Dimensions
160 x 230 x 50mm
In THE QUIET WORLD, award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley tells the heroic story of how conservationists and environmentalists from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama have sought to save Alaska's beautiful Arctic Refuge from Big Oil. Brinkley chronicles how Roosevelt created the Bull Moose Party in 1912, in part, to protest Alaskan lands being raped for coal by the Morgan-Guggenheim Syndicate. A colorful gallery of Alaskan outdoors characters step into view: There is the wealthy explorer Charles Sheldon, who led the campaign to create Denali National Park; Bob Marshall, who lived in Arctic Village, Alaska, and co-founded The Wilderness Society; maverick biologist Lowell Sumner of the National Park Service, promoter of "zoom lens ecology" over hunting; and the feisty Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas who found God in Alaska's Arctic. Brinkley tells the story of why President Dwight Eisenhower boldly signed an executive order creating Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) in December 1960 and how President Jimmy Carter bravely expanded the wilderness site in 1980 to its current nineteen million acres (larger than some states).
This is ultimately a story about the Alaskan wilderness in peril. Brinkley writes of the bi-annual Porcupine caribou herd migration (one of the world's great wildlife spectacles) and polar bears struggling to den on ANWAR's coastal regions. With vivid prose Brinkley celebrates the wildflower tundra, boundless space, and summer sun, but he also grapples with the global warming phenomenon, including melting glaciers, migratory birds in peril, and the Exxon-Valdez oil spill of March 1989 in which eleven million square miles of ocean was polluted. The Arctic Refuge, Brinkley argues, is America's last chance of protecting forever a pristine and irreplaceable patch of wild Alaska for future generations to enjoy.
