuits. And on the pipeline … I brought Marshal’s book up there with me, I actually zeroxed it … brought it up … read it in the same environment he was in. I went to Wiseman a few times, got connected to a few old people like Tishu Ulen who knew him and so Marshal’s philosophy, his ideas, his use of the emerging science of psychology to try to understand the wilderness concept in which the experience … this really intrigued me. And that led me to read Leopold and the Muries and Sigurd Olson and I just got into the literature and I guess my experiences had some intellectual grounding from that … those readings, so I guess that was it. And then my summer in Alaska traveling, as I mentioned … doing trips and thinking about those writers, taking those books with me, and I guess it just emerged over time.
NO Oh, OK. I was just going to say I was thinking back to that period and during … you know, dealing with the workbook … the alternatives workbook that we had … and then looking at the range of alternatives, and then beginning to put together the draft plan. Wilderness again, as I say, became sort of the key issue, the driving force really and wilderness was important … played an important role up to a point. All of the sudden we sort of had the … our legs knocked out from underneath us from Washington as the case may be and we wound up with … without any wilderness in the plan.
RK Yeah, that’s true. You know, the public … the attentive public was overwhelmingly in support of wilderness. In fact the last great wilderness alternative, which was actually not a Service developed alternative, but was given to the Service by the Northern Alaska Environmental Center … it was the Fairbanks Environmental Center at the time, changed names 18
later … and was supported by virtually every conservation and environmental group that got involved. And that focused on wilderness because that’s how they perceived it and very correctly so, because that was … you talked about my book a little bit … but that’s certainly the history of the Arctic Refuge. It was primarily to be a wilderness area, that it became a refuge instead of a park wilderness was just an accident of history as a mater of fact. But from it’s inception the very idea of it in the early 1950s through the campaign to establish Arctic Refuge, the main purpose was wilderness, it was always the focus, it was always the central theme. So the series of literature that followed the establishment of the Arctic Refuge in 1960, beginning with I think with 1969 with “Nameless Valleys, Shinning Mountains” was all about wilderness and a whole series of books … I think there have been 15 now with mine … they all focused on wilderness values. So it’s certainly no surprise that the Mike Green articles, the press, the books they focus on it and that the public has largely seen it as a wilderness and supported the wilderness alternative. Not all the staff did however; we had some of those redneck folks who … for whom wilderness was rather a personal affront to them. The idea that they’re managers and controllers and wilderness … but not the landscape and wildlife are there’s to manipulate, to control and subjugate … it was still … at that time was still fairly strong and it’s less so today. But there are certainly problems within the agency as well as political interference from beyond the agency. But you know, the reason we didn’t get any additional wilderness in the original CCP was the fact that the it was the Reagan Administration and Bill Horn and others who opposed ANILCA were put in the place of administering it after Reagan won. Right after ANILCA passed the people opposing it were in charge of administering it as you know, so it’s entirely no surprise that during the 8 years of the Reagan era we didn’t get very much.
NO No, that’s right. It was a disappointing period I think for a lot of people.
RK Well, that’s true, because hopes were built up through, you know, the time before … the Jimmy Carter era and the thought was that we’d get this huge expanse with ANILCA and we did … it was a tremendous victory as it was. But the compromises weren’t anticipated, it wasn’t anticipated that the Republicans would win such a sweeping victory not only with Reagan’s election, but the conservative mood of the public, the conservative’s that were swept into Congress it just … compromises happened and many people whose expectations were built up over years and years were really dashed to some degree. So yeah, it was a disappointment … many of us did feel disappointed but we did … it was a huge victory. It remains one of the most expansive wilderness protection legislation in the world history. It pays to remember that it was … it was huge and the building blocks are there and now I think the key is, you know … in this new administration in my opinion … to go back and begin managing, administering, stewarding wilderness as it should be.
NO You’re talking about the new Obama Administration that will be coming in next January?
RK Yeah and I think there is hope. I think for some of us … or a few of us anyway, probably several of us … had Obama not won, had McCann been elected … although certainly not as bad as Bush from a wilderness perspective … it would be very difficult for some of us to launch into the present process of the revision of the CCP process we’re beginning. I for one hold out a lot of hope that we can develop a CCP revision that’s a model of wilderness for the future. 19
NO Yeah, ANILCA required that the … that the Comprehensive Conservation Plan be periodically revised, updated what have you and you’re about to enter into that process with Arctic in terms of rewriting or revisiting or revising the Arctic plan.
RK Well, I hope it’s more than a revision. I hope it’s a general rewrite. You know, the original plan wasn’t too bad in that it generally recognized … well it recognizes the ANILCA purposes of refuges in general and this one … you know, the wildlife that are mentioned, clean water in quantity and quality, and a few other things … subsistence … but the original purposes of the Arctic Refuge which continue are not very well recognized. The original purposes for Arctic Refuge in it’s 1960 Public Land Order which established it being to preserve unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values, and two words there are especially worth noting there. Never before had a refuge been established to preserve values. Refuges were pragmatic things; they were factories for production of wildlife for our use and then along comes this place. And so I hope that we in this current process can define those terms, describe them in an operational sense … you know, what’s it mean wilderness values, what are wildlife values and so on … and … and develop specific provisions that recognize the importance and specifically provide the visions for how we are going to maintain those qualities. So I’m looking at … as you probably know from my book, that research I did … is what … looking at what did those words mean in the context of the time. From a legal standpoint, you know, managing for these you need to know what those words meant in the context … in history and looking at them, you know, we need to know what wilderness meant in the freedom of natural processes to continue. What recreation meant, it certainly … the term isn’t well described … what the founders of this place originally meant. My view is that … I think the attentive public concurs … today is very concerned with … that this place should be an adventuring ground. It is to be place for self-reliance, and challenge and exploration and discovery, a sense of mystery, a sense of unknown about it and adventure about it … and those are components of adventure. The original CCP, you know, generally it alluded to those values and it quoted some articles that we found and I wrote several sections of that and a couple of articles that, you know, we just talked about it. But we’re going to take some of the research that’s been done on these experiential values or dimensions and describe them and then look at the specific provisions that … these are values for the place. And let the public through, you know, the public process … they validate … yes, this is the kind of place … we want one place in America … you know, just one place … the Arctic Refuge is going to be it. But these kind of values, these kind of experiences can be kept alive and not watered down, not diminished, not domesticated … and this is the place and we need to define them and describe them and we need to develop specific provisions. And to a large degree, what it is going to involve is not restricting the public so much, but restrain on the part of the agency, and that’s always been hard for this agency that’s so focused on management of this and management of that, control and so on … manipulation. The challenge here will be not what you can do but your willingness to limit ourselves, to restrain ourselves, so that people can come here and not have their experience diminished by sometimes well intentioned agency programs or recreational improvements, campgrounds, signs pointing the way, or trails. We don’t need that here and I’m convinced if you look at the river planning process and public comments on the original CCP and other writers whose comments we get … not to mention the plethora of popular literature, the magazine feature articles, the newspaper features, the books, all of which 20
just espouse this wild character of the area and the magical experience it provides. So I think the challenge is let’s get the specifics, which define those qualities and specify how they’ll be preserved.
NO You’ve mentioned your book several times and let’s … let’s sort of get into that and I guess I’d like to start out by just saying when did you decide to go back and do a PhD?
RK Oh gosh, I don’t know. You know, I’ve been into this … looking at this wilderness area systematically from an academic standpoint and at some point, I don’t know when it was, what 12 years ago or 13 … I looked at … I wanted to write a book, I wanted to investigate, I wanted to do research and I just had the sense that if I was going to try I needed the discipline of a PhD program with a bunch of advisors looking over my shoulder and I would be quite sure … and you know, when you have a strong interest in a matter like wilderness and the Arctic Refuge … it would be very easy to perhaps to be a little bias on your approach. And … and I thought, you know, the direction would be good and to do this research with the assistance, some help and under the direction of some scholars, and people like Rod Nash who had been a friend of mine had talked to me about it and said he would be on the committee and he served. And I got a psychologist from the university, Judy Klinefeld, who is not a wilderness proponent but assured me, you know, she would be a person that would find any errors in, you know, and any bias in what I was looking at. And then I got a couple of other scholars that helped out as well on the committee and so I just decided that I would get on with the program. It wasn’t for the degree, I mean I had a job, I didn’t need the doctorate for anything, but it seemed like a worthwhile goal … that it would be a way of structuring and insuring the quality of what I was after.
NO Yeah. So when you … when you thought about the PhD and the dissertation, Arctic Refuge and wilderness were always going to be the topic, the subject?
RK Well, initially yeah … initially Arctic Refuge was more of a case study … in which I would focus my main interests, which were basically the subject of my dissertation … my doctorial work … was the historical, the philosophical and the psychological underpinnings of the wilderness idea. And so the Arctic Refuge provided a perfect case study of that and that’s what really the dissertation or research was about … that part of it on environmental psychology and the history and the philosophical basis of this wilderness concept. When it came to writing the book I, you know, focused just on the place and its history.
NO So although you were going through the discipline you knew you were doing a dissertation … which was an academic document … the ultimate thing you had in mind really was a book?
RK A book, yeah, yeah.
NO OK. OK.
RK It was an academic book.
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NO Yeah. Yeah. Very good. So it would seem to me that wilderness and the Arctic Refuge are still professional passions with you.
RK Yeah, I guess they are. And I guess that’s perhaps a good word to use. But yeah, they are. They both are interests … yeah.
NO OK. Getting back to this idea of a revision or a rewriting of this … the plan for Arctic, what sort of a role do you see yourself playing in that?
RK Oh, I guess I’m the staff lead for it and the role I see is to ensure that, you know, that these challenges are met and no plan, no refuge plan that I’ve heard of or know anything about has explored these specific dimensions in the detail and with the scholarly attention, the research focused … research base … that I plan to bring to this and I think that’s the challenge and I think that’s what management wants me to do.
NO Do you have support for this from the refuge manager and the deputy?
RK Yes, from the refuge manager yeah, although there’s some staff that still think this wilderness idea is off the wall and … but never the less the manager and the deputy agree and perceive I think they see the same future. But the challenge will be, you know, the regional office, the national office, the politics … who knows where there will be challenges. But never the less there’s a growing body of research that we didn’t have in the first CCP planning process, as you know, in the mid ‘80s. There’s been an awful lot of work in environmental psychology and that has looked at what we call these experience dimensions and helped us recognize there validity, there existence, and what specific provisions are needed and we should be able to identify those provisions. So that’s the great challenge … there’s no refuge … there’s no conservation unit in my opinion, in the United States, that’s better suited to become the model of the wilderness management than this place.
NO Yeah. Yeah, I think you have, you know, with the new administration coming in January certainly … as a country we face great challenges with our economic situation and others but I think there might be some rays of hope there in terms of there being a little bit greener perhaps administration that might be a little bit more sympathetic.
RK Oh absolutely, yes, there is. You know, the big concern of myself and others is the oil issue and of course the plan is not going to address that, it can’t. It’s the prerogative of Congress as you know, and the refuge … the agency has virtually nothing to say about the future of oil development in the coastal plain. But beyond that I think there is great hope for developing the best, most protective provisions that can assure that this place is forever, for all times, for all people, is here … as it always has been …. its character is maintained.
NO Would you say you’re optimistic about the future?
RK Yeah, it depends on when you talk to me I guess. Yeah, it depends on hopefully things in Congress, you know, I’ve just seen so many times … I don’t know how many times … a 22
developmental bill had been introduced in the House or the Senate or both, passed one or the other or both, and either the President … you know, before Bush … vetoed it or the Senate didn’t quite vote … or by a narrow margin it was defeated. There were times when it just really seemed touch and go and some people forecast all was lost and it’s … it’s those times when you really wonder. Other times it pulls through and I have to say that, you know, since 1980 … it’s been what, 28 years now … incredible pressures, incredibly wealthy, influential, politically powerful forces, the oil industry and others have thrown so many resources and worked so hard to develop this place and the American public in all that time has said no. So that’s certainly an encouraging sign, it’s an encouraging and demonstration and reminder of the fact that the American public … you know, there’s still some reverence for the natural world I guess. I don’t know how I can explain it … it is quite remarkable that people who have no notion … you know, Arctic Refuge has about 1,400 visitors a year, that’s for 20 million acres almost … so it’s really remarkable that the American public … that 99.9 percent will never go there … have no notion of going there … have been involved in the campaign to protect this place. So that’s encouraging. Whether that can stand up against, you know, perhaps $200 a barrel prices, $5.00 a gallon gas prices and politicians who will lie as they have and imply that somehow if Arctic Refuge is opened your gas prices are going to go down. It’s simply OPEC determines world prices and American oil companies charge whatever OPEC charges. So I think if the facts be known and the American public remains mindful of the facts that, you know, it will be preserved as was intended forever.
NO I think that I might add at this time that you will be speaking on your book “The Last Great Wilderness - the Battle to Save the Arctic Range … Refuge” on this Thursday evening here at NCTC in the conservation forum and I’m looking forward to that … your discuss of the book and your presentation.
RK Oh, thanks.
NO OK. Anything you’d like to add before we wrap up?
RK Well, let’s see, not really. No, I think you’ve covered about everything I know and it’s been fun to recall memories … theres not a lot of people left Norm, that were back in that time and stage, back in the mid ‘80s, that are still around. Most are retired and moved away and so you and I are a couple of old timers I guess.
NO I guess so, I guess so. And thank goodness there’s a couple of guys like us who are still around to talk about this. Well, I want to really thank you Roger, for sitting down with me. I tried to sit down with you back in 2006 when I was in Anchorage and you were busy out flying a musk ox survey I think … with Pat I think … at that point, so I had to wait a couple more years to sit down with you, but it was worth the wait. I really appreciate your sitting down with me this evening and sharing some of your thoughts with us.
RK OK, my pleasure.