Doug Brinkley Makes Noise with "The Quiet World"

Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian and author of the new book The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, is a resident of Austin, Texas, where Imus hopes to soon buy a home so that Wyatt can focus on roping.
 
“One of the only bad parts about Austin is the cedar, if you get allergies,” Brinkley said, talking about the area’s beautiful cedar trees. “In January, people can’t breathe.” Since Imus can’t breathe the other 11 months of the year anyway, this poses no problem.
 
The Quiet World is the second of Brinkley’s series focusing on the history of conservation, a movement he says has not gotten its due, despite a host of high profile cheerleaders like Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Esienhower, and John F. Kennedy, and Walt Disney. But some lesser known, equally important people, like Sierra Club founder John Muir, also played a pivotal role in its proliferation.
 
“Muir started becoming, really, the great promoter of Alaska,” Brinkley said. After taking a steamer from San Francisco up the Inside Passage to see the Alaskan glaciers, Muir wrote “Travels in Alaska” in 1915, which Brinkley called “a great American road book.” Muir’s goals, however, were more than just literary.
 
“The idea was if you had enough tourists going up there, you’d be able to stop the extraction industries,” Brinkley said. “There’s been a longtime battle since we acquired Alaska in 1867 between the people who wanted first gold, then silver, the copper rush was huge, timber, fishing, now of course it’s gas and oil up there—there’s always been an action, usually by artists, but sometimes people in the federal government, trying to stop and save wild Alaska.”
 
Following a visit to Alaska in the 1940s, Walt Disney became such a lover of the area that he produced a documentary featuring only seals, with no voice narration at all. “Nobody would distribute Disney’s film, so he rented a Pasadena movie theatre, and just showed it to himself for a week, but by doing that it qualified for an Academy Award in documentary because Disney had a big name and nobody saw documentaries in the 50s,” Brinkley said. Disney won, and RKO subsequently distributed “White Wilderness.”
 
The Quiet World ends in 1960, after President Eisenhower signed an international treaty to demilitarize and non-industrialize Antarctica, and also saved 8.9 million acres of the Arctic, which is the 19 million acres known today as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
 
“When you ask people, ‘Should we drill ANWR?’ they say, ‘Yes,’” Brinkley said. “It sounds like Anwar Sadat, or a Middle Eastern country. You say, ‘Should we molest the Arctic Refuge?’ People say, ‘No, I want to protect the bears.’”
 
The battle continues between big business and conservation, a subject in which the public has expressed an amount of interest not surprising to Brinkley. “Every community has a preservation group,” he said, but noted that they tend to only exist on a local level. “It’s lost some of it’s, I think, input on a big, national level. But people want to make sure their backyard’s taken care of.”
 
It’s not too late to make a difference, in Brinkley’s view, but he quoted the song “All Along the Watchtower” by saying, “The hour’s getting late.”
 
“The Arctic is distressed; the glaciers are melting; the species that are important to us, like the polar bear, are having a very hard time because of the melting ice,” he said. The Endangered Species Act, in his opinion, may have gone too far in protecting smaller species, and not far enough in its defense of the “big, charismatic animals,” like the manatee or the jaguar, that he thinks this country not only loves, but needs.
 
“It makes our life exciting to know that there’s still some wild left in America,” he said. “That we haven’t homogenized and tamed it all.”
 
-Julie Kanfer